Think Again: The Power of Knowing What You Don't Know

by Adam M. Grant

What we want to attain is confident humility: having faith in our capability while appreciating that we may not have the right solution or even be addressing the right problem.

Her confidence wasn’t in her existing knowledge—it was in her capacity to learn.

the more often they felt like impostors,40 the higher their performance reviews

The first upside of feeling like an impostor is that it can motivate us to work harder.

interpreted doubts differently: they were a cue that she needed to improve her tools.

Great thinkers don’t harbor doubts because they’re impostors. They maintain doubts because they know we’re all partially blind and they’re committed to improving their sight. They don’t boast about how much they know; they marvel at how little they understand.

The goal is not to be wrong more often. It’s to recognize that we’re all wrong more often than we’d like to admit, and the more we deny it, the deeper the hole we dig for ourselves.

What makes an idea interesting is that it challenges our weakly held opinions.

totalitarian ego, and its job is to keep out threatening information.

As physicist Richard Feynman quipped, “You must not fool yourself—and you are the easiest person to fool.”

We choose our views, and we can choose to rethink them any time we want. This should be a familiar task, because we have a lifetime of evidence that we’re wrong on a regular basis.

we feel pride when we see only information that supports our convictions. Then our beliefs are sealed in echo chambers, where we hear only from people who intensify and validate them.

he genuinely enjoys discovering that he was wrong, because it means he is now less wrong than before.

Discovering I was wrong felt joyful because it meant I’d learned something.

he refuses to let his beliefs become part of his identity. “I change my mind at a speed that drives my collaborators crazy,” he

To unlock the joy of being wrong, we need to detach. I’ve learned that two kinds of detachment are especially useful: detaching your present from your past and detaching your opinions from your identity.

As Bridgewater founder Ray Dalio told me, “If you don’t look back at yourself and think,21 ‘Wow, how stupid I was a year ago,’ then you must not have learned much in the last year.”

Most of us are accustomed to defining ourselves in terms of our beliefs, ideas, and ideologies.

Who you are should be a question of what you value, not what you believe. Values are your core principles in life—they might be excellence and generosity, freedom and fairness, or security and integrity. Basing your identity on these kinds of principles enables you to remain open-minded about the best ways to advance them. You

The single most important driver of forecasters’29 success was how often they updated their beliefs.

Research suggests that the more frequently we make fun of ourselves,36 the happier we tend to be.

I’ve noticed a paradox in great scientists and superforecasters: the reason they’re so comfortable being wrong is that they’re terrified of being wrong.

“People who are right a lot listen a lot,37 and they change their mind a lot,” Jeff Bezos says. “If you don’t change your mind frequently, you’re going to be wrong a lot.”

“I started out just wanting to prove myself,” Jean-Pierre says. “Now I want to improve myself—to see how good I can get.”

Psychologists find that admitting we were wrong doesn’t make us look less competent.41 It’s a display of honesty and a willingness to learn.

we can operate more like scientists, defining ourselves as people committed to the pursuit of truth—even if it means proving our own views wrong.

“The absence of conflict is not harmony,14 it’s apathy.”

research shows that how often parents argue has no bearing on their children’s academic, social, or emotional development. What matters is how respectfully parents argue, not how frequently.

Disagreeable people tend to be more critical, skeptical, and challenging—and they’re more likely than their peers to become engineers and lawyers.21 They’re not just comfortable with conflict; it energizes them.

Rethinking depends on a different kind of network: a challenge network, a group of people we trust to point out our blind spots and help us overcome our weaknesses.

They give the critical feedback we might not want to hear, but need to hear.

Bird family dinners were more like a food fight, where they all vented, debated, and spoke their minds. Brad found the exchanges contentious but fun, and he brought that mentality into his first dream job at Disney.

I’ve watched too many leaders shield themselves from task conflict. As they gain power, they tune out boat-rockers and listen to bootlickers. They become politicians, surrounding themselves with agreeable yesmen and becoming more susceptible to seduction by sycophants.

Strong leaders engage their critics and make themselves stronger. Weak leaders silence their critics and make themselves weaker.

When I write a book, I like to enlist my own challenge network. I recruit a group of my most thoughtful critics and ask them to tear each chapter apart. I’ve learned that it’s important to consider their values along with their personalities—I’m looking for disagreeable people who are givers, not takers. Disagreeable givers often make the best critics: their intent is to elevate the work, not feed their own egos.

Silence disrespects the value of your views and our ability to have a civil disagreement.

When making The Incredibles, they fought about every character detail,

“It’s good that we disagree. It’s good that we fight it out. It makes the stuff stronger.”