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

by Adam M. Grant

When it comes to our knowledge and opinions, though, we tend to stick to our guns. Psychologists call this seizing and freezing.11 We favor the comfort of conviction over the discomfort of doubt, and we let our beliefs get brittle long before our bones. We laugh at people who still use Windows 95, yet we still cling to opinions that we formed in 1995. We listen to views that make us feel good, instead of ideas that make us think hard.

This book is an invitation to let go of knowledge and opinions that are no longer serving you well, and to anchor your sense of self in flexibility rather than consistency. If you can master the art of rethinking, I believe you’ll be better positioned for success at work and happiness in life. Thinking again can help you generate new solutions to old problems and revisit old solutions to new problems. It’s a path to learning more from the people around you and living with fewer regrets. A hallmark of wisdom is knowing when it’s time to abandon some of your most treasured tools—and some of the most cherished parts of your identity.

After all, the purpose of learning isn’t to affirm our beliefs; it’s to evolve our beliefs.

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.

Although productive disagreement is a critical life skill, it’s one that many of us never fully develop. The problem starts early: parents disagree behind closed doors, fearing that conflict will make children anxious or somehow damage their character. Yet 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. Kids whose parents clash constructively feel more emotionally safe in elementary school,15 and over the next few years they actually demonstrate more helpfulness and compassion toward their classmates.

We learn more from people who challenge our thought process than those who affirm our conclusions. Strong leaders engage their critics and make themselves stronger. Weak leaders silence their critics and make themselves weaker. This reaction isn’t limited to people in power. Although we might be on board with the principle, in practice we often miss out on the value of a challenge network.

Disagreeable people don’t just challenge us to think again. They also make agreeable people comfortable arguing, too. Instead of fleeing from friction, our grumpy colleagues engage it directly. By making it clear that they can handle a tussle, they create a norm for the rest of us to follow. If we’re not careful, though, what starts as a scuffle can turn into a brawl. How can we avoid that slippery slope?

If you’re like me, you reconsidered your views multiple times. Changing your mind doesn’t make you a flip-flopper or a hypocrite. It means you were open to learning.

A good debate is not a war. It’s not even a tug-of-war, where you can drag your opponent to your side if you pull hard enough on the rope. It’s more like a dance that hasn’t been choreographed,4 negotiated with a partner who has a different set of steps in mind. If you try too hard to lead, your partner will resist. If you can adapt your moves to hers, and get her to do the same, you’re more likely to end up in rhythm.

When we point out that there are areas where we agree and acknowledge that they have some valid points, we model confident humility and encourage them to follow suit. When we support our argument with a small number of cohesive, compelling reasons, we encourage them to start doubting their own opinion. And when we ask genuine questions, we leave them intrigued to learn more. We don’t have to convince them that we’re right—we just need to open their minds to the possibility that they might be wrong. Their natural curiosity might do the rest. That said, these steps aren’t always enough. No matter how nicely we ask, other people don’t always want to dance. Sometimes they’re so attached to their beliefs that the mere suggestion of getting in sync feels like an ambush. What do we do then? DR. JEKYLL AND MR. HOSTILE Some years ago, a Wall Street firm

If we approach an argument as a war, there will be winners and losers. If we see it more as a dance, we can begin to choreograph a way forward. By considering the strongest version of an opponent’s perspective and limiting our responses to our few best steps, we have a better chance of finding a rhythm.

In every human society, people are motivated to seek belonging and status. Identifying with a group checks both boxes at the same time:12 we become part of a tribe, and we take pride when our tribe wins.

A key step is getting them to do some counterfactual thinking: helping them consider what they’d believe if they were living in an alternative reality. In psychology, counterfactual thinking involves imagining how the circumstances of our lives could have unfolded differently.34 When we realize how easily we could have held different stereotypes, we might be more willing to update our views.fn3 To activate counterfactual thinking, you might ask people questions like: How would your stereotypes be different if you’d been born Black, Hispanic, Asian, or Native American? What opinions would you hold if you’d been raised on a farm versus in a city, or in a culture on the other side of the world? What beliefs would you cling to if you lived in the 1700s?

Psychologists find that many of our beliefs are cultural truisms:38 widely shared, but rarely questioned. If we take a closer look at them, we often discover that they rest on shaky foundations. Stereotypes don’t have the structural integrity of a carefully built ship. They’re more like a tower in the game of Jenga—teetering on a small number of blocks, with some key supports missing. To knock it over, sometimes all we need to do is give it a poke. The hope is that people will rise to the occasion and build new beliefs on a stronger foundation.

Featuring shades of gray in discussions of solutions can help to shift attention from why climate change is a problem to how we can do something about it. As we’ve seen from the evidence on the illusion of explanatory depth, asking “how” tends to reduce polarization, setting the stage for more constructive conversations about action. Here are examples of headlines in which writers have hinted at the complexity of the solutions:

If you find yourself saying ____ is always good or ____ is never bad, you may be a member of an idea cult. Appreciating complexity reminds us that no behavior is always effective and that all cures have unintended consequences.

If you spend all of your school years being fed information and are never given the opportunity to question it, you won’t develop the tools for rethinking that you need in life.

It takes confident humility to admit that we’re a work in progress. It shows that we care more about improving ourselves than proving ourselves.fn1 If that mindset spreads far enough within an organization, it can give people the freedom and courage to speak up.

Amy Edmondson finds that when psychological safety exists without accountability, people tend to stay within their comfort zone, and when there’s accountability but not safety, people tend to stay silent in an anxiety zone.

We all have notions of who we want to be and how we hope to lead our lives. They’re not limited to careers; from an early age, we develop ideas about where we’ll live, which school we’ll attend, what kind of person we’ll marry, and how many kids we’ll have. These images can inspire us to set bolder goals and guide us toward a path to achieve them.3 4 The danger of these plans is that they can give us tunnel vision,5 blinding us to alternative possibilities. We don’t know how time and circumstances will change what we want and even who we want to be, and locking our life GPS onto a single target can give us the right directions to the wrong destination.

Deciding to leave a current career path is often easier than identifying a new one. My favorite framework for navigating that challenge comes from a management professor, Herminia Ibarra. She finds that as people consider career choices and transitions,28 it helps to think like scientists. A first step is to entertain possible selves:29 identify some people you admire within or outside your field, and observe what they actually do at work day by day. A second step is to develop hypotheses about how these paths might align with your own interests, skills, and values. A third step is to test out the different identities by running experiments: do informational interviews, job shadowing, and sample projects to get a taste of the work. The goal is not to confirm a particular plan but to expand your repertoire of possible selves—which keeps you open to rethinking.

A successful relationship requires regular rethinking. Sometimes being considerate means reconsidering something as simple as our habits.

One possibility is that when we’re searching for happiness, we get too busy evaluating life to actually experience it. Instead of savoring our moments of joy, we ruminate about why our lives aren’t more joyful.32 A second likely culprit is that we spend too much time striving for peak happiness, overlooking the fact that happiness depends more on the frequency of positive emotions than their intensity.33 A third potential factor is that when we hunt for happiness, we overemphasize pleasure at the expense of purpose. This theory is consistent with data suggesting that meaning is healthier than happiness,34 and that people who look for purpose in their work are more successful in pursuing their passions—and less likely to quit their jobs—than those who look for joy. While enjoyment waxes and wanes, meaning tends to last.35 A fourth explanation is that Western conceptions of happiness as an individual state leave us feeling lonely. In more collectivistic Eastern cultures, that pattern is reversed: pursuing happiness predicts higher well-being, because people prioritize social engagement over independent activities.36

As we get older, we become more focused on searching for meaning—and we’re most likely to find it in actions that benefit others.44 My favorite test of meaningful work is to ask: if this job didn’t exist, how much worse off would people be? It’s near midlife that this question often begins to loom large. At around this time, in both work and life, we feel we have more to give (and less to lose),45 and we’re especially keen to share our knowledge and skills with the next generation.

Careers, relationships, and communities are examples of what scientists call open systems—they’re constantly in flux because they’re not closed off from the environments around them.47 We know that open systems are governed by at least two key principles:48 there are always multiple paths to the same end (equifinality), and the same starting point can be a path to many different ends (multifinality). We should be careful to avoid getting too attached to a particular route or even a particular destination. There isn’t one definition of success or one track to happiness.

At work and in life, the best we can do is plan for what we want to learn and contribute over the next year or two, and stay open to what might come next. To adapt an analogy from E. L. Doctorow, writing out a plan for your life “is like driving at night in the fog. You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.”49

Our identities are open systems, and so are our lives. We don’t have to stay tethered to old images of where we want to go or who we want to be. The simplest way to start rethinking our options is to question what we do daily.

It takes humility to reconsider our past commitments, doubt to question our present decisions, and curiosity to reimagine our future plans. What we discover along the way can free us from the shackles of our familiar surroundings and our former selves. Rethinking liberates us to do more than update our knowledge and opinions—it’s a tool for leading a more fulfilling life.

See yourself as someone who values curiosity, learning, mental flexibility, and searching for knowledge. As you form opinions, keep a list of factors that would change your mind.

Seek out information that goes against your views.

When you find yourself doubting your ability, reframe the situation as an opportunity for growth. You can have confidence in your capacity to learn while questioning your current solution to a problem.

Don’t shy away from constructive conflict. Disagreements don’t have to be disagreeable. Although relationship conflict is usually counterproductive, task conflict can help you think again. Try framing disagreement as a debate: people are more likely to approach it intellectually and less likely to take it personally.