Think Again Quotes

“What stands in the way of rethinking isn’t the expression of emotion; it’s a restricted range of emotion.”
― Adam M. Grant, Think Again: The Power of Knowing What You Don't Know

“What works is not perspective-taking but perspective-seeking: actually talking to people to gain insight into the nuances of their views. That’s what good scientists do: instead of drawing conclusions about people based on minimal clues, they test their hypotheses by striking up conversations.”
― Adam M. Grant, Think Again: The Power of Knowing What You Don't Know

“the quest for knowledge is never finished.”
― Adam M. Grant, Think Again: The Power of Knowing What You Don't Know

“The more reasons we put on the table, the easier it is for people to discard the shakiest one. Once they reject one of our justifications, they can easily dismiss our entire case. That happened regularly to the average negotiators: they brought too many different weapons to battle. They lost ground not because of the strength of their most compelling point, but because of the weakness of their least compelling one.”
― Adam Grant, Think again: the power of knowing what you don’t know

“Confident humility doesn’t just open our minds to rethinking—it improves the quality of our rethinking”
― Adam M. Grant, Think Again: The Power of Knowing What You Don't Know

“Arrogance is ignorance plus conviction,”
― Adam M. Grant, Think Again: The Power of Knowing What You Don't Know

“A fundamental lesson of desirability bias is that our beliefs are shaped by our motivations. What we believe depends on what we want to believe.”
― Adam M. Grant, Think Again: The Power of Knowing What You Don't Know

“Part of the beauty of motivational interviewing is that it generates more openness in both directions. Listening can encourage others to reconsider their stance toward us, but it also gives us information that can lead us to question our own views about them. If we take the practices of motivational interviewing seriously, we might become the ones who think again.”
― Adam M. Grant, Think Again: The Power of Knowing What You Don't Know

“There’s a fourth technique of motivational interviewing, which is often recommended for the end of a conversation and for transition points: summarizing. The idea is to explain your understanding of other people’s reasons for change, to check on whether you’ve missed or misrepresented anything, and to inquire about their plans and possible next steps.”
― Adam M. Grant, Think Again: The Power of Knowing What You Don't Know

“there’s another reason stereotypes are so sticky. We tend to interact with people who share them, which makes them even more extreme. This phenomenon is called group polarization,”
― Adam M. Grant, Think Again: The Power of Knowing What You Don't Know

“An informed audience is going to spot the holes in our case anyway. We might as well get credit for having the humility to look for them, the foresight to spot them, and the integrity to acknowledge them.”
― Adam M. Grant, Think Again: The Power of Knowing What You Don't Know

“A few years ago, I argued in my book Originals that if we want to fight groupthink, it helps to have “strong opinions, weakly held.” Since then I’ve changed my mind—I now believe that’s a mistake. If we hold an opinion weakly, expressing it strongly can backfire. Communicating it with some uncertainty signals confident humility, invites curiosity, and leads to a more nuanced discussion.”
― Adam M. Grant, Think Again: The Power of Knowing What You Don't Know

“Experiments show that simply framing a dispute as a debate rather than as a disagreement signals that you’re receptive to considering dissenting opinions and changing your mind, which in turn motivates the other person to share more information with you. A disagreement feels personal and potentially hostile; we expect a debate to be about ideas, not emotions. Starting a disagreement by asking, “Can we debate?” sends a message that you want to think like a scientist, not a preacher or a prosecutor—and encourages the other person to think that way, too.”
― Adam M. Grant, Think Again: The Power of Knowing What You Don't Know

“If being wrong repeatedly leads us to the right answer, the experience of being wrong itself can become joyful.”
― Adam M. Grant, Think Again: The Power of Knowing What You Don't Know

“That’s where the best forecasters excelled: they were eager to think again. They saw their opinions more as hunches than as truths—as possibilities to entertain rather than facts to embrace. They questioned ideas before accepting them, and they were willing to keep questioning them even after accepting them. They were constantly seeking new information and better evidence—especially disconfirming evidence.”
― Adam M. Grant, Think Again: The Power of Knowing What You Don't Know

“Yet in a turbulent world, there’s another set of cognitive skills that might matter more: the ability to rethink and unlearn.”
― Adam M. Grant, Think Again: The Power of Knowing What You Don't Know

“Psychologists have a name for this: binary bias. It’s a basic human tendency to seek clarity and closure by simplifying a complex continuum into two categories. To paraphrase the humorist Robert Benchley, there are two kinds of people: those who divide the world into two kinds of people, and those who don’t.”
― Adam M. Grant, Think Again: The Power of Knowing What You Don't Know

“Plenty of evidence suggests that confidence is just as often the result of progress as the cause of it.46 We don’t have to wait for our confidence to rise to achieve challenging goals. We can build it through achieving challenging goals.”
― Adam M. Grant, Think Again: The Power of Knowing What You Don't Know

“The most effective leaders score high in both confidence and humility.36 Although they have faith in their strengths, they’re also keenly aware of their weaknesses. They know they need to recognize and transcend their limits if they want to push the limits of greatness.”
― Adam M. Grant, Think Again: The Power of Knowing What You Don't Know

“psychologically safe teams reported more errors, but they actually made fewer errors. By freely admitting their mistakes, they were then able to learn what had caused them and eliminate them moving forward. In psychologically unsafe teams, people hid their mishaps to avoid penalties, which made it difficult for anyone to diagnose the root causes and prevent future problems.”
― Adam M. Grant, Think Again: The Power of Knowing What You Don't Know

“When conflict is cliché, complexity is breaking news. —Amanda Ripley”
― Adam M. Grant, Think Again: The Power of Knowing What You Don't Know

“It’s a rare person who wants to hear what he doesn’t want to hear.”
― Adam M. Grant, Think Again: The Power of Knowing What You Don't Know

“We are living in space-age times, yet there are still so many of us thinking with stone-age minds,”
― Adam M. Grant, Think Again: The Power of Knowing What You Don't Know

“and to anchor your sense of self in flexibility rather than consistency.”
― Adam M. Grant, Think Again: The Power of Knowing What You Don't Know

“Build a challenge network, not just a support network. It’s helpful to have cheerleaders encouraging you, but you also need critics to challenge you.”
― Adam M. Grant, Think Again: The Power of Knowing What You Don't Know

“If we’re insecure, we make fun of others. If we’re comfortable being wrong, we’re not afraid to poke fun at ourselves. Laughing at ourselves reminds us that although we might take our decisions seriously, we don’t have to take ourselves too seriously. Research suggests that the more frequently we make fun of ourselves, the happier we tend to be.[*] Instead of beating ourselves up about our mistakes, we can turn some of our past misconceptions into sources of present amusement.”
― Adam M. Grant, Think Again: The Power of Knowing What You Don't Know

“Maybe impostor syndrome is needed for change. Impostors rarely say, ‘This is how we do things around here.”
― Adam M. Grant, Think Again: The Power of Knowing What You Don't Know

“Na teoria, autoconfiança e competência andam de mãos dadas. Na prática, é comum que se afastem. Notamos isso quando as pessoas avaliam as próprias capacidades de liderança ao mesmo tempo que são avaliadas por colegas de trabalho, supervisores ou subordinados. Em uma metanálise de 95 estudos com mais de 100 mil participantes, as mulheres costumam subestimar sua capacidade de liderança, enquanto os homens a superestimam.”
― Adam M. Grant, Pense de novo: O poder de saber o que você não sabe

“El progreso es imposible sin el cambio, y aquellos que no pueden cambiar de opinión no pueden cambiar nada.1”
― Adam M. Grant, Piénsalo otra vez

“Strong leaders engage their critics and make themselves stronger. Weak leaders silence their critics and make themselves weaker.”
― Adam M. Grant, Think Again: The Power of Knowing What You Don't Know