Good Life Project - Adam Grant | Think Again

Episode Date: February 1, 2021

What would it take to make you rethink a deeply held point of view or belief? That’s one of Adam Grant’s recent fascinations. Adam is an organizational psychologist and TED speaker who helps people find meaning and motivation at work. He has been Wharton’s top-rated professor for 7 straight years. As an organizational psychologist, he is a leading expert on how we can find motivation and meaning, and live more generous and creative lives. He has been recognized as one of the world’s 10 most influential management thinkers and Fortune’s 40 under 40.Adam is also one of TED's most popular speakers, his books have sold millions of copies, his talks have been viewed more than 25 million times, and his podcast WorkLife with Adam Grant has topped the charts. His pioneering research has inspired people to rethink fundamental assumptions about motivation, generosity, and creativity. And he is a former Junior Olympic springboard diver. Adam’s new book, Think Again, is a fascinating deep dive into how to come to form a point of view, why it’s so important to hold even our staunchest beliefs more lightly than we think, and what happens when stay doggedly attached to opinions and beliefs even as the world starts to reveal how wrong they were.You can find Adam Grant at:Website : https://www.adamgrant.net/Instagram : https://www.instagram.com/adamgrant/Check out our offerings & partners: My New Book SparkedMy New Podcast SPARKEDVisit Our Sponsor Page For a Complete List of Vanity URLs & Discount Codes. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

So what would it take to make you rethink a deeply held belief or point of view? That is one of Adam Grant's recent fascinations. Adam is an organizational psychologist and TED speaker who's sold millions of books. His TED talks have been viewed, I think something like 25 million times. And he helps people find meaning and motivation at work. He's been Wharton's top rated professor for seven straight years. He's a leading expert on really how we can find motivation and meaning and live more generous and creative lives. And Adam's work has inspired people to really rethink fundamental assumptions about motivation, generosity, and creativity.

Interestingly, in a past life, he's also a former junior Olympic springboard diver. And his new book, Think Again, is this really fascinating deep dive into how we come to form points of views, opinions, and beliefs. Why it's so important to hold even our staunchest beliefs more lightly than we think. And what happens when we stay doggedly attached to opinions and beliefs, even as the world starts to reveal that maybe we shouldn't be. Really excited to share this conversation with you. I'm Jonathan Fields, and this is Good Life Project. The Apple Watch Series 10 is here.

It has the biggest display ever. It's also the thinnest Apple Watch ever, making it even more comfortable on your wrist, whether you're running, swimming, or sleeping. And it's the fastest-charging Apple Watch, getting you 8 hours of charge in just 15 minutes. The Apple Watch Series X. Available for the first time in glossy jet black aluminum. Compared to previous generations, iPhone XS or later required.

Charge time and actual results will vary. Mayday, mayday. We've been compromised. The pilot's a hitman. I knew you were gonna be fun. January 24th. Tell me how to fly this thing. Mark Wahlberg. I was catching up on some of the work that you've been doing over the last couple of years and saw these two studies that came out, I think, 2019, 2021, was about moderate procrastination, increasing creativity. And the other was about things where you have a high intrinsic motivation for a particular task, potentially leading to reduced motivation to do pretty much everything else. So I was looking at these, I'm like, taken together, it sounds like

this is permission to be a moderately motivated slacker. That's, you know, it's funny, the two papers there, they're both with Jihei Shin, who's one of the most creative people I've ever met. And I had a very similar reaction when she came to me with both of these ideas. Like. You're saying if you put off your work, not because you're lazy, but because you haven't figured it out yet and it's hard, and you take the things you're really interested in and you make sure that they don't make all your other work

seem extremely boring, you're going to be more creative and more productive? Yes, yes, I think so. And we decided to go and test it. And it turns out it's obviously a little more complicated. But yeah, there are times when your first thoughts are not your most creative thoughts. And waiting for the right idea to come can lead you to an unexpected solution. And there are times, I feel this all the time, Jonathan,

I don't know if you have this too, but I have learned not to start my day with my favorite project. Because number one, I'll never do anything else because I'm completely absorbed in that and it's so much fun. But number two, if I do ever get to the next project, nothing is at all exciting and motivating by contrast.

Yeah, it's so funny you mentioned that because I'll sometimes structure my day. So I almost have to earn the right to do the thing I really want to do. Same, same. It's a reward. Yeah. And also I know once I'm in it, it's sort of like, I'm just going to go all in. Kind of like consumes a lot of cognitive bandwidth. But yeah, it was really funny to see those two things and how they just sort of like in my mind instantly sort of like wove together to create permission to do a lot of what I already wanted to do anyway. I love it.

Yeah. I want to talk about your book and some of the ideas in the book. It's really fascinating. I think it's a really interesting moment in time for you to be dropping this conversation as well. Before we talk about the ideas though, we got to talk about the cover. Because when you look on the credits for the cover should look like. And we toyed around with the idea of some optical illusions and threw them all out very quickly. We knew we wanted something that would make you think again, but they're just all the optical illusions. They were either too hard to parse or they didn't, they were trite. We'd seen them a million times and they just didn't stick. And finally, one day I was just trying to figure out what should this be?

And I was talking with my wife, Allison, and our oldest daughter, Joanna, who's 12, came in and started brainstorming with us. And later that day, she sent me a couple ideas. And one of them was, she said, what if you had a match with water instead of fire? That is ingenious. And that became the cover.

And the best part of it was I learned something. First of all, I needed to rethink who I go to for creative ideas, right? Because there is a brilliant creative mind in my own house that I was not having enough conversations with. But the other thing that really struck me is she had a very different process for thinking through what a great cover would look like than I would have had. I actually hadn't even described the book. She just, she said, okay, think again. Well, that sounds like I'm supposed to think about the opposite of what I think. And so let me think about opposites. And one of the opposites she came up with was fire and water. And it just, it kind of snowballed from there. So I'm obviously incredibly proud of her that she came up with the idea for my book cover, but it's also, I mean, it's, it's probably, it's the cover that I've gotten the most glowing feedback on before people know who created it. So it's a great momentish word. I don't know if you know the word naches. Absolutely. Yes. Right? You know, which is, it's that- Vicarious pride.

Yeah. When somebody you love so, so dearly, just you feel it as if it's your own success. It's even better though. It's better than your own success because- I agree. I'm glad I'm not alone in that because I feel like when I accomplish something, five minutes later, okay, what's the next goal? Whereas this feeling of joy and pride that I have for Joanna's accomplishment here, it stays with me. Yeah, I so agree with that.

And as a father of a daughter, she's also sort of like really creative and thinks differently, had really similar experiences. I mean, Joanna also, is she actually doing this? Sort of like, well, she's 12, so not like for her living, but she threw up a website because it sounds like once she realized, oh, I could do this for dad and this was kind of fun and cool, maybe there's something else

going on here. I'm amazed. How do you know this? I didn't tell you this, did I? Nope. You have either done your homework or you are a skilled stalker. But yes, she decided that she would start a little business consulting on cover concepts. So she created her own website. And then while she was working on that, she sent me out of the blue one day a draft of a book trailer, which we ended up using. And now she's also trying to help authors make their own book trailers. So it's been, it's been so fun to see her find an outlet for her creativity. And yeah, I guess, I guess I would say it never would have occurred to me that a 12 year old could do any of this. And in retrospect, it's so obvious that she has all these talents and this is a great way for her to be applying them. Yeah, it really is amazing, but it also speaks to what you sort of touched on briefly, which is this notion about who we go to, to think things through with, you know, and I think we sometimes we fall into this trap of having our go to people, you know, or the people who we deem for some reason are worthy of contributing on a level that would be valuable. And all of a sudden,

you know, it's sort of like this one moment in time just kind of makes you rethink it. It does. I think it's part of though, becoming a lifelong learner, recognizing that every single person you meet can teach you something. Yeah. Beginner's mind. I think that's something I'm just constantly dropping back into. It's like, it doesn't matter how accomplished you are, how expert you are in something, you got to always keep the gates of learning open. Let's talk about the fundamental ideas here. When we think about thinking, I think a lot of us think about cognitive function, creativity, what are the components that go into thinking? And I think there's been a lot of debate and research around this notion. You're coming at the process of thinking from a really different sort of like alternate angle, which is, but what about not just the process of thinking, but what about the process of rethinking? And I guess what I'm curious about sort of and having the mental flexibility to question

assumptions and opinions and beliefs and knowledge that you've taken for granted. So I guess I've, I don't know when this happened actually, but some point while I was writing Think Again, the cycle crystallized from a lot of the research I'd done. And what I realized is that rethinking really starts with intellectual humility, knowing what you don't know. And once you're aware of all the things that you're ignorant about, it's a lot easier to doubt your convictions, which then makes you curious about, well, could I be wrong? Is there information out there that might complicate my existing views? And the more curious you get, the more likely you are to discover new information. And if you process those discoveries the right way, they reinforce your humility

because they remind you that you knew so little going in and now you know a tiny bit more, but there's that much more to keep learning. And it then kicks off this cycle where you're excited to rethink other things. And I think the problem is that too many of us, instead of entering into rethinking cycles, we end up in overconfidence cycles where we're proud of our existing knowledge. That gives us too much conviction. We then go and see what we want and expect to see, confirmation bias and desirability bias. And then that validates our preconceived notions. And we get prouder and prouder of what we know to the point that we've become arrogant and there's no reason to rethink. I'm right.

Thus the state of the world right now. Yeah, I was going to say, I didn't realize when I started writing this book how relevant it would be to what we're seeing in the world, but yes. Yeah. I mean, it's interesting also, you know, I remember sitting there years ago with Milton Glazer and he said so much that has stayed with me and shaped the way that I've moved through the world. But one of the things that he said was, I remember the line because it was literally like it just caught my breath. He said, certainty is a closing of the mind.

Here was a guy where when I sat down with him, he was in his 80s, iconic in every way, and still perpetually placing himself in a state of the unknown and assuming that he doesn't know everything. In fact, he doesn't know most things, even though he was stunningly accomplished. And that's always stayed with me. But one of the things that you were just bringing up is this idea of, I think we're losing the distinction between our beliefs and our identity. And it's one thing to change your values or the thing that you believe, you see proof and okay, so it's not true anymore.

I changed my beliefs. But if that thing is connected to who you see yourself as being in the world, it's an entirely different equation. Such a problem. Almost every time I read any political story or see something on the news that references current events, I just want to say to everyone involved in the conversation, you know, you don't actually have to believe everything you think. And not every opinion that enters your head is right. Not every feeling that enters your heart is right. And last time I checked, if you want to keep evolving in your knowledge, you actually have to be open to changing your mind, which is easier said than done. Yeah. I mean, because it means, you know, we're talking about shedding,

shedding everything, you know, you know, it's interesting. We zoom the lens out and, you know, there's this phrase which has been bandied about in the world. I feel like it's really become much more popular over the last decade or so, identity politics. And it's fascinating to me because I've been really curious about this and it act on your behalf when you want them to. But the downside of that is it's almost impossible to change their minds, even when clear evidence shows that this is not, in fact, the objective truth anymore or as close as we can come. And I feel like it's not just politics. This is sort of like identity action-taking. We're constantly persuading people not just to take a different point of view, but to stand in a different identity. And because it gets us what we want in theory, but the destruction that comes after is really, it's bad. Horrendous. And I think one of the easiest ways to see that is to get in a mental time machine

and imagine that you were born in a different era or a different point in history. So, you know, Jonathan, I think there's a good chance that if you and I lived in the 1700s, we'd know a lot of people that we thought were totally reasonable who had the identity of slave owner, right? And you wouldn't have bothered to question that

and think about how unspeakably wrong that is. And I keep wondering, how many of our identities today are people going to look at in 100 or 200 or 300 years and say, I cannot believe anyone believed that that was a good idea, let alone saw it as core to who they were? Yeah, no, it's at some benefit of hindsight, and especially with a whole lot of space. There's something you described, the sort at some benefit of hindsight and especially with a whole lot of space. There's something you describe, the sort of three modes of being a preacher, prosecutor, and politician. Talk me through this a little bit. I had so much fun with this because the original idea comes from my colleague, Phil Tetlock.

And when I read his work about these mental modes, it hooked me as an organizational psychologist because he was writing about how we spend a lot of our time thinking and talking like jobs we've never held. So when you get into preacher mode, you are basically proselytizing the truth that you've already found, and your job is to enlighten everybody else. When you're in prosecutor mode, it's the reverse. You have to prove other people wrong and win your argument or your case. And it's so easy to see how those two mindsets stand in the way of rethinking. Because if I'm already right, and I know you're wrong, I might be trying to open your mind, but I don't have to budge an inch. And then this third mode, thinking like a politician, is a little more flexible.

When you're in politician mode, you're seeking the approval of an audience. You're trying to campaign or lobby to get their support. And you might end up catering to their opinions rather than your deeply held convictions because you want to fit in or you want something from them. The problem is that once you get a ticket to join their tribe, you are basically drinking whatever Kool-Aid they serve. And so you've changed your mind at the wrong moment for the wrong reason. Yeah, which is really hard to pull back from. It's interesting. We have these three modes, which it seems like the default is to one of those three most of the time,

rather than taking an alternative approach to making up your mind or being open to actually changing your mind down the road. Part of it comes from identity. We talked about a little bit. Reading your work also, it brought me back to Robert Cialdini's early work, which is what, 35 years old at this point, and all around persuasion. And there was one of the principles I remember him sharing, which he termed the consistency principle, which is that we fundamentally, once we say or do something in the world, we want to see ourselves and also be seen as being a consistent human being who acts consistently with that. And that trips us up. It can be really powerful if we're taking constructive action,

but it also stops us from dropping into this place of re-examining what we're doing. Yeah. I think Bob captured it perfectly with his description of the consistency and commitment effect, which in some ways, to the point you were making earlier, is a tool that people use to persuade others. But I think it's also a weapon that we inadvertently use against ourselves that prevents us from changing and growing. And I'm not going to say we should live our lives as hypocrites. I am saying, though, that many of the times when we get accused of being flip-floppers

are moments when we encountered more credible sources or more valid information. And we've made progress in our thinking. And I think in such a polarized time, people have a really hard, they struggle to sort out, okay, when somebody's changed their mind, are they doing it for political reasons to affiliate with a group or prove their allegiance? Or are they doing it because they have, to affiliate with a group or prove their allegiance? Or are they doing it because they have actually gotten closer to the truth? Yeah. I mean, and that's delicate.

And maybe it's not a binary thing either. You know, it's a yes and thing, especially in this moment in time. Hearing you say that, I'm torn between thinking you're right and, oh, no, this is going to make things even harder, but I think you are right. And I think, especially in our own heads, it's extremely difficult to separate out, you know, when I do change my mind, am I doing it because of the pressure of a group that I don't want to be excluded from or a set of role models that I'm, you know, that I'm trying to follow in the footsteps of versus am I using the most unbiased, the most rigorous standards to figure out what I believe? Yeah. It's complicated, you know, especially when we bring belonging into the conversation, you know, going all the way back

to Putnam's work on bowling alone, you know, like, and I think it's only gotten worse in the last couple of decades where all the places we used to seek belonging, the institutions, the organizations, the job, faith-based places, trade groups, bowling leagues, they don't exist or they don't provide it anymore, but it's a human need. Once we find it in affiliation with a group and there's a set of beliefs that wrap around that, it's not just saying no to the beliefs anymore. We're potentially risking being outcast from a group who we really don't want to walk away from or be shunned in. In a serious way. One of the things I worry about a lot is the group polarization effect, where you join a group and everybody in the group has, let's say, relatively moderate views. If they interact for a couple of weeks, then they all tend to come out more

extreme than they were. And part of that is, you know, they're stuck in an echo chamber or a filter bubble. But part of it is that the people that groups pay the most attention to, the people that typically gain the most status in a group, are the ones who are most prototypical of the group. And when you think about being prototypical of a group, that means representing the group's essence, standing for their values and their DNA and their identity. And so oftentimes, the person who's elevated to be the most important member of the group is the person who has the most extreme passion for whatever belief or principle the group stands for. And over time, that can mean that a group that starts out with pretty

reasonable views can land in a fairly unreasonable place. Yeah. And I think probably politics pops into mind is when we're talking about the quote group, but the fact is this can be families, this can be work, this can be friend groups. This is not a dynamic, which is sort of like limited to any one domain. It's based in human nature. It is. And it reminds me of John Haidt's argument that we're groupish as creatures, that we're drawn to kind of identify with an in-group and see the people in that group in some ways as extensions of ourselves. And then anybody who doesn't belong to the group and subscribe to whatever our beliefs are is a potential adversary. And it's just, it's so puzzling to me. You look at it on social media, for example.

I cannot imagine only wanting to follow people with one set of beliefs. How do you learn anything? All you're doing is reinforcing what you already think you know. And there's no growth there. There's no evolution there. So I wonder what would happen if we all made a point to say, look, I'm going to take at least a quarter or a third of the people I follow, and they're going to be people where I disagree with their conclusions, but I'm impressed or intrigued by their thought process. I love that invitation. It makes a lot of sense. But also what you're effectively asking people to do is step away from a potential slipstream

of safety and validation, which people really want. Yeah, I guess I would just rather be right than feel right. Yeah, I'm right there with you. Whether you're in your running era, Pilates era, or yoga era, dive into Peloton workouts that work with you. to strengthen who you are. So no matter your era, make it your best with Peloton. Find your push. Find your power. Peloton. Visit Peloton at onepeloton.ca.

Mayday, mayday. We've been compromised. The pilot's a hitman. I knew you were gonna be fun. On January 24th. Tell me how to fly this thing. Mark Wahlberg. You know what the difference between me and you is?

You're gonna die. Don't shoot him, we need him! Y'all need a pilot? Flight Risk. The Apple Watch Series 10 is here. It has the biggest display ever. It's also the thinnest Apple Watch ever, making it even more comfortable on your wrist,

whether you're running, swimming, or sleeping. And it's the fastest-charging Apple Watch, getting you 8 hours of charge in just 15 minutes. The Apple Watch Series 10, available for the first time in glossy jet black aluminum. Compared to previous generations, iPhone XS or later required, charge time and actual results will vary. You share a whole bunch of sort of like reframes, different ways to sort of like approach the world and your thought process. And I don't want to touch down on some of those, but there's one other thing that sort of

like to me is a big open question, which is what needs to happen in order for us to kind of break open? Like what is the inciting incident or process or experience that makes us go from a place of saying like, this is who I am. This is what I believe. This is the people that I'm rolling with to all of a sudden waking up one day and saying, oh, this actually is not serving me. And I need to actually re-examine how I've been moving through the world and start to actually go out and acquire a different set of processes and tools? That's such an important question. I don't feel like we have a clean answer

to it. I can point to lots of evidence, for example, that extended contact with people who hold very different views or who have different experiences, and especially having respectful exchanges with those people, can shift your thinking over time. I can certainly point you to evidence as well that when people are repeatedly confronted with the fact that their beliefs are undermining their ability to achieve their goals, that they're a little bit more likely to say, huh, maybe I should change course. But for every one of those cases, we can think of examples of people who had the exact opposite reaction to those situations, right? Who were told over and over again that their startup was a terrible idea. How many times have you watched Shark Tank where it closes with all five sharks saying, for your own safety and future, please abandon this idea and it's this you know kind of heroic delusional grit of saying

i didn't realize that you know i should have invested my grit in you know in being an effective entrepreneur and there are lots of ideas that i could pursue as opposed to where these people get trapped is well this is the one idea and this is this is definitely going to make it and you know it's it's sometimes amusing. It's almost, I'll give the other reality TV show example of this is American Idol, right? How many of us have laughed at the person who clearly cannot carry a tune and just can't hear it and will not listen to both the audience and expert judges who say, I'm sorry, singing is really not for you. And that is one of the things

in life that seems to be driven more by talent than by effort. This is all a long way of saying, I don't know the answer to your question. I think that one of the ways of thinking about the question though, is to say, I think we would have an easier time being open-minded and rethinking more frequently if we said, every time I catch myself preaching or prosecuting or politicking, what would a scientist do here? And this is obviously, this is something I find appealing as a social scientist because it's part of my training, but I actually think it's relevant to everybody. Thinking like a scientist is actually something we've seen demonstrated in business. There's an experiment recently with entrepreneurs in Italy where they're randomly assigned one group. The control group is going through an entrepreneurship training course,

essentially. There's another group that's given all the same lessons, but they're embedded in a framework of saying, think about running your business like a scientist. Your strategy is a theory. Go out and do customer interviews to develop hypotheses, and then do a product launch or create a minimum viable product with an A-B test and run that as an experiment to say, well, is my hypothesis true or false? And the results are staggering. Over less than a year, the control group that gets regular entrepreneurship training, they're all pre-revenue and they average about $300 per startup in revenue. The group that learns to think like a scientist averages over $12,000 in revenue. And the major reason for that is they're much more willing to pivot.

They're a lot more likely to say, huh, this strategy that I thought was genius, this product that I knew everyone was going to love, my experiment did not support my hypotheses. So it's time for me to change course. Yeah. I mean, that makes so much sense to me and being sort of a lifelong entrepreneur at the same time and having sort of like studied the different approaches. I think it's been really fascinating to see the conflation of the scientific method and startup methodology, you know, where, you know, lean startup methodology, which is essentially the process that you were talking about. It's all about like hypothesis, you know, like rapidly gathering evidence to either prove or disprove. Either one is okay. As long as you're where the primary metric is not succeeding or proving something, it's just

learning. Exactly. You know, what's interesting to me is that has become really embraced in the world of startups and pivoting is, you know, like a huge thing. It's like, you know, everybody knows the idea you start with is not the idea that anyone succeeds with. It's so rare in that world. And yet, you know, and then we see design thinking and human centered design, which is varying this, you know, in, in broader complex problem solving in the business world. And then we see design thinking and human-centered design, which is varying this in broader complex problem solving in the business world. And yet it doesn't seem to really have expanded out from that. And even in the world of business, it's limited to this one fairly narrow domain. And so much more of the business world kind of looks at it as like, oh, those are the weirdos. It's right for them, but not for us.

At their own peril. Yeah. It's so sad. I cannot tell you how many CEOs of large companies I've seen just tank their organizations because they weren't even willing to run some experiments, let alone question their intuitions. And I just, at this point, I just want to say to them, BlackBerry, Blockbuster, Kodak, Sears, should I keep going? How many, is that the, is that the group that you're hoping to join? Cause you are on your way. Yeah. I mean, it's the classic innovators dilemma. And yet it still exists in so many cultures. You also brought up this,

the, I think thinking like a scientist is a core part of the rethinking process is learning to really sort of like shift what you're doing, not being dug in. You mentioned earlier confidence and there's, I guess, an interesting relationship between confidence, cognitive flexibility, and competence that all plays into this. that one of the biggest barriers to people achieving their goals is that they don't have the confidence to aim high enough or work hard enough or pursue whatever dream they have. And I don't disagree with that. There's plenty of research to support it. I think what we overlook though is that the effect of success on confidence is often bigger than the reverse. That you build your confidence through achieving success. That you don't have to magically discover confidence out of thin air before you can achieve something meaningful. You can build your confidence

through achieving something meaningful. And I think that what that requires is a different kind of confidence, which is associated for me with actually maintaining and gaining confidence, as opposed to becoming overconfident to the point that you don't know what you don't know, and you're bad at things you think you're good at, and you become a victim of the Dunning-Kruger effect and everyone laughs at you. So I had a really interesting conversation with Sarah Blakely about how she knew that she was ready to start Spanx. And my basic question for her was, how did you have the confidence to do that? You hadn't worked fashion or retail. You didn't know how to run and build a business. You'd never applied for a patent before.

I just couldn't imagine myself going for that. And she said, I didn't have confidence in my knowledge and skills in any of those areas. I knew I didn't know what I was doing, but I had confidence in my ability to learn. And I think so many of us, when we think about confidence, we define it as believing in my existing knowledge and skills. And that's the wrong kind of confidence. What we want is confidence in my ongoing ability to learn. And I think that's what keeps us humble and curious and allows us to flex as opposed to becoming rigid. Yeah. I mean, I'm curious whether you feel like there's a tie in between that notion and like Carol Dweck's work on the fixed versus growth mindset, you know, and whether some of us just sort of come up in a way where

we're shaped in that you got what you got, and that's what it is, and whether that plays into this entire conversation way, which is really limited. Yeah, I do think Carol's work on growth mindset is a big part of this idea of seeing yourself as a learner. I think this goes further, though, because when you have a growth mindset, you believe that your knowledge and skills are potentially malleable, but you don't necessarily think that you're the person who's able to grow in this particular way. And I think if you look back on your experience and say, let me think through all the times that I've initially struggled at something and then gotten better,

you can start to realize, you know what, that, that is what it means to be human. Like that, that is, it's one of the things that differentiates us from any other species is we are remarkably good at learning. You see it with, you know, with tiny, tiny babies, right? Starting to pick up language at a rate that no adult could, could master. You see it with, you know, with tiny, tiny babies, right? Starting to pick up language at a rate that no adult could master. You see it with, you know, just the extraordinary athletic feats that we capture on television every day where, I don't know, I think about my days as a springboard diver, for example. And when I first stepped on a diving board, I could barely do a somersault. And it was unfathomable to me that I would one day do two and a half flips and a twist and dive into the water and know where I was. And that was learning, right? It was a discipline.

But I think seeing yourself as a learner, as opposed to seeing yourself as an expert, might be one of the fundamental distinctions between being satisfied with what you know and being excited to rethink what you know. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense to me. One of the things that popped into my mind as you were sharing that is that while there's a certain blessing in that shift in frame, when you open yourself to a process of perpetual growth, you're also opening yourself to a process of perpetual grief that I think some people struggle with because you perpetually have to accept the fact that the thing that you thought and believed in and maybe how you identify yourself, it's time to let that go.

And if that especially is a part of your identity, it's like you're constantly grieving the loss of that even though it's being replaced by the joy of learning something new. Well, I think, I think you just got right to the heart of a shift in perspective that, that probably more of us could go through, which is rethinking is only a loss. If you were attached to your old belief, if you took your opinion and you just treat it as a, as a hunch and you said, well, you know, I have a sneaking suspicion that this could be true. You find out that it's not. Huh. Interesting.

I learned something new. Right. The moment you get attached to it and you say, this is me. This is foundational to how I think the world works is the moment that you experience the pain of having to let something go. And I'm not saying we shouldn't have any strong convictions. Of course we should. I have a strong conviction that we should have some strong convictions. You're hearing it in my voice right now.

So I guess I have met a conviction. But I think we take too many beliefs too seriously. I think we identify with too many opinions. And I guess what I would say about that is we've all experienced the joy of being wrong, which is when somebody challenges a weakly held assumption and we're delighted by the surprise. I remember reading that the moon might have formed out of magma rain from the center of the earth. Mind-boggling. I can't quite grasp what that even means. But I was so excited to discover that maybe it wasn't a separate asteroid.

And you could say, well, wait a minute, but that upends your entire worldview. The moon might have been born from inside the earth. Well, guess what? That's not core to my worldview, so it doesn't bother me. And I just think most of us would be better off if we had more of our views work that way, where we say, you know what? My views about the best ways to accomplish my goals, my views about what policies are going to be effective, my views about how to be a good parent, those are theories in use, right? I'm putting them into action because they're what the evidence I know of and the experiences that I've had are pointing me toward. But the moment I find out that they might not be true or that they might be incomplete, that's great. I've just discovered

something and I'm going to grow from it. And it doesn't have to involve grief. Yeah. Now, the notion of attachment and grasping, I think, is such a – it's kind of this nuance, but really critical part of the process. It's a very Buddhist lens, to kind of say. It is, isn't it? I'm just going to keep rolling. And I think what I think is interesting and maybe valid now, but who knows what I'll think down the road. I'm open to the possibility that it might not be. You set up, I think you may have told me this a couple of years back and then I've heard you talk about it. When you write, I think this started when you're

writing, but maybe it was different. You essentially assemble a group of people to challenge you. So it's not even just you trying to create your own mechanisms to challenge yourself, but you've created this superstructure that exists outside of you and sort of giving people the role of coming at you and actually sort of challenging your thoughts and you welcome this. I'm fascinated by sort of that structure. Well, it started because I learned early in my career that I'm not smart enough or objective enough to see all the holes in my own work. And there are workarounds. One of the workarounds is putting something away for a couple of weeks or a month.

And I have had experiences where I come back to a draft that I hadn't seen in six weeks. I'm like, who is the moron who wrote this? How could his thinking have been so simple and incomplete? But I think creating those experiences, one, you wouldn't get that much done because it would take you forever to evolve your work. And two, there's still going to be things you don't see because, okay, I've gained some distance from that work in those six weeks, right? Maybe I've changed 0.0004%, but I'm still mostly me, the same person who wrote the first draft. And so I really need diversity of background and thought in order to challenge my thinking. So I didn't at first have a philosophy around that.

I was just sort of haphazardly sending out drafts to people and saying, you know, what would you challenge? What should I rethink? And then eventually I realized this is a whole different way of thinking about my network. I've always known the value of a support network and had people who believed in my potential and cared about my success and were there to encourage me when I got discouraged. And so have you, Jonathan, of course, right? You were actually one of those people. When I started writing, you sent me just enormously helpful document about how to launch a book and how to share

your ideas. And I had no clue what I was doing before. And I felt like, okay, maybe this is something I could do after reading that. And then I realized, well, we need more than just a support network. We need a challenge network. We need a group of people who are going to point out our blind spots and see the shortcomings in our work that are invisible to us or that we don't want to see, or in some cases, help us solve problems that we've identified and are just stuck around how to move forward. And I think that's one of the real gifts that you've given as an author is a lot of the wisdom that you share about how to spread ideas is counterintuitive, right? It challenges people to question the things they think are effective.

And what I've done lately, which is different now that I think about having a challenge network, is I've said, okay, what are the qualities of the people who have been in that role so helpfully for me? And they're often very disagreeable. They enjoy having the feisty debate. But they also, just like my support network, believe in my potential and care about my success. And so I've started going back to those people

and saying, hey, you know what? You may not know this, but I consider you a member of my challenge network. Ignore all those times when I didn't like your feedback or I pushed back too hard. That's just how I work out ideas. And I just, I really value the things that I learned from you. And I would love if you could keep challenging me and I get more useful feedback because of that. Because when people think about criticizing me, they no longer worry that they're going to hurt my feelings. They actually know that I'm going to take it as helpful.

They no longer worry that it's going to damage our relationship because I'm trying to make it clear to them, you know what? The only way that you can disrespect our relationship is by biting your tongue on something that might make me better. Yeah. It's been really interesting to see how it's formed into a real structure thing. But also I think what you shared about making it not just more formal, but also really understanding who should these people be and what is the underlying intention. It's not a destructive, it's not about bringing you down. It is about everybody's sort of like, they're

going at the idea. They're not going at you as an individual, they're going at the idea. They're not going at you as an individual. They're going at the idea. And the bigger idea is this process will make the net idea better. Exactly. And I think we've all encountered critics who are trying to boost their own egos or troll for some unknown reason. And this is a different group of people. These are thoughtful critics. These are people who enjoy playing with ideas, who are excited to figure out, okay, what will somebody who really fundamentally disagrees with this perspective, what will they say? And sometimes they are that person and they know it's

a contribution to make you aware of that sooner rather than later. Because I'll tell you what, Jonathan, I know you've had that experience many times too. When you're writing, you are going to find out at some point what is wrong with your work. And it's much better if you find that out in drafting phase. A hundred percent. Yeah. Because at some point it's going to happen. Wherever people disagree or whether the flaws are, it's going to come out. What's interesting also is you function in these two different worlds. You function in the world of academia and you function in the world of popular sharing. And in the world of academia, this structure is built in. When you publish, there's a whole peer review process where before anything actually lands in a journal,

it has been not only vetted, but very often attacked. And not always for constructive reasons. There's a pecking order and a power structure there where people are sometimes doing it for status. So it's interesting to see that you've created this in the context of a domain where you have sort of more control and built into that domain is not that same level of challenge and pure vetting. And you get to choose the people who have the intention that keeps it all positive. Yeah. I mean, it really grew out of the juxtaposition of those two worlds where one of the most beneficial and sometimes least fun parts of academia is no matter how much status you gain, you still send your paper for blind review. And you still have independent critics who are going to tell you exactly what they think of it. way to impress the editor is to skewer the paper, which is why when I've been an associate editor at a journal, I've said, okay, we care about constructiveness, not only quality of feedback.

But I felt like when I became an author and started writing outside of academia, I felt like that structure was missing. Obviously, I had a literary agent and an editor who provided that feedback, and we were encouraged to get friendly reviewers. I don't want friendly reviewers. I probably don't want hostile reviewers either, but I want people who are skeptical and interested in, you know, in stretching my thinking. field or every organization to have a structure like that in place, because it can be a lot of work to build your own challenge network. So if I were running an organization, the first thing I would do is I would say, all right, let's identify people who are willing and able to challenge and let's make them available for critical review stages. Yeah. I mean, in the context of an organization though, because I've been thinking about this lately, especially I've been revisiting your work. I feel like that's a lot harder because everybody in the organization has some sort of personal motivation. There's some level of a seeking of status, prestige, power, elevation within the organization. I would imagine it would be like finding a jury.

It's essentially the same thing. There's no way to actually assemble that group within an organization from people within the organization where it's just neutral. So it's got to be more about sort of like balancing the intentions and dynamics. I think so. I think one of the ways I've seen some workplaces do it is to bake this into performance reviews. So Bridgewater would be the extreme example where you're evaluated on whether you disagree with the people above you. And if you're never willing to touch the nerve or stick your hand in the fan or fight for right, then people think that you're putting your own ego or your own image above the mission

and the good of the organization. That's a step I'd like to see more organizations experiment with, knowing that it's going to look different from different cultures. There are definitely other kinds of structures, though, that exist. So Google X, or just X now, has actual kill incentives to shut down failing projects, to try to reverse this tendency to escalate your commitment when you get negative feedback and say, but I've got to prove to myself and everyone else that this is a good idea. We are genius at rationalizing. And so if you know you could get rewarded for pulling the plug, it becomes a little bit easier to do that. I think for a lot of organizations, and I've seen this at the Pentagon as well as some private companies, they have murder boards who at a

critical stage gate in a decision process will come in and say, our job is to explain why this should not go forward. And I worry sometimes that people get into a role-playing mode and they say, all right, I'm going to be the devil's advocate. We've checked the box. We no longer need to do any rethinking. But I think it's better to have people in that role than not. Yeah. I mean, totally agree. As I'm thinking about all of this, Richard Feynman's famous line sort of popped into my head. The first principle is that you must not fool yourself and you are the easiest person to fool. And this is coming from one of the most brilliant physicists and professors who's ever lived. And that's the lens he takes. We're talking

about getting back to that. Yeah. And that's the lens he takes. We're talking about getting back to that. Yeah. And what I think is profound about the Feynman observation is, it's not just that you're the easiest person to fool. It's that you are the easiest person for you to fool. So I guess it goes to the rationalizing animal point. But one of the biggest things that I learned while writing Think Again, which is not something I'd ever thought to do before, came from studying super forecasters who were competing to predict future events. And the thing I learned was that the best forecasters, when they form an opinion, they make a list of conditions where they would change their mind. To hold themselves accountable to the idea that when they encounter new information, they have to go back and say,

okay, does this meet the criteria that I set out for something that would shift my views? And if so, I have a responsibility to shift because I know once I have the view, I'm motivated to avoid or dismiss or discount that information. Yeah, I love that. It's funny because I've often wondered where I'm more interested as a general rule in developing models and finding answers. And I think that's the reason why is because that allows you to be dynamic and to be responsive, to change over time and not wed to assumptions. Yes. That just crystallized something I've never understood before, which is I feel the same

way. My greatest moments of, they're not eureka, but of aha or excitement when I'm doing research or writing a book, they're really when I discover a framework for making sense of something. And you're right, that's because the framework gives you a lens to keep learning as opposed to it answers one question and you're done. Yeah, completely agree with that. charge in just 15 minutes. The Apple Watch Series X. Available for the first time in glossy jet black aluminum. Compared to previous generations, iPhone XS or later required. Charge time and actual results will vary. Mayday, mayday. We've been compromised.

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You know, the flip side of some of the things that we've been talking about was sort of like a confidence-based assurity is what a lot of people complain about, which is this phrase which has been kicked around certainly all over social media, imposter syndrome. You know, it's something that you talk about and write about. What I was surprised to see in some of the research that you share is that it's not necessarily a bad thing to actually have a certain level of this, quote, imposter syndrome about the way you move into everything. Yeah. I was very surprised by this too. This comes from the research of one of our former doctoral students, Basima, who's now an MIT professor. And her basic finding was that if you relax the idea that

feeling like an imposter is a syndrome, it's sort of a chronic pathology that somebody struggles with. And you just say, hey, you know what? Everybody has imposter thoughts, moments of self-doubt where you say, maybe I'm not good enough, or maybe I've lost it, or maybe I don't belong here, or maybe everybody's going to find out that I'm just a regular person. What is the impact of having those thoughts? And she found when studying investment professionals and medical students that there were not performance costs of having those thoughts more often. That actually people who felt like imposters more often tended to perform better in certain ways. They were more likely to second guess their investment decisions,

which actually improved their judgment. They were more likely to follow up and make sure that if they were medical students, that not only had they diagnosed the main issue that a patient came in with, but they had really shown them enough care and compassion. And they were curious about whether there was anything else that was concerning them at the time. And I think that, you know, okay, imposter syndrome is debilitating. It's especially debilitating if you're a member of a non-dominant group and you're not used to people assuming that you can do it, right? So I think it's probably harder for women,

it's harder for people of color to get to this mindset. But if you can think about those imposter thoughts less as a debilitating syndrome and more as a beginner's mindset, as you called it earlier, as a frame of mind that's oriented toward learning, towards saying, huh, maybe this means I'm going to be really flexible in my thinking. Maybe this means I have to work that much harder and figure out a better way to solve this problem. Then it becomes a little bit less of a liability and a little bit more of an asset. Yeah. I mean, that makes sense for me. And I appreciate you bringing up the context also between dominant versus non-dominant group and how just structurally and culturally, this is a different proposition depending on where you lie in that spectrum. And it's real. It's a very real effect that I think

affects a lot of people. The other thing that sort of popped into my mind as I was learning this research, it brought me back to this research that I think is a bit old at this point, but where they were sort of looking at the relationship between affect and accuracy and discernment. And a lot of people will think, well, the more upbeat you are, the more positive you are, the more optimistic you are, the more you get done, the more accurate you are, you see the world better. But in fact, that wasn't the case. It's not necessarily saying that if you're clinically depressed, you're going to be better and more productive and accurate and effective. But people who are a little bit more sober, a little bit more towards melancholy, were actually much clearer about the way they perceive the world around them and could

make decisions based on more objective experiences. You're talking about Alloy and Abramson, depressive realism, right? Yeah, exactly. Yeah. I was so shocked when I first read that research. I first came across it, I guess, Yeah, exactly. a bit of a paradox because to your point, if you're not careful, it can become a self-fulfilling prophecy, right? That seeing the world only as it is can stand in the way of imagining how it could be. And yet if you develop a Pollyanna quality of optimism and you can't confront reality, then you're going to miss a lot of threats that are actually going to stand in the way of creating the very world that you're imagining. And the only way that I have known to think about this is to understand it as a collective phenomenon. So we do know that you can learn to become more optimistic.

You can learn to become more realistic. But it's a pretty wide spectrum. And it scares me whenever I go into a workplace and everyone is an optimist. I wonder what problems they are sweeping under the rug. It also concerns me when I walk into an organization and everybody takes pride in being not just a skeptic, but a cynic. And I think, okay, there's so many possibilities they're not seeing there. And so I guess for me, it just, it underscores the importance of diversity, not just of, you know, of background and experience, but also of cognitive styles.

Yeah. And I think this also leads into some of the exploration around collective rethinking, right? Because I think a lot of times we do want a certain type of person around us, and we also tend to enter a lot of thought processes and points of view in a binary way. And that's just not the reality ever. No. Now, this is, I love the Robert Benchley line that there are two kinds of people in the world, those who see the world in terms of two kinds of people and those who don't.

And it's such a prescient foreshadowing of what psychologists now call binary bias, which is that just distinctively human tendency to take a complex continuum and oversimplify it into two categories. And anytime I see somebody now in an us versus them or a my side versus other side conversation, I want to just step above it and say, well, you know, it's possible that one side is right more often than the other. But what's more likely is there are two sides. You need to look at this, you know, not like a heads or tails of a coin, but as the many lenses of a prism and say, if you take an issue like gun rights, you have people who are passionate about freedom to bear arms or the right to bear arms.

You have people who are passionate about gun safety or gun control. And it seems like there are only two camps there, but actually very few people are in one extreme camp or the other, right? Most people are somewhere in the middle agreeing on things like universal background checks, which have enormous bipartisan consensus. And I think that if we can resist these binaries and see the continuum, or at least a lot of kind of nuanced categories in between, it's a lot easier to have a reasonable conversation about polarized issues. And I know that, you know, part of the process, you know, that you share is there's a really interesting shift you speak to, which is the difference between perspective taking versus perspective seeking, which I think really ties into this.

It does. It does. You know, it's interesting because this was another one of moments. You can't write a book about thinking again without rethinking a lot of things you thought were true. And it was actually part of the reason I was excited to write Think Again was I knew it was going to force me to rethink some things that either I hadn't thought to question or that I had been hesitant to question. And one of them was, I've talked for years about the value of perspective taking. For years, I've loved the Jack Handy observation, the deep thought that before you criticize someone, you should walk a mile in their shoes. Because that way, when you criticize them, you're a mile away and you have their shoes, right? And it's such a fun way of capturing the importance of perspective taking for me and i always thought that when people didn't understand someone it's because they

were too anchored in their own view and not really considering well how does this look to the other person and then i read this research over 25 different experiments showing that on average perspective taking did not improve your understanding of somebody who is different from you, did not increase your empathy for them. And in some cases, it actually backfired because the further someone is away from what you believe, the more wrong you are about what their perspective looks like. And so you end up just guessing in ways that do disservice to their actual opinions. So the recommended alternative to perspective taking is perspective seeking, to reach out to people and find out what their

perspective actually is. Crazy idea, right? Complicated thought. But to me, there's a big knowing doing gap there. We know that we can learn more from people by talking to them than we can from imagining what they're thinking. But how often do we act on that knowledge? Yeah, not enough. When I first saw that, it also triggered Dan Gilbert's original work around effective forecasting. It's like, not only do we not know what other people are thinking, we don't even know what we think, just a short while down the road.

It's sort of like an interesting dynamic. It is. That's actually a great case for why rethinking is so important that how many decisions have we made in our lives? What college to go to, what career to pursue, what person to date, where we assumed that we knew who we were going to be five years down the road or 10 years down the road. And we don't. I don't know when I take a job, right, what I'm going to be interested in in five years. I don't know when I join an organization whether the values that I'm looking for today are going to be important to me in 10 years. And I also don't know how is that job going to evolve, right? Is that industry

still going to exist? How is that organization going to change? Is the culture going to fall apart? And I value of rethinking in all different contexts, personal, community, collective. Is there a value in not rethinking? Is there a moment or a time where rethinking really should stop? My instinct is yes. I sort of feel like I should be rethinking that in the spirit of the conversation. But yeah, I think, I mean, if you start to play out what happens if we all rethought everything, we'd never do anything. We'd be permanently trapped in analysis paralysis. And I think, Jonathan, you probably know some people who probably rethink more often than

they should, and they're always second guessing themselves. I think most of us, though, are probably hovering too far on the other end of that spectrum. And we're too good at justifying the choices we've already made. We're too good at clinging to the opinions that we've already formed. And so this is, you know, this is a case like you described it for balance, right? To find the optimal range in the middle of that spectrum. And one of the things I really struggled to do when I was writing this book was to quantify what's the ideal time to rethink and how much rethinking is enough. And I think it's so situational. It's so individual, right? The idiosyncrasies there are almost impossible to begin to catalog. But I was encouraged by the

data on superforecasters, which showed that the average forecaster, when trying to predict an event over the next few months, they would change their mind twice or they would update their prediction twice. And the superforecasters, the very best predictors of future events, they updated about twice as often, just four times. And so I'm not saying you have to rethink 900 opinions, right? In this particular judgment you're making. I'm just saying doing a little more rethinking will probably leave you with fewer regrets. Yeah. You almost wonder where there's an extra financial effect, you know, with just a little bit more rethinking actually has an exponentially greater effect or like more in a more generalized way. I can see that. I think, well, I don't, I don't know how this would play out, but my, my working hunch, which is, which is awaiting better data is there's something about starting the process of rethinking and

making a commitment to it that becomes a habit. And one of the places I saw this was with my challenge network. One of my favorite groups to bring into my challenge network is the students who have challenged me the most in class. And so last year when I was finishing up Think Again, I gave a draft of every chapter to a group of about 20 students who joined me in this impact lab that I've been running for a long time.

And their job was to tear apart the book and to object to everything that they disagreed with or that they thought was wrong or not well thought out or not convincing. And one of the interesting things that started happening as that group gathered is people, they would start to make a comment and then somebody else would question it because of course we're here to do rethinking. So we're all going to be bought into this process. And I saw several of them start to say things like, oh, maybe this is a time to rethink.

Oh, maybe this is a moment for rethinking. And they started to see it as a learning opportunity as opposed to a nuisance or a threat. And I found the same thing happening to me that, you know, the very moments when I would have said, no, I'm really attached to this belief. Like, huh, this could be a chance. This could be an occasion for thinking again. And I think the more you practice it, the less upsetting it becomes. And the more, I guess this is to your Buddhist point,

the more attached you get to detachment. Yeah, I love that. Good place for us to come full circle as well. I have asked you this question in the past, but it's been a number of years now. So I'm going to ask it again because it tends to shift as we sit here in this container of Good Life Project. If I offer up the phrase to live a good life, what comes up?

I think what I would say now is that to live a good life is to lead a life of integrity. And when I think about integrity, I think about having a set of values that are worthy, that serve people beyond you, and also living by those values, right? As opposed to, I guess this is something that I've rethought over the past couple of years since we last talked. I used to think integrity was practicing what you preach. And now I think preaching is overrated as a general rule. But if you are going to preach, that you should only preach what you already practice. I love that. Great place to wrap up. Thank you. Thank you so much for listening. And thanks also to our fantastic sponsors who help make this show possible. You can check them out in the links we have included in today's show notes. And while

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