Think Again: The Power of Knowing What You Don’t Know by Adam Grant. A wonderfully interesting book that promotes all the benefits of doubt. Yes, call it re-thinking. Actually, call it why we refuse to change and the negative results that arise.
Adam accurately states: The first rule of the Dunning-Kruger club is you don’t know you’re a member of the Dunning-Kruger club. At the same time, in today’s charged political landscape I had a number of good laughs.
Accordingly, Adams message is that easy access to web-based articles or videos written by anyone on any topic, we believe that we can become subject matter experts in two minutes.
This has disastrous consequences. Yet, Adam reveals how we can overcome this flaw by developing habits that force us all to embrace the challenge to our beliefs and change them when necessary.
Chapter 4’s Fight Club addressing Brad Bird’s role at Pixar is a worthy example of how teams can alter accepted skillsets to create award winning animation. You will learn how The Incredibles forced Brad to work with his “Pirate team” and still succeeded wildly. You can learn about changing long held beliefs.
The smarter they are, the harder they fall
Adam addresses this in a role of preachers, prosecutors, and politicians. professions, then interjects how a scientist reacts in comparison. The change is that all three hold beliefs that are infallible. Very little can change their mind as they are locked into a fixed mindset and only seek to persuade others. You can see where the train comes off the rails:
We don’t just hesitate to rethink our answers. We hesitate at the very idea of rethinking. Take an experiment where hundreds of college students were randomly assigned to learn about the first-instinct fallacy. The speaker taught them about the value of changing their minds and gave them advice about when it made sense to do so. On their next two tests, they still weren’t any more likely to revise their answers.
Part of the problem is cognitive laziness. Some psychologists point out that we’re mental misers: we often prefer the ease of hanging on to old views over the difficulty of grappling with new ones. Yet there are also deeper forces behind our resistance to rethinking. Questioning ourselves makes the world more unpredictable. It requires us to admit that the facts may have changed, that what was once right may now be wrong. Reconsidering something we believe deeply can threaten our identities, making it feel as if we’re losing a part of ourselves.
Rethinking isn’t a struggle in every part of our lives. When it comes to our possessions, we update with fervor. We refresh our wardrobes when they go out of style and renovate our kitchens when they’re no longer in vogue. When it comes to our knowledge and opinions, though, we tend to stick to our guns.
Psychologists call this seizing and freezing. 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.
At some point, you’ve probably heard that if you drop a frog in a pot of scalding hot water, it will immediately leap out. But if you drop the frog in lukewarm water and gradually raise the temperature, the frog will die. It lacks the ability to rethink the situation, and doesn’t realize the threat until it’s too late.
I did some research on this popular story recently and discovered a wrinkle: it isn’t true. Tossed into the scalding pot, the frog will get burned badly and may or may not escape. The frog is actually better off in the slow-boiling pot: it will leap out as soon as the water starts to get uncomfortably warm.
It’s not the frogs who fail to reevaluate. It’s us. Once we hear the story and accept it as true, we rarely bother to question it.
pp. 12-13
Adam then unrolls examples of how we can overcome this flaw and become open to change.
The smarter they are, the harder they fall
On the technology front, Adam’s story of the Blackberry mobile device is very impactful. After finding initial success, Blackbery’s inability rethink how technology was altering the cellular phone market simply led to a slow death. The story is rather compelling. It proves when finding success, espeially financial that change can become a foreign concept.
Mike Lazaridis’ story as a gifted youngster who could fix televisions in middle school found a promising future inventing the Blackberry. There is no doubt this product’s hyper-success soared in the early era of smart phones. Thus, users addicted to his device became known as Crackberry addicts.
Yet serving as the prime example of an unwillingness to change, Mike refused to alter the Blackberry when the market and mobile technologies made big leaps in performance. Mike now acknowledges the iPhone would conquer the market and surprisingly still refused to add a web browser to his device. Nevertheless, an impactful story of the inability to understand The Rethinking Cycle versus The Overconfidence Cycle. To a lesser extent, Mike also passed on an early version of what we know today as WhatsApp. Double ouch.
Hate Me Out At The Ballgame?
Maybe chapter six: Bad Blood on the Diamond Diminishing Prejudice by Destabilizing Stereotypes is certainly a poignant chapter for American sports fans. Yankees versus RedSox. Enough said right? In a rather interesting segment on sports rivals, Adam’s survey outcomes may suggest we need to re-think the influence of sports media:
As stereotypes stick and prejudice deepens, we don’t just identify with our own group; we disidentify with our adversaries, coming to define who we are by what we’re not. We don’t just preach the virtues of our side; we find self-worth in prosecuting the vices of our rivals.
When people hold prejudice toward a rival group, they’re often willing to do whatever it takes to elevate their own group and undermine their rivals—even if it means doing harm or doing wrong. We see people cross those lines regularly in sports rivalries. Aggression extends well beyond the playing field: from Barcelona to Brazil, fistfights frequently break out between soccer fans. Cheating scandals are rampant, too, and they aren’t limited to athletes or coaches. When students at The Ohio State University were paid to participate in an experiment, they learned that if they were willing to lie to a student from a different school, their own pay would double and the other student’s compensation would be cut in half. Their odds of lying quadrupled if the student attended the University of Michigan—their biggest rival—rather than Berkeley or Virginia.
p. 146
I certainly enjoyed learning how medical students who held humble beliefs are greater at addressing Adam’s Imposter Syndrome. Another great chapter not to be missed. Seems there really is data to reinforce the positives about staying humble.
In conclusion, Think Again is a deeply challenging book that will make you a better person providing insights for growth. For this reason, Adam’s Originals is another enjoyable read for your consideration. Please also consider To Pixar and Beyond and Creativity Inc., as previous reads from Pixar leaders.
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