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

“Yet there are also deeper forces behind our resistance to rethinking. Questioning ourselves makes the world more unpredictable.”

A key trend in the book is the idea that we avoid rethinking because we tie our thoughts, erroneously, to our identity. One reason we do this is because our thoughts inform, and help to stabilize, our worldview. In other words, Grant is arguing that we dislike rethinking because it destabilizes our carefully constructed identity.

“We’re swift to recognize when other people need to think again. […] Unfortunately, when it comes to our own knowledge and opinions, we often favor feeling right over being right.”

This connects to the larger theme of thinking like a scientist. For Grant, the other archetypes—preacher, prosecutor, and politician—are all informed by emotion. Instead, he thinks we should focus on searching for truth, and for him, this must be done through the scientific method.

“Research shows that when people are resistant to change, it helps to reinforce what will stay the same. […] Although our strategy might evolve, our identity will endure.”

This returns to the larger theme of identity while offering a way of approaching change that can help us reconcile those conflicts. In this case, Grant is highlighting how Apple engineers were able to change Steve Jobs’s mind whereas Blackberry’s engineers failed with Mike Lazaridis. Grant suggests that Apple’s engineers rightly focused on how they could progress while still retaining Apple’s core identity and suggests that we take this as a lesson for ourselves.

“When we lack the knowledge and skills to achieve excellence, we sometimes lack the knowledge and skills to judge excellence.”

The Dunning-Kruger effect, as Grant notes, is particular to a subset of people in a field. Absolute beginners don’t suffer from it, but those with some—but not much—experience do. It’s counterintuitive, but novices are still too inexperienced to recognize how complex a field can be; as a result, they misjudge their own competence in that field.

“Arrogance leaves us blind to our weaknesses. Humility is a reflective lens: it helps us see them clearly. Confident humility is a corrective lens: it enables us to overcome those weaknesses.”

Grant argues in this chapter against overconfidence cycles and identifies issues with imposter syndrome. However, his solution is to wed the two things in a way that allows us to utilize the both of best worlds: confident humility, much like task conflict later on, is about taking what should be a detriment and finding a way to make it productive.

“Attachment. That’s what keeps us from recognizing when our opinions are off the mark and rethinking them. To unlock the joy of being wrong, we need to detach.”

This returns us to Grant’s larger argument that we need to divorce our ideas from ourselves. For Grant, we attach our identities to our ideas, which makes being wrong uncomfortable; what people who enjoy being have in common is that they don’t attach their identities to their ideas.

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

Grant asks the reader to rethink their conceptions about conflict, which he argues are misunderstood because we tend to view conflict as a binary—either there’s conflict, which is bad, or no conflict, which is good. However, he argues that task conflict, as opposed to relationship conflict, is productive. If team members are passionate, task conflict is inevitable.

“After seeing [interactions at Pixar] up close, I finally understood what had long felt like a contradiction […] Agreeableness is about seeking social harmony, not cognitive consensus. It’s possible to disagree without being disagreeable.”

Grant challenges how we think about some core concepts. Here, he is undermining the way we think about what it means to be agreeable as a person and separating that from our capacity to disagree on specific ideas—it’s related to the relationship versus task conflict divide above.

“When we’re trying to persuade people, we frequently take an adversarial approach. Instead of opening their minds, we effectively shut them down or rile them up.”

This section is largely about rethinking our instinct to overwhelm our opposition with evidence in order to win debates. Grant’s research suggests that this isn’t effective because it makes our opposition defensive—instead, we need to focus on finding common ground.

“Most people immediately start with a straw man, poking holes in the weakest version of the other side’s case. [Harish Natarajan] does the reverse: he considers the strongest version of their case, which is known as the steel man.”

This builds on the common-ground concept that runs throughout this section. The straw man fallacy is a problem in part because it refuses to consider the opposition in good faith. In contrast, the steel man approach insists on putting yourself in your opposition’s mindset—the first step is to understand their arguments.

“By asking questions rather than thinking for the audience, we invite them to join us as a partner and think for themselves. […] If we see [an argument] more as a dance, we can begin to choreograph a way forward.”

This further reinforces the need for common ground in disputes. It isn’t just about letting people arrive at their own conclusions, although that is part of Grant’s motivation (to an extent). More importantly, for Grant, is the concept of the partnership in a debate as opposed to seeing a debate as a battleground.

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

Grant highlights the instinct and danger of group mentalities here. Community, as indicated elsewhere, is a good thing; however, it can also be weaponized. In this chapter, it’s weaponized more innocuously in sports rivalries, but much more problematically in racism and bigotry.

“Psychologist George Kelly observed that our beliefs are like pairs of reality goggles. We use them to make sense of the world and navigate our surroundings. […] Rather than trying on a different pair of goggles [when we encounter opposing evidence], we become mental contortionists.”

This connects to Grant’s earlier discussion about confirmation and desirability bias. These biases allow us to interpret the world as we prefer; Kelly’s goggles analogy is another version of that concept.

“When we try to convince people to think again, our first instinct is usually to start talking. Yet the most effective way to help others open their minds is often to listen.”

A key idea in this section is that persuasion seems to be most effective when it isn’t overt, but rather is rooted in an acknowledgement of others’ ideas and perspectives. This connects back to Chapter 5’s push to ask questions, but here, the speaker’s own ideas are even further deemphasized.

“At the turn of the last century, the great hope for the internet was that it would expose us to different views. But as the web welcomed a few billion fresh voices and vantage points into the conversation, it also became a weapon of misinformation and disinformation.”

This is a common critique of the modern web: Not only can it allow disinformation to spread more easily, but we tend to shift into our own information bubbles, rarely encountering opposing views. Grant challenges this framing, though but suggesting that it is only part of the story.

“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.”

Grant brings us back to earlier concepts of confirmation and desirability bias again. Both concepts are important for understanding our refusal to rethink our ideas, but this also connects to his argument about motivation—i.e., we must find our own motivation for change.

“It’s not hard to see why a boring lecture would fail, but even captivating lectures can fall short […] Lectures aren’t designed to accommodate dialogue or disagreement; they turn students into passive receivers of information rather than active thinkers.”

This connects to modern educational theory that argues in favor of active learning approaches. The key here isn’t the skill of the lecturer—the problem is that the method itself is flawed.

“I noticed a surprising pattern. The students who struggled the most were the straight-A students—the perfectionists. […] Achieving excellence in school often requires mastering old ways of thinking. Building an influential career demands new ways of thinking.”

Through much of this chapter, Grant differentiates between the world of education and what might be called the real world. But, this also connects to the following chapter’s concerns with “best practices” and staying the course—part of why good students don’t perform as well outside of school, he is arguing, is because career require the ability to be flexible.

“How do you know? It’s a question we need to ask more often, both of ourselves and of others. The power lies in its frankness. It’s nonjudgmental—a straightforward expression of doubt and curiosity that doesn’t put people on the offensive.”

This question could be said to be at the heart of rethinking. In asking how someone knows something, as with Davis’s questions in Chapter 6, we are asking them to explore the roots of their beliefs or arguments. Often, Grant suggests, we’ll find that those arguments are based on presumptions rather than solid evidence.

“In performance cultures, people often become attached to best practices. The risk is that once we’ve declared a routine the best, it becomes frozen in time.”

Grant’s suggestion isn’t that best practices are entirely bad, although he advocates for a linguistic change. Rather, those practices should be seen as ever-evolving based on an examination and evaluation of process.

“What do you want to be when you grow up? As a kid, that was my least favorite question. I dreaded conversations with adults because they always asked it—and no matter how I replied, they never liked my answer.”

Grant points to ideological tunnel vision as, in some ways, starting from the time we’re young. In Chapter 9, he suggests we do this in school, but on a more personal level, here, he suggests that the culprit is a more social drive to figure out what we want to be very early on. Just as he suggests we should be more comfortable with rethinking, he also suggests we should be less comfortable with boxing ourselves in too early or too firmly.

“[F]rom 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 […] The danger of these plans is that they can give us tunnel vision, blinding us to alternative possibilities.”

This further develops the above issue: by boxing ourselves in, we make it difficult to rethink our life choices when we should be considering pivots.

“I’ve noticed that the students who are the most certain about their career plans at twenty are often the ones with the deepest regrets by thirty. They haven’t done enough rethinking along the way.”

This connects back to Grant’s earlier discussion of straight-A students in Chapter 9. Here, the students who feel most secure in their career ambitions, Grant suggests, are merely following a script, one that can implode once it’s real.