Adam Grant is an organizational psychologist who has written a few books now like Give and Take and Hidden Potential and this book, Think-Again.
In a nutshell, the book is about the value of rethinking in our life. He gives a lot of good examples and anecdotes about things and recognizable companies to make his ideas really tangible and easy to understand.
I love a good book that gives you a lot of aha moments or leads you to stop and think for a second as you’re reading.
As we go through life, we often have to rethink what we’ve known or, more likely, what we think we know. Or at least we should be in order to grow as humans.
How many people had a hard time when they told us Pluto is no longer a planet? I know I did.
Because it challenged what we thought our whole lives.
No wonder it’s so hard to get older people to change their minds about things–Could you imagine thinking you know something for 70 years to be told it’s wrong? That would open a pandora’s box of your mind—what else were you wrong about?! What else don’t you really know??
It’s easier to just ignore it and keep a closed mind.
He also has a lot of recent examples as this was written in 2021, so he references the 2016 election and the Pandemic which was very relevant to us. That period of time is a prime cautionary tale of what happens when you don’t THINK AGAIN and when you hold on so tight to what you think you believe–because it’s better to hold your convictions instead of admitting you were wrong.
One great example was the creator of Blackberry. He was so good and inventive for the time. The value of the company was over $70 billion and was the most used during that period. He failed at rethinking once Apple came onto the scene.
Even when he had employees telling him that he needed to add a reliable browser to keep up with Apple, he refused, which led to his demise. He was so fixated on keeping his baby as is, instead of changing with the times.
Did you know that even Jobs was resistant to turning the Ipod into a phone? When his team urged him to do it, he refused because he didn’t like phone companies and didn’t want to be one. But they worked together and convinced him that it would be a computer company that just added a phone.
People are more open to change when you include a vision of continuity. He was curious about what they presented and after 6 months he agreed to it. Four years after the launch, iPhone accounted for half of Apple’s revenue.
Can you imagine if they didn’t try to convince him at all, if he didn’t become curious and was just stuck in his ways, or they came at him with a different approach? The iPhone as it exists today, may never have been or would’ve been different. Or we maybe would’ve all still been using Blackberries.
One chapter was about teaching students to question knowledge. It’s about teaching kids to be fact checkers, scientists, to keep learning and keep an open mind. There’s a lot of examples of things done in classrooms which would be great for teachers to look into.
I wrote down these quotes because they are really thought provoking:
- “When we lack the knowledge and skills to achieve excellence, we sometimes lack the knowledge and skills to judge excellence”
- “No matter how much brain power you have, if you lack the motivation to change your mind, you’ll miss many occasions to think again.”
- “It’s a sign of wisdom to avoid believing every thought that enters your mind. It’s a mark of emotional intelligence to avoid internalizing every feeling that enters your heart”
- “When someone becomes hostile, if you respond by viewing the argument as a war, you can either attack or retreat. If instead you treat it as a dance, you have another option–you can sidestep.”
And some that really made me stop and think:
“Strong leaders engage their critics and make themselves stronger. Weak leaders silence their critics and make themselves weaker”
We’ve been seeing a lot of this in the last few years and it’s going to lead to our demise unless we start being objective and subjective about things. Putin is also a great example of a whole nation silenced because they don’t agree with him and support him; a petulant child having an adult tantrum with very serious consequences. He would be a psychotherapists dream.
We need to not take things so personally–we need to separate our opinions from our identity. Too many people are taking things so personally like it’s a personal attack to their being instead of a disagreement of ideals or beliefs. I don’t know how we got like this in our country–you’re either a democrat or a republican, you’re either with me or against me. We are going to be our own demise and it’s very sad to see. Strong leaders address the duress they don’t add fuel to the fire nor do they ignore it. They are mature enough to have a conversation about it–a logical one. Not everyone needs to agree on everything and I don’t know where we went wrong and started thinking that way.
And finally:
“When we dedicate ourselves to a plan and it isn’t going as we hoped, our first instinct isn’t usually to rethink it. Instead, we tend to double down and sink more resources in the plan”
This one had me think about my life, my journey of figuring out what the hell I want to do with the years I have left. And it made me realize that we sometimes pressure ourselves to do things we think are what we are supposed to do, or steer our life in the way we think it should go. But sometimes when it feels like you’re just crashing into waves the whole time maybe, just maybe, life is telling you to let go and see where you end up. I’ve definitely been trying to do this in the last year.
I read another book after this that I really loved and aligned with this Designing-Your-Life, it’s about thinking like a designer for your life and building a life of joy. I’ll be reviewing it at some point, I’m in the middle of my 2nd read right now. Sometimes we get stuck thinking that our path has to be the one we originally thought and we’re so fixated on it that we miss the other opportunities that usually are better for us.
Overall, this book was excellent and I will go back to reread it as well. The theme I am seeing from what I’m learning is that open-mindedness and the ability to pivot and rethink ideas and beliefs are some of the strongest traits a successful person and leader could have in life.
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Life With Purpose (And Other Things) 