The “I’m not biased” bias is when “people believe they’re more objective than others. It turns out that smart people are more likely to fall into this trap. The brighter you are, the harder it can be to see your own limitations. Being good at thinking can make you worse at rethinking” (pg. 25).
“The purpose of learning isn’t to affirm our beliefs; it’s to evolve our beliefs” (pg 26).
“Recognizing our shortcomings opens the door to doubt . . . if knowledge is power, knowing what we don’t know is wisdom” (pg. 28) and “The curse of knowledge is that it closes our minds to what we don’t know” (pg 31).
Dunning-Kruger effect: “those who can’t . . . don’t know they can’t . . . the less intelligent we are in a particular domain, the more we seem to overestimate our actual intelligence in that domain . . .the first rule of the Dunning-Kruger club is you don’t know you’re a member of the Dunning-Kruger club” (pg 40).
“Arrogance is ignorance plus conviction,” blogger Tim Urban explains. “While humility is a permeable filter that absorbs life experience and converts it into knowledge and wisdom, arrogance is a rubber shield that life experience simply bounces off of” (pg 45).
“If we care about accuracy, we can’t afford to have blind spots. To get an accurate picture of our knowledge and skills, it can help to assess ourselves like scientists looking through a microscope. But one of my newly formed beliefs is that we’re sometimes better off underestimating ourselves” (pg 48).
“If we never worry about letting other people down, we’re more likely to actually do so. When we feel like impostors, we think we have something to prove. Impostors may be the last to jump in, but they may also be the last to bail out” (pg 52).
“We don’t have to wait for our confidence to rise to achieve challenging goals. We can build it through achieving challenging goals” (pg 53).
“Great thinkers don’t harbor doubts because they’re imposters. They maintain doubts because they know we’re all partially blind and they’re committed to improve their sight. They don’t boast about how much they know, they marvel at how little they understand . . .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” (pg 54).
Ideas survive not because they’re true, but because they’re interesting (pg 59).
Givers have higher rates of failure than takers and matchers - but higher rates of success too (pg 61).
“Being wrong is the only way I feel sure I’ve learned anything” (pg 62).
“The best performers are the ones who started their jobs believe their work would have a positive impact on others . . . givers would (therefore) be more successful than takers, because they would be energized by the difference their actions made in others’ lives” (pg 62).
“Even positive changes can lead to negative emotions; evolving your identity can leave you feeling derailed and disconnected” (pg 63).
“If you don’t look back at yourself and think, ‘Wow, how stupid I was a year ago,’ then you must not have learned much in the last year” (pg. 63).
“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” (pg 68).
“If we’re insecure, we make fun of others. If we’re comfortable being wrong, we’re not afraid to poke fun at ourselves” (pg 72).
“The apathy of conflict is not harmony, it’s apathy” (pg 80).
“Dissatisfaction promotes creativity only when people feel committed and supported - and that cultural misfits are most likely to add value when they have strong bonds with their colleagues” (pg 84).
“Most people immediately start with a straw man, poking holes in the weakest version of the other side’s case. He does the reverse: he considers the strongest version of their case, which is known as the steel man” (pg 108).
“A single line of argument feels like a conversation; multiple lines of argument can become an onslaught” (pg 111).
“It’s a rare person who wants to hear what he doesn’t want to hear” (pg 143).
“Presenting two extremes isn’t the solution; it’s part of the polarization problem. 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” (pg 165).
“Perspective-taking consistently fails because we’re terrible mind readers. We’re just guessing . . . What works is not perspective-guessing but perspective-seeking: actually talking to people to gain insight into the nuances of their vies” (pg 178).
“It turns out that even if we disagree strong with someone on a social issue, when we discover that she cares deeply about an issue, we trust her more. We might still dislike her, but we see her passion for a principle as a sign of integrity. We reject the belief but grow to respect the person behind it” (pg 179).
“If you spend all of your school years being fed information and are never given the opportunity to question it, you won’t develop the tools for rethinking that you need in life” (pg 193).
“Every year I would aim to throw out 20 percent of my class and replace it with new material. If I was doing new thinking every year, we would all start rethinking together” (pg 195).
“Good teachers introduce new thoughts, but great teachers introduce new ways of teaching” (pg 203).
“Education is more than the information we accumulate in our heads. It’s the habits we develop as we keep revising our drafts and the skills we build to keep learning” (pg 203).
“It takes confident humility to admit that we are a work in progress” (pg 215).
“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. We preach about its virtues and stop questioning its vices” (pg 216).
“A bad decision process is based on shallow thinking. A good process is grounded in deep thinking and rethinking, enabling people to form and express independent opinions” (pg 217).
“The more people value happiness, the less happy they often become with their lives” (pg 237).
“When we’re searching for happiness, we get too busy evaluating life to actually experience it . . . we spend too much time striving for peak happiness, overlooking the fact that happiness depends more on the frequency of positive emotions than their intensity . . . when we hunt for happiness, we overemphasize pleasure at the expense of purpose” (pg 238).
People who are happy don’t focus on being happy, they look for contribution and connection (pg 240).
Grade: A
Adam Grant is one of my favorites.
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