Notes from "Think Again"

ART of LEARNING

1. Learn to question knowledge! Inculcate an inquiry-based learning.
2. Disbelief can give a way to curiosity and eventually the awe of discovery and the joy of being wrong.
3. There’s a huge difference between learning about other people’s false beliefs and actually learning to unbelieve things ourselves.
4. Learn to think like fact-checkers: the guidelines include (1) “interrogate information instead of simply consuming it,” (2) “reject rank and popularity as a proxy for reliability,” and (3) “understand that the sender of information is often not its source.”

Organization, Culture, Learning.

1. Ultimately, 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.
2. Rethinking is not just an individual skill. It’s a collective capability, and it depends heavily on Organization culture.
3. Rethinking is more likely to happen in a learning culture, where growth is the core value and rethinking cycles are routine. In learning cultures, the norm is for people to know what they don’t know, doubt their existing practices, and stay curious about new routines to try out. Evidence shows that in learning cultures, organizations innovate more and make fewer mistakes.
4. Learning culture thrives under a particular combination of Psychological safety and accountability.
5. It appeared that psychological safety could breed complacency. When trust runs deep in a team, people might not feel the need to questions their colleagues or their own work.
6. Psychological safety is not a matter of relaxing standards, making people comfortable, being nice and agreeable, or giving unconditional praise. It’s fostering a climate of respect, trust, and openness in which people can raise concerns and suggestions without fear of reprisal. It’s the foundation of a learning culture.
7. "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 defensive.
8. Changing the culture of an entire organization is daunting, while changing the culture of a team is more feasible. It starts with modeling the values we want to promote, identifying and praising others who exemplify them, and building a coalition of colleagues who are committed to making the change.
9. The standard advice for managers on building psychological safety is to model openness and inclusiveness. Ask for feedback on how you can improve, and people will feel safe to take risks.
10. It takes confident humility to admit that we’re a work in progress. It shows that we care more about improving ourselves than proving ourselves.
11. But mindsets aren’t enough to transform a culture. Although psychological safety erases the fear of challenging authority, it doesn’t necessarily motivate us to question authority in the first place. To build a learning culture, we also need to create a specific kind of accountability—one that leads people to think again about the best practices in their workplaces.
12. 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, no longer curious about where it’s imperfect and where it could improve. Organizational learning should be an ongoing activity, but best practices imply it has reached an endpoint. We might be better off looking for better practices.
13. Exclusive praising and rewarding results is dangerous because it breeds overconfidence in poor strategies, incentivizing people to keep doing things the way they’ve always done them. It isn’t until a high-stakes decision goes horribly wrong that people pause to reexamine their practices.
14. When psychological safety exists without accountability, people tend to stay within their comfort zone, and when there’s accountability but not safety, people tend to stay silent in an anxiety zone. When we combine the two, we create a learning zone. People feel free to experiment—and to poke holes in one another’s experiments in service of making them better. They become a challenge network.
15. In learning cultures, people don’t stop keeping score. They expand the scorecard to consider processes as well as outcomes: Even if the outcome of a decision is positive, it doesn’t necessarily qualify as a success. If the process was shallow, you were lucky. If the decision process was deep, you can count it as an improvement: you’ve discovered a better practice. If the outcome is negative, it’s a failure only if the decision process was shallow. If the result was negative but you evaluated the decision thoroughly, you’ve run a smart experiment.
16. Requiring proof is an enemy of progress. This is why companies like Amazon use a principle of disagree and commit.
17. The goal in a learning culture is to welcome these kinds of experiments, to make rethinking so familiar that it becomes routine.
18. Process accountability isn’t just a matter of rewards and punishments. It’s also about who has decision authority.
19. In culture of Learning, we are not weighed down with as many questions which means we can live with fewer regrets.

Too Committed

1. 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 pattern is called escalation of commitment.
2. Escalation of commitment happens because we’re rationalizing creatures, constantly searching for self-justifications for our prior beliefs as a way to soothe our egos and shield our image and validate our past decisions.
3. Escalation of commitment is a major factor in preventable failures. Ironically, it can be fueled by one of the most celebrated engines of success: grit.
4. Grit is the combination of passion and perseverance, and research shows that it can play an important role in motivating us to accomplish long-term goals.

Career, Jobs, Relationship.

1. You can be anything you wanna be? Is a partial truth. You can be anything you’re good at?.?.?. as long as they’re hiring.”
2. Even if kids get excited about a career path that does prove realistic, what they thought was their dream job can turn out to be a nightmare. Kids might be better off learning about careers as actions to take rather than identities to claim. When they see work as what they do rather than who they are, they become more open to exploring different possibilities.
3. Our Career and jobs are not what we are, it's what we do.
4. Don't be too harsh about your career choices. Your future self doesn't exist right now, and your interest might change over time.
5. Identity foreclosure can stop us from evolving.
6. In hindsight, identity foreclosure is a Band-Aid: it covers up an identity crisis, but fails to cure it
7. In some ways, identity foreclosure is the opposite of an identity crisis: instead of accepting uncertainty about who we want to become, we develop compensatory conviction and plunge head over heels into a career path.
8. The students who are the most certain about their career plans at twenty are often the ones with the deepest regrets by thirty.
9. They haven’t done enough rethinking along the way. Sometimes it’s because they’re thinking too much like politicians, eager to earn the approval of parents and peers. They become seduced by status, failing to see that no matter how much an accomplishment or affiliation impresses someone else, it’s still a poor choice if it depresses them. In other cases it’s because they’re stuck in preacher mode, and they’ve come to see a job as a sacred cause. And occasionally they pick careers in prosecutor mode, where they charge classmates with selling their souls to capitalism and hurl themselves into nonprofits in the hopes of saving the world.
10. They often know too little about the job—and too little about their evolving selves—to make a lifelong commitment. They get trapped in an overconfidence cycle, taking pride in pursuing a career identity and surrounding themselves with people who validate their conviction. By the time they discover it was the wrong fit, they feel it’s too late to think again. The stakes seem too high to walk away; the sacrifices of salary, status, skill, and time seem too great.
11. It’s better to lose the past two years of progress than to waste the next twenty.
12. Put a reminder on your calendars to ask some key questions twice a year. When did you form the aspirations you’re currently pursuing, and how have you changed since then? Have you reached a learning plateau in your role or your workplace, and is it time to consider a pivot? Answering these career checkup questions is a way to periodically activate rethinking cycles.
13. It would help you maintain humility about their ability to predict the future, contemplate doubts about their plans, and stay curious enough to discover new possibilities or reconsider previously discarded ones.
14. When making a career choice, think like a scientist:
15. A first step is to entertain possible selves: identify some people you admire within or outside your field, and observe what they actually do at work day by day. A second step is to develop hypotheses about how these paths might align with your own interests, skills, and values. A third step is to test out the different identities by running experiments: do informational interviews, job shadowing, and sample projects to get a taste of the work. The goal is not to confirm a particular plan but to expand your repertoire of possible selves—which keeps you open to rethinking.
16. Checkups aren’t limited to careers—they’re relevant to the plans we make in every domain of our lives.
17. A successful relationship requires regular rethinking. Sometimes being considerate means reconsidering something as simple as our habits. Learning not to be fashionably late to everything. Retiring that wardrobe of ratty conference T-shirts. Rolling over to snore in the other direction. At other times being supportive means opening our minds to bigger life changes—moving to a different country, a different community, or a different job to support our partner’s priorities.
18. When we’re willing to update our ideas of who our partners are, it can give them freedom to evolve and our relationships room to grow.
19. Whether we do checkups with our partners, our parents, or our mentors, it’s worth pausing once or twice a year to reflect on how our aspirations have changed.
20. As we identify past images of our lives that are no longer relevant to our future, we can start to rethink our plans. That can set us up for happiness—as long as we’re not too fixated on finding it.

Happiness- A Conundrum

1. When we think about how to plan our lives, there are few things that take priority over happiness.
2. Psychologists find that the more people value happiness, the less happy they often become with their lives. It’s true for people who naturally care about happiness and for people who are randomly assigned to reflect on why happiness matters. There’s even evidence that placing a great deal of importance on happiness is a risk factor for depression. Why?
3. One possibility is that when we’re searching for happiness, we get too busy evaluating life to actually experience it. Instead of savoring our moments of joy, we ruminate about why our lives aren’t more joyful. A second likely culprit is that 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. A third potential factor is that when we hunt for happiness, we overemphasize pleasure at the expense of purpose. This theory is consistent with data suggesting that meaning is healthier than happiness, and that people who look for purpose in their work are more successful in pursuing their passions—and less likely to quit their jobs—than those who look for joy.
4. While enjoyment waxes and wanes, meaning tends to last.
5. The Western conceptions of happiness as an individual state leave us feeling lonely. In more collectivistic Eastern cultures, that pattern is reversed: pursuing happiness predicts higher well-being, because people prioritize social engagement over independent activities.
6. When we pursue happiness, we often start by changing our surroundings. We expect to find bliss in a warmer climate or a friendlier dorm, but any joy that those choices bring about is typically temporary.
7. Our happiness often depends more on what we do than where we are. It’s our actions—not our surroundings—that bring us meaning and belonging.
8. Think of Happiness less as a goal and more as a by-product of mastery and meaning. Those only are happy who have their minds fixed on some object other than their own happiness; on the happiness of others, on the improvement of mankind, even on some art or pursuit, followed not as a means, but as itself an ideal end. Aiming thus at something else, they find happiness by the way.”?
9. Careers, relationships, and communities are examples of what scientists call open systems—they’re constantly in flux because they’re not closed off from the environments around them. We know that open systems are governed by at least two key principles: there are always multiple paths to the same end (equifinality), and the same starting point can be a path to many different ends (multifinality). We should be careful to avoid getting too attached to a particular route or even a particular destination. There isn’t one definition of success or one track to happiness.
10. At work and in life, the best we can do is plan for what we want to learn and contribute over the next year or two, and stay open to what might come next. Writing out a plan for your life “is like driving at night in the fog. You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.
11. Our identities are open systems, and so are our lives. We don’t have to stay tethered to old images of where we want to go or who we want to be. The simplest way to start rethinking our options is to question what we do daily.
12. It takes humility to reconsider our past commitments, doubt to question our present decisions, and curiosity to reimagine our future plans.?