Yet in a turbulent world, there’s another set of cognitive skills that might matter more: the ability to rethink and unlearn.
The more successful people have been in the past, the worse they perform when they enter a new environment.
Grit is the combination of passion and perseverance.
In the words of Google executives Eric Schmidt and Jonathan Rosenberg, “Passionate people don’t wear their passion on their sleeves; they have it in their hearts.
Ultimately, the people who choose to champion originality are the ones who propel us forward. After spending years studying them and interacting with them, I am struck that their inner experiences are not any different from our own. They feel the same fear, the same doubt, as the rest of us. What sets them apart is that they take action anyway. They know in their hearts that failing would yield less regret than failing to try.
It shows that we care more about improving ourselves than proving ourselves.
If you want to be original, “the most important possible thing you could do,” says Ira Glass, the producer of This American Life and the podcast Serial, “is do a lot of work. Do a huge volume of work.
Conformity means following the crowd down conventional paths and maintaining the status quo. Originality is taking the road less traveled, championing a set of novel ideas that go against the grain but ultimately make things better.
Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it,” philosopher George Santayana.
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.
Confident humility doesn’t just open our minds to rethinking – it improves the quality of our rethinking.
Agreeable people make for a great support network: they’re excited to encourage us and cheerlead for us. Rethinking depends on a different kind of network: a challenge network, a group of people we trust to point out our blind spots and help us overcome our weaknesses. Their role is to activate rethinking cycles by pushing us to be humble about our expertise, doubt our knowledge, and be curious about new perspectives.
What works is not perspective-taking but perspective-seeking: actually talking to people to gain insight into the nuances of their views. That’s what good scientists do: instead of drawing conclusions about people based on minimal clues, they test their hypotheses by striking up conversations.
What stands in the way of rethinking isn’t the expression of emotion; it’s a restricted range of emotion.
When we lack the knowledge and skills to achieve excellence, we sometimes lack the knowledge and skills to judge excellence.
If you’re a scientist by trade, rethinking is fundamental to your profession. You’re paid to be constantly aware of the limits of your understanding. You’re expected to doubt what you know, be curious about what you don’t know, and update your views based on new data.
Disagreeable people tend to be more critical, skeptical, and challenging – and they’re more likely than their peers to become engineers and lawyers. They’re not just comfortable with conflict; it energizes them. If you’re highly disagreeable, you might be happier in an argument than in a friendly conversation.
One of the keys to cultivating grit is making the task at hand more interesting and motivating.
In the moral philosophy of John Rawls, the veil of ignorance asks us to judge the justice of a society by whether we’d join it without knowing our place in it. I think the scientist’s veil of ignorance is to ask whether we’d accept the results of a study based on the methods involved, without knowing what the conclusion will be.
What look like differences in natural ability are often differences in opportunity and motivation.
The Tennessee experiment contained a startling result. Chetty was able to predict the success that students achieved as adults simply by looking at who taught their kindergarten class. By age 25, students who happened to have had more experienced kindergarten teachers were earning significantly more money than their peers.