Thinking, Re-Thinking, and the Power of Knowing What You Don’t Know

One thing I’ve learned from reading more than 1,000 books is that life and the world are really, really complicated. Reality resists easy answers, sound bites and bullet points, and that’s why books like Think Again are so important.

It’s an argument for appreciating complexity, nuance, and the fact that getting to the right answer isn’t something that just “happens.” And it’s certainly not usually the first answer that we settle on.

What’s more, being wrong feels exactly the same in the mind as being right!

There’s rarely one single answer to any complicated question or nuanced situation that we’re likely to encounter in life. For instance, is milk good or bad?

I rest my case.

But seriously, even for touchier issues — especially so for these — getting to the right answer is going to require collaborative work over a sustained period of time, which is going to necessitate constantly questioning our assumptions and received opinions, not to mention working with others to share knowledge, gain access to wider perspectives, and challenge our own ideas.

This is really hard to do. Which is probably why it’s so rare. It’s so much easier to think once, act once, where what Grant argues for instead is a…