Persuadable: How Great Leaders Change Their Minds to Change the World

Go out of your way and try to disprove your own favored belief. If you succeed, then you know that you can discard the belief. If you fail, then you can be more confident that your belief is the right one. If the exercise proves inconclusive, and it often will, you can wait for more evidence, knowing that you’ve done your duty for now.

Knowing that his own perspective was fundamentally biased, he wrote: “The greatest deception men suffer is from their own opinions.” Da Vinci took the idea of looking at his own work from different perspectives quite literally, advising: “We know well that mistakes are more easily detected in the works of others than in one’s own. When you are pain

opposing tribes who disagree on particular issues grow even further apart—severely

that it’s our beliefs about the facts, rather than the facts themselves, that produce anxiety.

Abraham Lincoln, admired his always developing, flexible brand of leadership: Lincoln “was perhaps the greatest figure of the nineteenth century.” He was to be admired “not because he was perfect but because he was not and yet he triumphed. . . . Out of his contradictions and inconsistencies he fought his way to the pinnacles of the earth and his f

The second clue you should be on the lookout for is confusion.

Two: the world will almost certainly pull you in the direction against your own genius. “Society, everywhere is in conspiracy against the manhood of every one of its members,” he laments. Emerson makes it clear that in the face of societal pressure, we will be tempted to ignore our own genius and instead conform to the current norms and standards d

“If you’re building a brand you have to listen to the critics, and we have.”31

consider going one step further, and beyond changing your own mind, focus on actively persuading those with whom we have the most influence—our own tribes.