The Scout Mindset: Why Some People See Things Clearly and Others Don't

We all start out with wildly incorrect maps, and over time, as we get more information, we make them somewhat more accurate. Revising your map is a sign you’re doing things right.

Venture capitalist Ben Horowitz argues, in The Hard Thing About Hard Things, that there’s no point in thinking about your odds of success when building a company. “When you are building a company, you must believe there is an answer and you cannot pay attention to your odds of finding it. You just have to find it,” he writes. “It matters not whethe

Striving for an accurate map means being aware of the limits of your understanding, keeping track of the regions of your map that are especially sketchy or possibly wrong. And it means always being open to changing your mind in response to new information. In scout mindset, there’s no such thing as a “threat” to your beliefs. If you find out you we

This is the biggest problem with the self-belief approach to motivation. Because you’re not supposed to think realistically about risk, it becomes impossible to ask yourself questions like, “Is this goal desirable enough to be worth the risk?” and “Are there any other goals that would be similarly desirable but require less risk?” It implicitly ass

Being in scout mindset means wanting your “map”—your perception of yourself and the world—to be as accurate as possible.

Intelligence and knowledge are just tools. You can use those tools to help you see the world clearly, if that’s what you’re motivated to do. Or you can use them to defend a particular viewpoint, if you’re motivated to do that instead.

To be willing to consider other interpretations—to even believe that there could be other reasonable interpretations besides your own—requires scout mindset.

the fact that soldier mindset is often our default strategy for getting what we want doesn’t necessarily mean it’s a good strategy. For one thing, it can backfire. In “Persuasion,” we saw that law students who are randomly assigned to one side of a moot court case become confident, after reading the case materials, that their side is morally and le

Instead of being motivated by the promise of guaranteed success, a scout is motivated by the knowledge that they’re making a smart bet, which they can feel good about having made whether or not it succeeds. Even if a particular bet has a low probability of success, they know that their overall probability of success in the long run is much higher,