Think Again: The Power of Knowing What You Don't Know

JACK OF ROUGH DRAFTS, MASTER OF CRAFTS When I asked a handful of education pioneers to name the best teacher of rethinking they’ve ever encountered, I kept hearing the same name: Ron Berger.

grit. Grit is the combination of passion and perseverance,

As we think and talk, we often slip into the mindsets of three different professions:13 preachers, prosecutors, and politicians. In each of these modes, we take on a particular identity and use a distinct set of tools. We go into preacher mode when our sacred beliefs are in jeopardy: we deliver sermons to protect and promote our ideals. We enter pr

focused less on why different solutions would succeed or fail, and more on how those solutions might work.

We fall victim to the fat-cat syndrome,32 resting on our laurels instead of pressure-testing our beliefs.

health care, or nuclear sanctions, they often doubled down on their convictions. Asking people to explain how those policies would work in practice—or how they’d explain them to an expert—activated a rethinking cycle.

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Experiments show that simply framing a dispute as a debate rather than as a disagreement signals that you’re receptive to considering dissenting opinions and changing your mind,39 which in turn motivates the other person to share more information with you.

He said that in his eighty-five years, no one had pointed that out before, but yes, he genuinely enjoys discovering that he was wrong, because it means he is now less wrong than before.