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Blink 3 of 8 - The 5 AM Club
by Robin Sharma
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Think Again summary
Adam Grant
The Power of Knowing What You Don't Know
22 mins
Table of Contents
Think Again
Summary of 7 key ideas
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Key idea 1 of 7
In a constantly changing world, it pays to change your mind.
In 2009, Blackberry smartphones were riding high. The company controlled almost 50 percent of the smartphone market, and everyone from Bill Gates, to President Obama, to Oprah, declared that they couldn’t live without their Blackberries. But just five years later, the company’s market share had nosedived to just 1 percent.
Why? Because Blackberry’s inventor, Mike Lazaridis, wouldn’t change his mind.
As Apple’s iPhone was released in 2007 and began to gain market share, Lazaridis continued to believe that most consumers would only want a device that could make calls and send and receive emails. He simply couldn’t imagine a world in which people wanted more than what a Blackberry could do.
The key message here is: In a constantly changing world, it pays to change your mind.
But before you rush to judge Mike Lazaridis, consider that you might have made exactly the same mistake.
Whether you’re a business leader or an entrepreneur, you probably pride yourself on sticking to your guns and staying true to what you believe in.
But the problem with sticking to your guns is that the world is now changing faster than ever before, and access to information is increasing faster, too. Just consider this: in 2011, the average person consumed five times the amount of information, each day, as the average person did in 1986.
This frenetic pace of change means that knowing how to think isn’t enough anymore. You also need to know how to rethink, so that you can integrate new information into your belief systems and strategies.
Ok, but how do you do that? A great place to start is to train yourself to think like a scientist.
Scientists are always curious about what they don’t know, and they’re constantly adapting their views to fit with incoming data. Scientists don’t begin with answers but with questions. They carefully test their theories and rely on evidence, not intuition.
If you’re a business leader, you can think more like a scientist by viewing your business strategy as a theory that you need to test. A study on Italian startups found that founders who thought about their businesses scientifically gained more revenue and more customers than founders who didn’t. The researchers concluded that the scientifically-minded leaders had more success because they were more likely to pivot and adjust their business models when things started going wrong.
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What is Think Again about?
Think Again (2021) examines the science behind changing your mind – and persuading others to change theirs. It explores the biases and assumptions that we bring to our decision-making, and outlines how individuals and organizations can build a mindset of lifelong curiosity.
Best quote from Think Again
We learn more from people who challenge our thought process than those who affirm our conclusions.
—Adam Grant
Who should read Think Again?
- Psychology buffs looking for fresh insights
- Sales professionals seeking a new angle
- People managers hoping to improve team performance
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