The Scout Mindset summary

The short answer to that question – why do people adopt a soldier mindset in the first place – is that it comes with benefits. A soldier mindset has benefits. Some of those benefits are social. Others are emotional. We’ll get to the emotional ones in a moment. But, for now, let’s start with what might be the biggest social benefit: belonging.

Imagine for a moment that you’re part of a tight-knit religious community. Now imagine you lose your faith. In this community, losing your faith doesn’t just mean losing your faith, at least not if you publicly announce that you’re no longer a believer. It could mean losing your marriage, losing your family, your friends. It could mean losing your entire community.

No one likes to be wrong. You could even say that that’s what the soldier mindset is all about: preventing you from having to face the uncomfortable feeling of having been, or of still being, wrong. If you refuse to back down on your beliefs; if you refuse to consider other versions of reality; if, in other words, you always insist that you’re right – then you may never have to confront the possibility that you’re wrong. Scouts go about things differently. They believe that the best way to be right – not just to feel right, or to believe that you’re right, but to actually be in possession of an accurate picture of objective reality – is to get good at being wrong.

Now, being good at being wrong doesn’t mean that being wrong is the goal. The goal is to be right: to be in possession of that accurate picture. But scouts, unlike soldiers, regard being wrong as an important step on the path to being right.

So scouts believe that being wrong is an important step on the path to being right. But that raises an important question: How can you get better at being wrong? 

The first step is learning to admit when you’re wrong. Admitting when you’re wrong is a kind of exercise: it’ll strengthen your ability to spot when you’re wrong, which, as you know, will improve your ability to get things right. Some of the titans of history seemed to know this. Abraham Lincoln, for example, would even go out of his way to admit mistakes. Here’s just one example: It’s May of 1863 – the middle of the American Civil War – and General Ulysses S. Grant has captured Vicksburg from the Confederates. Lincoln wrote to congratulate Grant on his victory – and, in his letter, he made an admission. See, Lincoln had believed that Grant’s plan would fail. But rather than remaining silent on this point, he admitted his mistake, writing, “I now wish to make the personal acknowledgment that you were right and I was wrong.”

Everyone looks at the world through a particular lens. Dr. Brookshire, from the last blink, was on the lookout for evidence of gender bias in the sciences – so it’s little wonder that gender bias is what she saw. The author, Julia Galef, had a similar experience. While conducting research for The Scout Mindset, she was, quite understandably, on the lookout for evidence that supported her thesis: that the scout mindset is superior to the soldier mindset. 

During this research phase, she came across a paper claiming that having a soldier mindset leads to success. She immediately dismissed it as nonsense. She checked the paper’s methodology, and, yes indeed, it was flawed. But then she had a thought: What if the paper had made the opposite argument? What if it’d said that the soldier mindset sets people up for failure? She realized she’d probably have cited the research in her book. 

By now, you’ve probably figured out that having a scout mindset is hard. The soldiers of the world enjoy benefits that scouts have to be ready to give up. And it’s not like admitting your mistakes and proving yourself wrong is fun – at least not all the time. So, in this blink, we’ll be exploring a technique for making it easier to be a scout. 

It has to do with identity.