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Ch. 1: Think Again by Adam Grant

Please use this thread to discuss the above chapter.

The book starts off with titanium cojones, but switches immediately to academic psychology. It quickly returns to cojones titania so I think this will be a good read.

Ooh. I will start shortly.

Page 1. A team of smoke jumpers in Montana parachute in to put out a fire, but get trapped by thirty foot flames and have to work out how they can escape in a situation of life or death choice.

I have the opportunity to obtain this book in audio format at no cost to me (important for someone on a fixed income). Do you think I could understand it enough to join the forum? It sounds really interesting, and I would like to participate.

Cattleman wrote:I have the opportunity to obtain this book in audio format at no cost to me (important for someone on a fixed income). Do you think I could understand it enough to join the forum? It sounds really interesting, and I would like to participate.

Yes please. Adam Grant writes very clearly, conveying new ideas quite simply.

I just listened to the summary of the book on Blinkest.com and will order the book. I liked the part about "binary bias" an how everything isn't black and white.

Page 2 introduces the concept of ‘mental fitness’, defined in terms of ability to rethink and unlearn, rather than just intelligence. After the team got trapped by the fire, the leader lit a small grass fire and lay on the ground on the burnt ground with a wet handkerchief over his mouth. His team thought he had gone crazy and just kept running. The big fire burnt around him. He survived while most of the others were burnt to death. His mental agility enabled him to innovate to survive.

Robert Tulip wrote:Page 2 introduces the concept of ‘mental fitness’, defined in terms of ability to rethink and unlearn, rather than just intelligence. After the team got trapped by the fire, the leader lit a small grass fire and lay on the ground on the burnt ground with a wet handkerchief over his mouth. His team thought he had gone crazy and just kept running. The big fire burnt around him. He survived while most of the others were burnt to death. His mental agility enabled him to innovate to survive.

I have read this far (only) but already have been drawn in to this book by this story. Everyday I see the same unfortunate results as the majority of the team in this story suffered. The inability to overcome either what folks think they know, refuse to break free from what they believe or to break free from established norms or groupthink. The denial of doing something different for fear of the unknown. And the eventual deterioration of results. Just had a convo Friday where someone blatantly admitted that they were afraid to try something new that was coming down the pike for our organization. Something that I know first hand will be a positive in the long run.

Intelligence has its value, but having the ability to unlearn/relearn is imperative to achieving true knowledge. To me, that's what a freethinking and rational thought approach to life has always been about.

Page 3 is about the first-instinct fallacy. Students get told that changing answers in exams is more likely to introduce mistakes. That is wrong. Studies show that most test revisions (from eraser marks in multiple choice exams) change the answer from wrong to right.

It is a problem that people are reluctant to check their work based on this fallacy, and instead prefer to run with the gut. Overcoming such foolish caution through a willingness to think again is a theme of the book.

This is a great example of evidence versus emotion, rather like how people remember the emotion of gambling wins and forget the evidence of their more frequent losses. After exams, people remember the incidents when they changed an answer from right to wrong, but forget the far more numerous instances where they correct an initial error.

The psychology of imprinting on memory is far stronger when we do something that gets hormones running, which occurs with the embarrassment of introducing a mistake. That experience tends to make us more conservative and unwilling to change or innovate, when we would be better off having the flexibility and courage to constantly review whether our views are correct.