This is our final look at Think Again. Next month we’re reading The Siren’s Call which is all about attention. If you’re not signed up to get the book club emails in your inbox, it’s free. Subscribers get a weekly post about the book for the month.

I first read Think Again in 2022 and was immediately struck with how crucial it was to be willing to say you’re wrong and forge a new path forward. This wasn’t my first encounter with the idea that I needed to fess up to my mistakes.

Years ago I took on a project at work and royally messed it up, taking over a year to deliver something I said I could deliver in 8 weeks. I was very lucky that I had worked with the customer for years prior and they had seen that I shipped work on time. I was very lucky that they took the time to ask what happened and when I told them the truth, that I had screwed up and just done a bad job at running my business for the last year, they signed a small maintenance contract I worked on without issues for the next 5 years.

At the time admitting that the problem was entirely mine, saying I wouldn’t blame them if they wanted to use a new contractor and that they had a stellar reference from me as a customer was heart-poundingly frightening. I had spent a year messing up and I was on my last dollars figuring out how to pay the bills and keep my kids eating food. My youngest was about a year old and then I had two others at 2 and 6. We were living in a dump because that was all I could afford.

I needed the money from any work that I could get.

While Adam Grant isn’t quite talking about being honest with customers, there are many similarities between my experience and his writing.

Arrogance leaves us blind to our weaknesses. – Think Again Pg 54

I could have tried to lie to my customer and bluff my way through the uncomfortable situation trying to make it his fault for a few slow email replies. Instead admitting my weakness put food on the table until I was able to recover from bad decisions and almost a decade later have the thriving business I have today.

Every time we encounter new information, we have a choice. We can attach our opinions to our identities and stand our ground in the stubbornness of preaching and prosecuting. Or we can operate more like scientists, defining ourselves as people committed to the pursuit of truth – even if it means proving our own views wrong. – Think Again Pg 76

Reading this book a second time, in the midst of a world that seems to prize doubling down as your decisions turn the world to shit around you, is a strong reminder that the people around us we see backtrack in the face of new information are the ones we should be championing. It takes far more strength of character to admit that you’re wrong and then take the steps to correct your mistake than to double down on convincing people that whatever is bad is someone else’s fault while all your ideas are like golden eggs laid from the proverbial goose.

Knowing that we should value rethinking is why I question cancel culture. We’ve all said things that are stupid, we just haven’t all said them in a forum that never forgets like the internet. I’m a vastly different person than I was 10 years ago, I hope I’ve grown in the last year even.

I highly recommend Think Again by Adam Grant and will likely read it again in the future because I don’t think you can spend enough time evaluating if your ideas are on solid footing.

I hope you’ll spend as much time looking at your ideas as you do critiquing those around you.