Author: Adam Grant
Genre: self-help book
Publication date: 2 February 2021
Publisher: Penguin Random House
Number of pages: 307 pages
I remember that I was stunned by what Bill Gates said on a Netflix show titled “Inside Bill’s Brain” where he said the most terrifying thing for him is if his brain no longer works. This book successfully makes me aware why thinking matters and how come someone as inspired as Bill Gates feels scared if he cannot think anymore.
In this book, Adam Grant, an organizational psychologist at The Wharton School, covers rethinking in terms of individual, interpersonal, and collective. He explains how important thinking, unlearning, and rethinking as mindset tools that help us be updated in the fast-moving world. Think Again brings academic research into unexpected realization completed with a package of valuable solutions.
As an individual, Adam delivers a smart analogy of each of us easily becoming a preacher, prosecutor, and politician at once when we defend our belief and being close-minded to recent improvement. It is hard and even humiliating for us to act as a scientist by unlearning our stance and rethinking our conviction.
Adam Grant states the danger of confidence to ourselves. He suggests that we have to keep confidence in balance, in this book called confidence humility where we should believe in ourselves but keep in mind that we don’t have the solution to every issue. Overconfidence might lead us to overjudge our expertise while lack of confidence leads to impostor syndrome. However, Adam believes that exploitation of our impostor syndrome motivates us to be great learners. A noble intellect preserves hesitancy so they always have space for more questions to ask and more knowledge to learn.
At a glance of reading the title of this book, we might be mumbled to ourselves “well, my smart friend doesn’t need this book. They think really well, why bother reading a book about thinking.” Well, again, as this book offers, beware of your confidence because Adam tells the backstory of why intelligent people are suggested as people who have a propensity to be hard at rethinking. They are so good at pattern identification which makes them become stereotypers and they are expert preachers, prosecutors, and politicians to defend their intelligence.
It takes us humility to reconsider our past commitment, doubt to question our present decisions, and curiosity to reimagine our future plans. Rethinking liberates us to do more than update our knowledge and opinions – it’s a tool for leading a more fulfilling life
Adam Grant
We tend to see the phenomena surrounding us as black and white and prefer to stand only on one of the side, which is called binary bias. We have to be perspective-seekers to improve our perspectives and widen our spectrum. It is recommended to be a skeptic and keep questioning how does it happens and have a scientific basic as our mindset.
This book suggests the readers to keep applying rethinking in lifetime. People who don’t really know what they want to be in their early age, prone to rethink, and update their work and self and ready for various possibilities. Rethinking open us to evolve alongside the world and society demands and prevent us from having identity crisis.
There are a lot of points in this book that I can relate to. I find that many of my peers left their identity in the 2020 Indonesia presidential election where we were inclined to choose one of the presidential candidates with the kind of ideology that they spread at the moment of campaign. Most Indonesians were polarized and more likely gathered and shared stance with people with the similar ideology. Now, both presidential candidates and parties are joining and running the government, even personally I feel like we don’t have any opposition to challenge the government. But, still, some of us remain polarized and even being hateful to the other side. Without thinking that politicians have a flexible maneuver to keep up with their interest, we let the politicians define our identity and hinder us from rethinking. Most of us don’t enjoy the mistake and are in denial to hunt for the correct value in the long run. Thus, this book is a perfect knocker for our mind to be a consistent thinker, keep asking our present-world, and revisualize a lot of path for our future-self.
