Your Story: Humility, curiosity, openness: how to succeed in life by rethinking and unlearning

Adam Grant is an organisational psychologist at Wharton. An influential management thinker, his earlier books include Originals. His latest book is thoroughly researched with over 15 pages of references citing 250 sources. “Intelligence is traditionally viewed as the ability to think and learn. Yet in a turbulent world, there’s another set of cognitive skills that might matter more: the ability to rethink and unlearn,” Adam begins. But a number of biases and barriers come in the way, such as confirmation bias, desirability bias, binary bias, first instinct fallacy, cognitive laziness, escalation of commitment, and sunken costs. Discarding assumptions, habits and instincts is tough because they constitute a part of our identity. “We favour the comfort of conviction over the discomfort of doubt,” Adam writes. Read more at Your Story.