Rethinking (Think Again)

Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Meaning

Adam Grant reflects on careers and rethinking in these passages from Think Again. Personal updates and descriptions of research reflect the book’s publication context.

To be clear, I wouldn’t encourage anyone to stay in a role, relationship, or place they hated unless they had no other alternatives. Still, when it comes to careers, instead of searching for the job where we’ll be happiest, we might be better off pursuing the job where we expect to learn and contribute the most.

Psychologists find that passions are often developed, not discovered. In a study of entrepreneurs, the more effort they put into their startups, the more their enthusiasm about their businesses climbed each week. Their passion grew as they gained momentum and mastery. Interest doesn’t always lead to effort and skill; sometimes it follows them. By investing in learning and problem solving, we can develop our passions—and build the skills necessary to do the work and lead the lives we find worthwhile.

As we get older, we become more focused on searching for meaning—and we’re most likely to find it in actions that benefit others. My favorite test of meaningful work is to ask: if this job didn’t exist, how much worse off would people be? It’s near midlife that this question often begins to loom large. At around this time, in both work and life, we feel we have more to give (and less to lose), and we’re especially keen to share our knowledge and skills with the next generation.

When my students talk about the evolution of self-esteem in their careers, the progression often goes something like this:

Phase 1: I’m not important

Phase 2: I’m important

Phase 3: I want to contribute to something important

I’ve noticed that the sooner they get to phase 3, the more impact they have and the more happiness they experience. It’s left me thinking about happiness less as a goal and more as a by-product of mastery and meaning. “Those only are happy,” philosopher John Stuart Mill wrote, “who have their minds fixed on some object other than their own happiness; on the happiness of others, on the improvement of mankind, even on some art or pursuit, followed not as a means, but as itself an ideal end. Aiming thus at something else, they find happiness by the way.”

Careers, relationships, and communities are examples of what scientists call open systems—they’re constantly in flux because they’re not closed off from the environments around them. Open systems can exhibit equifinality—different paths reaching the same outcome—and multifinality—the same starting point leading to different outcomes. We should be careful to avoid getting too attached to a particular route or even a particular destination. There isn’t one definition of success or one track to happiness.

My cousin Ryan finally wound up rethinking his career arc. Five years into his neurosurgery residency, he did his own version of a career checkup and decided to scratch his entrepreneurial itch. He cofounded a fast-growing, venture-backed startup called Nomad Health, which creates a marketplace to match clinicians with medical facilities. He also advised several medical device startups, filed medical device patents, and is now working on multiple startups to improve health care. Looking back, he still regrets that he foreclosed so early on an identity as a neurosurgeon and escalated his commitment to that career.

At work and in life, the best we can do is plan for what we want to learn and contribute over the next year or two, and stay open to what might come next. To adapt an analogy from E. L. Doctorow, writing out a plan for your life “is like driving at night in the fog. You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.”

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We don’t have to upend our entire paths to rethink some of our plans. Some people are perfectly content with their fields of work but dissatisfied with their current roles. Others may be too risk averse to make a geographic move for a job or a partner. And many don’t have the luxury of making a pivot: being economically dependent on a job or emotionally attached to an extended family can limit the options available. Whether or not we have the opportunity or appetite for major changes in our lives, it’s still possible to make smaller adjustments that breathe new meaning into our days.

My colleagues Amy Wrzesniewski and Jane Dutton find that in every line of work, there are people who become active architects of their own jobs. They rethink their roles through job crafting—changing their daily actions to better fit their values, interests, and skills. One of the places Amy and Jane studied job crafting was in the University of Michigan health-care system.

If you visited a certain floor of the hospital, it wouldn’t be long before cancer patients told you how grateful they were for Candice Walker. Her mission was not only to protect their fragile immune systems—it was also to care for their fragile emotions. She called the chemotherapy center the House of Hope.

Candice was often the first one to console families when their loved ones went through treatment; she showed up with bagels and coffee. She would make patients laugh by telling stories about her cats drinking her milk or showing them that she had accidentally put on one brown sock and one blue sock. One day she saw a patient on the floor of an elevator writhing in pain, and the staff members nearby weren’t sure what to do. Candice immediately took charge, rushed the woman into a wheelchair, and took her up in the elevator for urgent treatment. The patient later called her “my savior.”

Candice Walker wasn’t a doctor or a nurse. She wasn’t a social worker, either. She was a custodian. Her official job was to keep the cancer center clean.

Candice and her fellow custodians were all hired to do the same job, but some of them ended up rethinking their roles. One cleaner on a long-term intensive care unit took it upon herself to regularly rearrange the paintings on the walls, hoping that a change of scenery might spark some awareness among patients in comas. When asked about it, she said, “ No, it’s not part of my job, but it’s part of me.”

Our identities are open systems, and so are our lives. We don’t have to stay tethered to old images of where we want to go or who we want to be. The simplest way to start rethinking our options is to question what we do daily.

Humility helps us reconsider past commitments, doubt prompts us to question present decisions, and curiosity opens up future possibilities. Revisiting what we do daily can reveal a change worth making, even when a larger move is out of reach.

Epilogue

“ What I believe” is a process rather than a finality.

—Emma Goldman

When reading fiction, my favorite part has always been the conclusion. As long as I can remember, whether I was devouring sci-fi like Ender’s Game or mystery like The Westing Game, the twist at the end wasn’t just the highlight of the story. It transformed the story, making me rethink everything I’d read before.

In writing about ideas, though, I’ve never liked conclusions. Can’t the final chapter just serve as the end? It’s a book, not a book report. If I had something else worth saying, I would’ve already said it.*

What bothers me most about a conclusion is the finality. If a topic is important enough to deserve an entire book, it shouldn’t end. It should be open-ended.

That’s an inherent challenge for Think Again. I don’t want the conclusion to bring closure. I want my thinking to keep evolving. To symbolize that openness, I decided to make the epilogue a blank page. Literally.

My challenge network unanimously rejected that concept. Two of my most insightful students convinced me that although it might represent an endpoint for me as a writer, it’s a starting point for you as a reader—a springboard to new thoughts and a bridge to new conversations. Then they proposed a way to honor the spirit of the book: I could take a cue from Ron Berger’s classroom and show some of my rethinking of the conclusion from one draft to the next.

I loved the idea.* For a book about rethinking, it seemed delightfully meta. Like the Seinfeld coffee table book about coffee tables—or the time when Ryan Gosling wore a shirt with a photo of Macaulay Culkin, and Macaulay Culkin one-upped him by wearing a shirt with a picture of Ryan Gosling wearing that shirt.*

The conclusion seemed like the perfect place to show a few key moments of rethinking, but I still didn’t know what to cover. I went back to my challenge network, and they suggested one more way to synthesize key themes and provide an update on what I’m rethinking right now.

The first thing that came to mind was a moment in the fact-checking process, when I learned that scientists have revised their thinking about the purported plumage of the tyrannosaurus family. If you were picturing a feathered T. rex in chapter 1, so was I, but the current consensus is that a typical T. rex was covered mostly in scales. If you’re devastated by that update, please flip to the index and look up joy of being wrong, the. Actually, I have some good news: there’s another tyrannosaur, the yutyrannus, that scientists believe was covered in vibrant feathers to stay cool.*

Lately, I’ve been thinking again about how rethinking happens. For thousands of years, much of the rethinking that people did unfolded invisibly in groups over time. Before the printing press, a great deal of knowledge was transmitted orally. Human history was one long game of telephone, where each sender would remember and convey information differently, and each receiver would have no way of knowing how the story had changed. By the time an idea traveled across a land, it could be completely reimagined without anyone’s being aware of it. As more information began to be recorded in books and then newspapers, we could begin to track the different ways in which knowledge and beliefs evolved. Today, although we can see every revision made in Wikipedia, the individuals making the changes often wind up in edit wars, refusing to concede that others were right or that they were wrong. Codifying knowledge might help us track it, but it doesn’t necessarily lead us to open our minds.

Many great thinkers have argued that rethinking is a task for each generation, not each person—even in science. As the eminent physicist Max Planck put it, “ A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die.” From this perspective, generations are replaced faster than people change their views.

I no longer believe that has to be the case. We all have the capacity to think again—we just don’t use it often enough, because we don’t think like scientists often enough.

The scientific method can be traced back several millennia, at least as far back as Aristotle and the ancient Greeks. I was surprised to learn, then, that the word scientist is relatively new: it wasn’t coined until 1833. For centuries, there was no general term for people whose profession was to discover knowledge through developing hypotheses, designing experiments, and collecting data. I hope we don’t wait that long to recognize that this way of thinking applies to every line of work—and any walk of life.

Even as this book goes to press, I’m still rethinking. In making the case for thinking like a scientist, something has been nagging at me. I wonder if I’ve devoted too little attention to the situations in which it’s productive to preach, prosecute, and politick. When it comes to rethinking our own views, the weight of the evidence favors the scientist mode as giving us the best odds.* But the ideal mode is less clear cut when it comes to opening other people’s minds. I tried to capture the nuances in the value of each approach, exploring how preaching can be effective in debates with people who are receptive to our viewpoint or aren’t invested in the issue; prosecuting can get through to audiences who aren’t determined to be in control; and simplicity can persuade our own political tribe. But even after reviewing these data points, I still wasn’t sure whether I’d done enough to qualify my argument.

Then the coronavirus pandemic happened, and I became curious about how leaders communicate during crisis. How do they give people a sense of security in the present and hope for the future? Preaching the virtues of their plans and prosecuting alternative proposals could reduce uncertainty. Making a political case might rally the base around shared goals.

For me, the most instructive example came from the governor of New York. In an early speech in the spring, as his state and the nation faced an unprecedented crisis, he announced, “It is common sense to take a method and try it: If it fails, admit it frankly and try another. But above all, try something.”

The New York Times quickly eviscerated the governor’s speech, noting that “ something unspecified is no better than nothing.” Whereas other leaders were “precise, concrete, positive,” the governor was “indefinite, abstract, irresolute.” It wasn’t just the media that trashed the speech—one of the governor’s own advisers apparently described it as an act of political stupidity.

It’s easy to see the appeal of a confident leader who offers a clear vision, a strong plan, and a definitive forecast for the future. But in times of crisis as well as times of prosperity, what we need more is a leader who accepts uncertainty, acknowledges mistakes, learns from others, and rethinks plans. That’s what this particular governor was offering, and the early critics were wrong about how his proposed approach would unfold.

This didn’t happen during the coronavirus pandemic, and the governor wasn’t Andrew Cuomo. It occurred the last time unemployment in America was so high: during the Great Depression. It was 1932, and the governor of New York was Franklin Delano Roosevelt. He delivered his “try something” message as the country was reeling from the Great Depression, in a commencement speech at a small university in Georgia. In the most memorable line from the speech, FDR argued that “the country demands bold, persistent experimentation.” That principle became a touchstone of his leadership. Although economists are still debating which of the resulting reforms lifted the country out of a historic depression, Americans elected FDR president four times, endorsing a broader leadership record of which experimentation was a part.

In his commencement speech, FDR wasn’t preaching, prosecuting, or appealing to politics. He spoke with the same kind of confident humility that you’d expect from a scientist. There’s a lot we don’t know about how to communicate confident humility. When people lack knowledge about a complex topic—like stopping a pandemic or reinvigorating an economy—they might be comfortable with leaders admitting what they don’t know today and doubting the statements they made yesterday. When people feel more informed and the problem is simpler, they might dismiss leaders who acknowledge uncertainty and change their minds as flip-floppers.

I’m still curious about when each mode is most effective for persuasion, but on balance, I’d love to see more people do their rethinking out loud, as FDR did. As valuable as rethinking is, we don’t do it enough—whether we’re grappling with the pivotal decisions of our lives or the great quandaries of our time. Complex problems like pandemics, climate change, and political polarization call on us to stay mentally flexible. In the face of any number of unknown and evolving threats, humility, doubt, and curiosity are vital to discovery. Bold, persistent experimentation might be our best tool for rethinking.

We can all improve at thinking again. Whatever conclusion we reach, I think the world would be a better place if everyone put on scientist goggles a little more often. I’m curious: do you agree? If not, what evidence would change your mind?