Book Club: Think Again by Adam Grant
Thursday, April 29 from 10 - 11:30 AM PDT
Our first ever KA Connect Book Club will take place on April 29th and we'll be discussing Adam Grant’s “Think Again: The Power of Knowing What You Don’t Know.”
It seems like many of us are rethinking core assumptions about work, life, and community. What is refreshing in Adam Grant’s book was not just that he advocates for rethinking, but shows why it can be difficult to rethink, provides multiple techniques for questioning your own beliefs, and shares tools for improving conversations in even the most polarizing situations.
You’ll have the opportunity to spend an hour with 5-6 KA Connect community members to discuss the book and then we’ll reconvene as a larger group to recap.
We’ll send out discussion questions about a week in advance, but for now, we suggest highlighting key passages which speak to you and you’d like to share with others.
About the Book
Intelligence is usually seen as the ability to think and learn, but in a rapidly changing world, there’s another set of cognitive skills that might matter more: the ability to rethink and unlearn. In our daily lives, too many of us favor the comfort of conviction over the discomfort of doubt. We listen to opinions that make us feel good, instead of ideas that make us think hard. We see disagreement as a threat to our egos, rather than an opportunity to learn. We surround ourselves with people who agree with our conclusions, when we should be gravitating toward those who challenge our thought process. The result is that our beliefs get brittle long before our bones. Intelligence is no cure, and it can even be a curse: there’s evidence that being good at thinking can make us worse at rethinking. The brighter we are, the blinder to our own limitations we can become.
As an organizational psychologist, Adam Grant is an expert on opening other people’s minds–and our own. As Wharton’s top-rated professor and the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Originals and Give and Take, one of his guiding principles is to argue like he’s right but listen like he’s wrong. With bold ideas and rigorous evidence, he investigates how we can embrace the joy of being wrong, harness the surprising advantages of impostor syndrome, bring nuance to charged conversations, and build schools, workplaces, and communities of lifelong learners. Think Again reveals that we don’t have to believe everything we think or internalize everything we feel. It’s an invitation to let go of views that are no longer serving us well and prize mental flexibility, humility, and curiosity over foolish consistency. If knowledge is power, knowing what we don’t know is wisdom.