Motivational Mondays is now available on all podcast platforms!
As an organizational psychologist for some of the biggest brands in the world, Adam Grant is an expert on helping us find meaning at work and live more generous and creative lives.
Recognized as one of the 10 most influential management thinkers in our lifetime, Adam has been the top-rated professor at Wharton for seven years in a row and is the author of four New York Times bestselling books that have sold millions of copies and translated into 35 languages.
His and why they embrace failure has earned more than 17 million views.
On this week's episode of Motivational Mondays, Adam shares the importance of continuous learning and being hyper-aware of what we don鈥檛 know.
One of the key aspects of continuous learning is keeping an open mind and understanding that there is always more to learn.
During the episode, Adam says that many of his worst decisions came from assumptions. For example, when he was accepted to Harvard, he started an email community to connect with other incoming freshmen. By the time their first semester started, they had more than an eighth of the incoming freshmen class in this group.
Some even called it Harvard鈥檚 first social community.
But once they got to campus, they disbanded the email group because they didn鈥檛 think it was necessary to connect online when they could simply have lunch together on campus. And just 5 years later, Mark Zuckerberg started Facebook in the house next door to where Adam lived.
It never even occurred to Adam and the other students that many other people would want to connect. Adam says, 鈥淲e鈥檝e all had moments where we took for granted beliefs and assumptions and opinions that we should鈥檝e questioned.鈥�
Adam continues, 鈥淚f there鈥檚 anything this pandemic has taught us, it鈥檚 that we need to get a little more comfortable rethinking a lot of the beliefs, and even the identities that we hold dear.鈥�
Adam says that, 鈥�Think Again is really about what it takes to build the skill and the will to question ourselves, but also open other people鈥檚 minds, and build cultures of learning in the teams and communities and workplaces that we wander into.鈥�
To do this, we need to get better at knowing what you don鈥檛 know, which is also called . This is being hyper-conscious of all the things you鈥檙e completely ignorant about.
While writing Think Again, Adam made a list for himself of all the things he didn鈥檛 know. Initially, he came up with topics such as chemistry, art, and financial markets. But the more he thought about it, the longer the list became.
Then, Adam questioned why he鈥檚 stayed so ignorant about those topics and what knowledge he might be missing. Instead of being embarrassed by his lack of knowledge, if one of these topics comes up in conversation, he鈥檒l say, 鈥淚 actually know embarrassingly little about this topic.鈥�
This allows him to ask a bunch of questions and to learn something new. During the episode, Adam says, 鈥淚 would say in an ideal world, that list is ever-growing, not shrinking. That every time you learn something, you should become more aware of how many things you don't understand yet.鈥�
Adam says that one of the biggest lessons he learned while writing Think Again is that it鈥檚 rare to change somebody else鈥檚 mind. And it鈥檚 nearly impossible if you鈥檙e not willing to change your mind either.
On the other hand, continuous learning is an exercise that should allow us to think about being wrong differently. We鈥檙e not locked into our thoughts and opinions. When new information arises, we should be proud to admit that we鈥檝e changed our mind.
In the full episode you鈥檒l hear how Adam says that being wrong isn鈥檛 a threat to our ego, but rather an opportunity for discovery.
91桃色 members, listen to the bonus episode in the Members Area to hear even more in-depth advice from Adam.
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Adam鈥檚 second TED Talk (with nearly 9 million views):
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