Skip to main content

Thinking is hard, and changing bad thinking is harder still

By June 15, 2014July 26th, 2018mindfield

Most people can’t rethink the way they think. So they keep thinking with the same patterns.

That’s a premise of Think Like a Freak, the most recent book by the authors of Freakonomics —a book that aspires to help people improve how they think. The first piece of advice is simple to state, but hard to retrain your brain to do.

Rule #1: learn to admit when you don’t know something.

People who can’t do this (and there are many) are completely blocked from learning many useful new things.

And this rule applies to well informed folks just as much as anyone.

For example, a study showed that highly educated experts tend to predict wrong over 50% of time in their fields of expertise.

Despite this mediocre track record, the experts still tend to be massively overconfident.

Pretending we know things is about protecting our reputation, even to the point of promoting it over the collective good.

That’s a super-lethal combination: cocky and wrong.

Especially bad if you’re in a position to make decisions about other people’s safety and well-being.

If people are bad at understanding the external world, they’re often even worse when it comes to understanding themselves.

One reason is we’re oblivious to the effects of our “moral compass.”

Our moral compass is great for feeling an allegiance to some abstract duty, but it also distorts our ability to perceive things as they really are.

We incline to fitting facts to our worldview.

And guess what?

Righteousness is not a good foundation for unbiased evaluation.

Not only do most people not want to change the way they think, there is evidence that the human brain often tries to avoid thinking at all.

Few people think more than two or three times a year, said author George Bernard Shaw who then added: “I made an international reputation for myself by thinking two or three times a week.”

If you want to change the way you think the first step is to study the little voice in your head.


Technology creates massive leverage when you use it selectively. This short Assessment will help you discover which tools you should be using to make massive improvements.

One Comment

  • Dicky says:

    Confidence is doing what is right for you no metatr how tough it gets, no metatr how harshly other people criticize and sabotage you.I guarantee that many of the people who will say it can’t be done or held you back will want a slice of the pie.They didn’t earn it, and choose to let their own egos get in the way of understanding and compassion.Support the people who were there for you. Ignore the rest.

Skip to content