The Portuguese nobleman was born Fernão de Magalhães around 1480. “It sounded suicidal to do this,” says Bergreen. At the beginning of his journey, his contemporaries suspected it was impossible to sail around the entire globe-and feared that everything from sea monsters to killer fogs awaited anyone foolhardy enough to try. “That’s not hyperbole.”īrutal, bellicose, and brave, Magellan turned a commercial voyage into a hair-raising showdown with a wide world few Europeans could imagine. His journey was “the greatest sea voyage ever undertaken, and the most significant,” says historian Laurence Bergreen, author of Over the Edge of the World: Magellan’s Terrifying Circumnavigation of the Globe. Nonetheless, it’s clear that Ferdinand Magellan’s 1519 expedition changed the world forever. Consider setting aside time every week to assess how your beliefs are evolving, or to ask your friends and family what they think you should be reconsidering.Please be respectful of copyright. Complexifying can be useful in the workplace, too, encouraging us to ask questions that challenge the status quo. If you feel wronged by someone with a different set of beliefs, you can be simultaneously angry about your past interactions and hopeful about a future relationship. Just as the spectrum of beliefs on charged topics is much more complex than two extremes, our emotions are often more mixed than we realize. It helps to remember that we can fall victim to binary bias with emotions, not only with issues. We might believe we’re making progress by discussing a hot-button issue as two sides of a coin, but people are actually more inclined to think again if we present these topics through the many lenses of a prism. An antidote is complexifying: showcasing the range of perspectives on a given topic. There’s a basic human tendency to seek clarity and closure by simplifying a complex continuum into two categories. We have a better chance of finding a rhythm. If we see it more as a dance, we can begin to choreograph a way forward. If we approach an argument as a war, there will be winners and losers.
Think again series#
First, they spend more than a third of their planning time looking for areas of agreement, mapping out a series of dance steps they might be able to take with the other side.“When you’re thinking like a scientist, you don’t let your ideas become your identity.”Ĭonsider the findings of a classic study that examined what expert negotiators do differently: Admitting points of convergence doesn’t make you weaker-it shows that you’re willing to negotiate about what’s true, and it motivates the other side to consider your point of view. When we debate our friends, family, and colleagues, we tend to think the key to victory is to go into battle armed with airtight logic and rigorous data. And you anchor your identity in mental flexibility rather than foolish consistency. You surround yourself with people who challenge your thought process, not just the ones who agree with your conclusions. You listen to ideas that make you think hard, not just the ones that make you feel good. When you’re thinking like a scientist, you don’t let your ideas become your identity. It requires searching for reasons why you might be wrong-not for reasons why you must be right-and revising your views based on what you learn. Thinking like a scientist is a frame of mind-having the humility to know what you don’t know and the curiosity to find out more. To master those skills, it helps to think like a scientist.
Yet in a turbulent world, there’s another set of cognitive skills that might matter more: the ability to rethink and unlearn. Intelligence is traditionally viewed as the ability to think and learn. The smarter you are, the more complex the problems you can solve-and the faster you can solve them. When people reflect on what it takes to be mentally fit, the first idea that comes to mind is usually intelligence. Think Again: The Power of Knowing What You Don’t Know 1.
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