To recognize the truth, you must accept that you are wrong and relentlessly find ways to increase the chances that you are right. Dalio calls this radical open-mindedness. Taking in more information, especially from other highly credible people, can only allow you to make better decisions, which will bring you closer to your goal.
We’ll cover a variety of themes and mindsets stemming from this concept.
Understand that you are blind, and that you need to figure out a way to see.
Pain from mistakes is how you learn that you are blind. Review bad decisions that you made because you failed to see what others saw. Ask others to help with figuring out your blind spots.
Recognize the importance of this mindset. If you willingly blind yourself and keep doing something wrong, you will never maximize your potential.
Even if you believe your baseline probability of being right is already high, it is always valuable to raise your probability of being right. And being open-minded to other viewpoints is how you raise your probability of being right.
Accept the possibility that others might see something better than you and point out threats and opportunities you don’t see.
People who make the best decisions are rarely confident that they alone have the best answers. What is the probability that, with your one brain, you have the best answer that can’t be improved by the other seven billion people on earth?
You’re looking for the best answer that exists, not simply the best answer that you can come up with yourself. The probability of your always having the best answer is very small.
But don’t just trust every opinion you get. Weigh a person’s opinions by how believable they are about the subject. This is the idea of “believability-weighted decision making,” which we’ll cover later.
If multiple believable people say you’re doing something wrong but you don’t think you are, you’re probably biased.
A common problem, especially among high achievers, is wanting to be the one to produce the correct answers. Our environment stresses this—parents and schools want you to have the right answers on tests and be the one producing the bright ideas.
But taken too far, this mindset can make you close-minded to other ideas and what other people have to offer.
If you value being right and having the best ideas above all, you shouldn’t care if the right answer comes from you or from someone else. Focus on finding the truth and the best ideas.
Chart yourself on two dimensions: 1) humility and open-mindedness, and 2) mental maps, or what you know and how you reason.
Many people have low values for both, and they remain trapped there. They know little, yet they are convinced they know everything. (Shortform note: This is similar to the Dunning-Kruger effect, a cognitive bias where people who are bad at something are incapable of recognizing how bad they are.)
The other quadrants are also suboptimal. If you have high open-mindedness but poor mental maps, you will have problems picking the right people and ideas to follow.
If you have good mental maps but low humility, you miss out on better ideas, and you leave a lot of value on the table.
Unfortunately, many people are close-minded, and they aggressively seek to close themselves off to better ideas. Here are characteristic behaviors of close-minded people:
In contrast, open-minded people behave in exactly the opposite ways. They welcome when other people disagree with them; they ask thoughtful questions; they openly admit when they don’t know something and show an eagerness to learn.
Some people worry that seeking ideas from other people means losing assertiveness. This is totally false. In reality, getting ideas from others will make you right more often; in turn, being right more often will make you more confident.
Some people try to be open-minded, but in reality, they’ve already made up their mind before they seek outside opinions. Then, they simply gather information to confirm their prior opinion, instead of opening it up for change. Do NOT settle on an opinion before getting information.
Some people hesitate to get other opinions, saying, **“I want to make up my own mind.” This is foolhardy—**opposing views shouldn’t threaten your ability to decide independently. It can only make you more accurate and give you more options to make up your own mind.
When accepting viewpoints from others, suspend your judgment and empathize with their viewpoint. Do not punish others for speaking their mind, like criticizing or mocking them. Make clear you want to understand their perspective and aren’t trying to prove them wrong. After all, they have their own egos to contend with.
Recognize when you’re being close-minded. You’ll feel tense, reactive, and emotional. Use this to trigger responses of calming down and slowing down. While this is difficult at first, practice this over time and it will become a habit.
Review instances when you made mistakes because you had incomplete information or suffered from blind spots.
Before making a decision, ask yourself, “Can I point to clear facts leading to my view?” If not, you’re merely trusting your gut, which is unlikely to be correct.
Being open-minded will make you seek other smart people and explore their viewpoints, especially when you disagree with each other. This may create conflict between the four Yous in the conversation.
The key is to have “thoughtful disagreement” with the other person. This means your goal is not to prove that you’re right, but rather to find out which view is true and decide what to do about it.
Your ego may get in the way of getting new perspectives from other people. But if you care about your goals, you should be more afraid of missing important ideas than being proven wrong. What stings more—being wrong about something, or ultimately failing your goal?
Thoughtful disagreement doesn’t mean just taking in other viewpoints by faith, without articulating your viewpoint. You should be open-minded and assertive at the same time. You must see things through the other person’s eyes, while communicating clearly how you see things. The best ideas will arise from this natural tension.
As you seek out more opinions, you may find that people will be naturally reluctant to disagree with you. This might be because they’ve been trained to agree to maintain social cohesion, or because they want to avoid emotional explosions. The trick is to engage in thoughtful disagreement without triggering emotional explosions.