This morning I changed my mind.
I was going to announce something but have pulled it. It can be better. My team will be surprised but they know I’m right.
I frequently change my mind.
It frequently costs me a lot of money but I don’t buy into sunk cost. It’s done. What’s next.
I used to think this was a weakness.
If you change your mind you can be perceived as fickle or lacking in confidence.
Thankfully if I look over the long term I come out on the right side of these decisions.
and on examination it seems I’m good company.
Jeff Bezos changes his mind frequently.
37signals Founder Jason Fried shared what Bezos said at an event in blog post. Bezos impressed Fried with his observations about people who are right a lot.
The people who are right a lot often change their minds. Bezos said he doesn’t think consistency of thought as a particularly positive trait. It’s better, even healthier in fact, to have an idea that contradicts one you had before.
The smart people constantly revise their understandings of a matter. They reconsider problems they thought they had solved. They are open to new points of view, new information, and challenges to their own ways of thinking.
Is he saying you should not have a well-formed point of view? Of course not – instead think of your thoughts as temporary ones, flexible to change. You may be only partly right one moment and partly wrong another. But in all, you are there to think. And thinkers go through constant introspection, open to other views.
If someone can’t climb out of the details, and see the bigger picture from multiple angles, they’re often wrong most of the time.
People who are wring often get lost in the details that just support one point of view, Bezos said.
Confirmation bias is the act of looking for information that only supports your current view and ignoring information that could indicate you’re wrong.
Funnily enough the live training I’m running tonight tackles something that many people are wrong about:
You can’t generate high value clients from Facebook.
I will show you that you can.
You coming?
