Intellectual humility means recognizing your beliefs might be wrong. Daniel Pink offers four questions: Do you think like a soldier defending or a scout exploring? Do you want to be right or understand? Do you seek opposing views? Do you enjoy discovering you were mistaken?
Hi everyone, welcome to another PinkCast. You know, there's one trait in others that I really admire, in part because I see it so rarely: intellectual humility. Intellectual humility is the willingness to recognize that what you think, what you believe, might be wrong. It's not about being a pushover or lacking confidence. Quite the opposite. Intellectual humility is about being open and recognizing that we all have cognitive blind spots. But developing this virtue is really hard. I've looked around for advice, and the best seems to come from Warren Berger, author of The Book of Beautiful Questions. He suggests 4 questions to test your intellectual humility. I've found them really useful, and here they are. The first question: Do I think more like a soldier or a scout? Soldiers defend positions. Scouts explore new territory. Second, would I rather be right or would I rather understand? Long-term knowledge is way more valuable than a short-term victory. Third, do I solicit and seek out opposing views? Instead of saying, don't you agree? Say, tell me if you disagree and explain why. Fourth, do I enjoy the pleasant surprise of discovering I'm mistaken? Being wrong isn't a failure, it's a success. You've just learned something new. Intellectual humility is in short supply today. That is a big, big problem. It's one reason our culture has coarsened, one reason people are screaming past each other everywhere we look. We need more intellectual humility. It's the antidote to what ails us. And I really believe that using these 4 questions can help you develop this quality and cascade it into the world. Then again? I might be wrong. Thanks for watching The Pinkcast.
