Think Again: The Power of Knowing What You Don't Know by Adam Grant (sad books to read txt) 📕

a job as a sacred cause. And occasionally they pick careers in prosecutor mode, where they charge classmates with selling their souls to capitalism and hurl themselves into nonprofits in the hopes of saving the world.

Sadly, they often know too little about the job—and too little about their evolving selves—to make a lifelong commitment. They get trapped in an overconfidence cycle, taking pride in pursuing a career identity and surrounding themselves with people who validate their conviction. By the time they discover it was the wrong fit, they feel it’s too late to think again. The stakes seem too high to walk away; the sacrifices of salary, status, skill, and time seem too great. For the record, I think it’s better to lose the past two years of progress than to waste the next twenty. In hindsight, identity foreclosure is a Band-Aid: it covers up an identity crisis, but fails to cure it.

My advice to students is to take a cue from health-care professions. Just as they make appointments with the doctor and the dentist even when nothing is wrong, they should schedule checkups on their careers. I encourage them to put a reminder in their calendars to ask some key questions twice a year. When did you form the aspirations you’re currently pursuing, and how have you changed since then? Have you reached a learning plateau in your role or your workplace, and is it time to consider a pivot? Answering these career checkup questions is a way to periodically activate rethinking cycles. It helps students maintain humility about their ability to predict the future, contemplate doubts about their plans, and stay curious enough to discover new possibilities or reconsider previously discarded ones.

I had one student, Marissa Shandell, who scored a coveted job at a prestigious consulting firm and planned on climbing up the ladder. She kept getting promoted early but found herself working around the clock. Instead of continuing to just grit and bear it, she and her husband had a career checkup conversation every six months, talking not just about the growth trajectory of their companies but also about the growth trajectory of their jobs. After being promoted to associate partner well ahead of schedule, Marissa realized she had reached a learning plateau (and a lifestyle plateau) and decided to pursue a doctorate in management.*

Deciding to leave a current career path is often easier than identifying a new one. My favorite framework for navigating that challenge comes from a management professor, Herminia Ibarra. She finds that as people consider career choices and transitions, it helps to think like scientists. A first step is to entertain possible selves: identify some people you admire within or outside your field, and observe what they actually do at work day by day. A second step is to develop hypotheses about how these paths might align with your own interests, skills, and values. A third step is to test out the different identities by running experiments: do informational interviews, job shadowing, and sample projects to get a taste of the work. The goal is not to confirm a particular plan but to expand your repertoire of possible selves—which keeps you open to rethinking.

Checkups aren’t limited to careers—they’re relevant to the plans we make in every domain of our lives. A few years ago, a former student called for romantic advice. Caveat: I’m not that kind of psychologist. He’d been dating a woman for just over a year, and although it was the most fulfilling relationship he’d ever had, he was still questioning whether it was the right match. He had always imagined himself marrying a woman who was ambitious in her career or passionate about improving the world, and his girlfriend seemed less driven and more relaxed in her approach to life.

It was an ideal time for a checkup. I asked him how old he was when he formed that vision of a partner and how much he’d changed since then. He said he’d held it since he was a teenager and had never paused to rethink it. As we talked, he started to realize that if he and his girlfriend were happy together, ambition and passion might not be as important to him in a partner as they had been in the past. He came to understand that he was inspired by women who were highly motivated to succeed and serve because that was who he wanted to be.

Two and a half years later, he reached out with an update. He had decided to let go of his preconceived image of who his partner should be:

I decided to open up and talk to her about how she’s different from the person I’d imagined being with. Surprisingly, she told me the same thing! I wasn’t who she imagined she’d end up with either—she expected to end up with a guy who was more of a creative, someone who was more gregarious. We accepted it and moved on. I’m thrilled to have left my old ideas behind to make space for the full her and everything our relationship could bring.

Just before the pandemic, he proposed to her, and they’re now engaged.

A successful relationship requires regular rethinking. Sometimes being considerate means reconsidering something as simple as our habits. Learning not to be fashionably late to everything. Retiring that wardrobe of ratty conference T-shirts. Rolling over to snore in the other direction. At other times being supportive means opening our minds to bigger life changes—moving to a different country, a different community, or a different job to support our partner’s priorities. In my student’s case, it meant rethinking who his fiancée would be, but also staying open to who she might become. She eventually switched jobs and became passionate about both her work and a personal cause of fighting educational inequity. When we’re willing to update our ideas of who our partners are, it can give them freedom to evolve and our relationships room to grow.

Whether we do checkups with our partners,