What is something you used to think?
Not as a toddler, but as an adult. Something you used to believe, that you’ve changed your mind about?
Unlearning is a key skill in boosting our adaptability. I think of it as updating our operating system and/or decluttering. It’s removing ways of thinking and being that likely served us well at one point, but don’t anymore. It usually accompanies curiosity and mental flexibility in people — they’re interested in learning and can lean into the grey zones of life rather than seeing things as black and white. And being good at it is way harder than it sounds. We tend to cling to our ways of knowing for longer than they actually serve us.
Unlearning is on my mind today because I have just finished reading Jim Collins’ new book What to Make of a Life: Cliffs, Fog, Fire and the Self-Knowledge Imperative. In it, he devotes a few pages to ideas he used to hold that he no longer does, and what he now believes in their place. In a book full of remarkable insights based on more than a decade of new research, his humility and enthusiasm for his own learning process is what stood out to me the most.
I don’t usually reveal the titles we’ll be covering in our no-reading-required book club in advance, but this one is worth telling you about. It just came out last week, and we’ll be discussing it this Friday — along with a brand-new book by another influential writer whose work I also love —so it would be a very good week to hop on and join us. You can learn more and register here.
And in the meantime, I’d love to hear what ideas you’re loosening your grip on these days!
PS: This handwritten note from Jim Collins is one I treasure. He sent it after receiving a copy of my book ELASTIC. So classy.
