This book is about reconsidering values.
It’s about adopting the kind of mental flexibility that saved Dodge’s life, and it’s also about gaining inspiration from failure: triggering the same agility in others.
You may not be carrying an axe or a shovel, but you have some common cognitive tools. They could be things you know, assumptions you make, or perspectives you hold. Some of them are not just part of your work, but also part of your self-perception.
Imagine a group of students creating what is known as Harvard’s first online community network. Before they even started university, they had already connected over an eighth of the freshman class in an “online group.” However, after they went to Cambridge, they abandoned that network and shut it down. Five years later, Mark Zuckerberg launched Facebook on the same campus.
The students who built the original online community occasionally feel the pain of regret. I know because I am one of the co-founders of that group.
Let’s be clear: we never had the vision that Facebook achieved. However, in hindsight, my friends and I clearly missed a series of opportunities to rethink the potential of our platform.
Our first instinct was to use the online community to make new friends. We didn’t consider whether students from other schools or outsiders would be interested in it. Our familiar habit was to use online tools to connect with people at a distance; once we lived in close proximity on the same campus, we didn’t think we needed an online community.
Although one of the co-founders was studying computer science, and another early member had already founded a successful tech startup, we made the wrong assumption that the online community network was a fleeting hobby, not a significant part of the future of the internet. Because I didn’t know how to code, I didn’t have the tools to create more complex things. Besides, starting a company wasn’t part of my self-identity: I saw myself as a university freshman, not a budding entrepreneur.
Since then, rethinking has become crucial to my self-awareness.
I am a psychologist, but I’m not a Freud enthusiast. My office doesn’t have a couch, and I don’t do psychotherapy. As an organizational psychologist at Wharton, I have been researching and teaching evidence-based management for the past fifteen years. As an entrepreneur of data and ideas, organizations like Google, Pixar, the NBA, and the Gates Foundation have sought my help to rethink how to design meaningful work, build creative teams, and shape a collaborative culture.
My mission is to rethink how we work, lead, and live, and empower others to do the same.
I wrote this book to explore how rethinking happens, seeking the most compelling evidence and some of the world’s most adept re-thinkers. The first part focuses on opening our own minds. The second part examines how we can encourage others to rethink. The third part is about how we can build a community of lifelong learners.
This is a lesson learned by firefighters through hard work. In the heat of the moment, Wagner Dodge impulsively dropped his cumbersome tools and took refuge in a fire he had set himself, making a difference between life and death. If it wasn’t for a deeper, more systematic rethinking of the failure, his creativity wouldn’t even have needed to come into play.
The greatest tragedy of Mann Gulch was the twelve firefighters who died in a firefighting operation that didn’t require a fight.
As early as the 1880s, scientists began emphasizing the crucial role wildfires play in the life cycle of forests. Fires remove dead material, deliver nutrients to the soil, and clear a path for sunlight. When fires are suppressed, forests become overly dense. The accumulation of shrubs, dead leaves, and small branches becomes fuel for more explosive wildfires.
However, it wasn’t until 1978 that the US Forest Service abandoned the policy that every discovered wildfire should be extinguished by ten o’clock the next morning. The Mann Gulch wildfire occurred in a remote area, and human life was not in danger. Yet, firefighters were still called in because their community, organization, or industry had not made an effort to challenge the assumption of letting wildfires burn naturally to their end.
This book invites you to discard knowledge and perspectives that are no longer useful to you, maintaining your self-awareness with flexibility rather than consistency. If you can master the skills of rethinking, I believe you will have a better chance of achieving success at work and living a fulfilled life.
Rethinking can help you find new solutions to old problems and reuse old solutions to tackle new problems.
This is the path to learning more from those around you and living with fewer regrets.
The hallmark of wisdom is knowing when to let go of some of your most cherished tools and some of the most precious parts of your self-identity.
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Managing Editor: Zeng Zhen