A Dad Considers Think Again by Adam Grant
Aaron Sharp | April 5, 2021
This book reaction will be a little different than what I’ve been doing. Instead of employing a question and answer format where I ask myself questions about this book I’m just going to rant (in a good way) about a book that I really, really liked.
I don’t have a top ten favorite books of all-time list (this might be shocking to those who know me), but if I did I’m fairly certain that Think Again: The Power of Knowing What You Don't Know by Adam Grant would already be there. I just finished it a few days ago and I’m already thinking that I need to run through it again.
Why did I like this book so much? Well, some of it is context, some of it is personality, and some of it is a case of the right book at the right time. Adam Grant has given research and credibility to a number of things that have been bouncing around in my head for a while. I guess this is where the context comes in, but why is it so dang hard to get Christians to spend a little bit of time reflecting on what they do and how they do it? That question deserves its own book. I’m fortunate to currently work for an organization that values this mentality, but I can say that this is the rarest of things in many circles.
This book is overflowing with insights for work, but I thought it would be particularly interesting to think about in briefly here as a dad. Let’s be clear, Grant has not created a parenting book, but one of the great things about wisdom and understanding is that their lessons can be applied in so many places. What I’m going to do is to just walk through some of the quotes from the book that caught my attention and add my two cents.
“Under acute stress, people typically revert to their automatic, well-learned responses…A hallmark of wisdom is knowing when it’s time to abandon some of your most treasured tools—and some of the most cherished parts of your identity.”
In the book he is talking about how people respond to a crisis, and how they often neglect to take obvious actions because they are just reverting to what they know, but as a dad I often find that I do some of my worst work as a parent when I’m under stress because I just revert to what comes naturally, not what’s best for my kids. The last year of working from home has been a fantastic laboratory experiment on this one for me. Invariably I’ll be in the middle of putting out some (virtual) fires at work when the crap hits the fan with the kids. In these moments I’ve seen myself respond with impatience and a lack of grace enough to see that what he is talking about is relevant to parenting. A good chunk of growing as a parent is spent abandoning some of your most treasured tools.
“It’s a sign of wisdom to avoid believing every thought that enters your mind. It’s a mark of emotional intelligence to avoid internalizing every feeling that enters your heart… If we’re insecure, we make fun of others. If we’re comfortable being wrong, we’re not afraid to poke fun at ourselves.”
The entire section of the book on humility, arrogance, and confidence was brilliant, but we’ll get to that later. Seriously, there are so many leaders that I have interacted with that I feel like really need to stop what they are doing until they can figure some of this out. There is a famous pastor (don’t get me started on the pitfalls of Christian celebrities, that’s a whole other post) who has had a recent fall from grace. I remember having a friend who was in a meeting with this pastor as a contractor and his one reaction, and this was years before any of the issues came out in public, was “That is the most arrogant person I have ever been around in my life.” That reaction was based on a one-hour meeting. I remember thinking after all of the scandal, that largely had to do with this man’s arrogance, if my friend could see it in one hour everyone knew about it, they just went with it because they had something to gain, or maybe for some because they didn’t know how to deal with it. We, as Americans, keep acting like humility isn’t a worthwhile virtue so we get the politicians we do. Specifically speaking to my own people, evangelical Christians have adopted the same faulty approach, and it shows.
Now that I am off my soap box I can go back to the parenting part of this thing. As a parent humility seems to be key to a lot of things. I’ve noticed a large percentage of the time that I handle a situation poorly it is because I don’t like how what my kids are doing is affecting me, something that a decent dose of humility would surely help with. Most of us don’t like being wrong, particularly when our actions are being scrutinized by a small human who seems destined for a career as a prosecuting attorney, but my personal opinion is that humbly owning our mistakes would go a long way to teaching our kids to be more secure themselves.
“Although productive disagreement is a critical life skill, it’s one that many of us never fully develop. The problem starts early: parents disagree behind closed doors, fearing that conflict will make children anxious or somehow damage their character. Yet research shows that how often parents argue has no bearing on their children’s academic, social, or emotional development. What matters is how respectfully parents argue, not how frequently. Kids whose parents clash constructively feel more emotionally safe in elementary school, and over the next few years they actually demonstrate more helpfulness and compassion toward their classmates.”
There’s a lot to unpack here because this is one of the places that Grant makes specific application to family life, which was great. The burden is on parents to learn to fight well, and to let the kids see that. Now, I don’t think the kids need to see every argument, but they won’t learn to work through issues they have with other people if they don’t see that modeled. One of the big problems, that Grant points too, is that too many kids are learning how to fight the wrong way from their parents. As our kids have problems with each other we do our best to have them talk to each other about it, and we also try to point them to the times that the Wonder Woman and I have worked out problems in front of them. As parents we should be more concerned with how we disagree with each other, than where we disagree.
“When someone becomes hostile, if you respond by viewing the argument as a war, you can either attack or retreat. If instead you treat it as a dance, you have another option—you can sidestep. Having a conversation about the conversation shifts attention away from the substance of the disagreement and toward the process for having a dialogue. The more anger and hostility the other person expresses, the more curiosity and interest you show. When someone is losing control, your tranquility is a sign of strength. It takes the wind out of their emotional sails. It’s pretty rare for someone to respond by screaming “‘SCREAMING IS MY PREFERRED MODE OF COMMUNICATION!’”
To be clear Adam wasn’t talking about toddlers here, but he might as well have been, and I say this as someone who must plead guilty as charged here. There will be times that a kid will just flat out throw down with you. When this happens my tendence is to gear up for battle. “You think you’re stubborn, well I’m just as stubborn, and I’m the Dad here!” The idea that everyone involved will be better off if you view those difficulties as a dance rather than a war is such a necessary paradigm shift. Too often I realized after the fact, “Wait, that kid was just really tired,” or something like that.
I genuinely loved this book, but I respect that most people don’t like reading insanely long posts on the internet so I’ll stop here and just say you should buy this book, you should read this book, and you should reread this book. The skill of thinking again is imminently valuable in pretty much every context.