Bill Godwin, American scientist and philosopher, sees something additional at the heart of polarized entrenchment:…

… One needs to begin with the assumption (obviously true if one thinks about it) that they may well be right and it is we who are wrong because of our own ignorance or assumption or biases or cultural and life experiences. It’s amazing what one can learn about other people’s lives, other people’s experiences, other people’s assumptions and biases, and other people’s cultures with this approach. And it is amazing how often that new understanding will modify one’s own views.

It starts with framing. Explicitly emphasizing the complexity or novelty of a situation helps put you in the right state of mind.

Part Two: Practicing The Science of Failing Well

Chapter Five: We Have Met the Enemy

“Today, Dalio credits this failure as a major cause of his subsequent extraordinary success, including his firm’s becoming the largest and most profitable hedge fund in history: “In retrospect, that failure was one of the best things that ever happened to me. It gave me the humility I needed to balance my aggressiveness and shift [my] mindset from thinking, ‘I’m right,’ to asking myself, ‘How do I know I’m right?’”

How do I know I am right?

It’s a powerful question. Failing well, perhaps even living well, requires us to become vigorously humble and curious—a state that does not come naturally to adults.

One of the most common mistakes people make is bargaining with how the world should work instead of accepting how it does work. Anytime you find yourself or your colleague complaining “that’s not right,” or “that’s not fair,” or “it shouldn’t be that way,” you are bargaining, not accepting. You want the world to work in a way that it doesn’t.

Failing to accept how the world really works puts your time and energy toward proving how right you are. When the desired results don’t materialize, it’s easy to blame circumstances or others. I call this the wrong side of right. You’re focused on your ego not the outcome.

Solutions appear when you stop bargaining and start accepting the reality of the situation. That’s because focusing on the next move, rather than how you got here in the first place, opens you up to a lot of possibilities. When you put outcome over ego, you get better results.

When everything is on your shoulders and the cost of being wrong is high, I told her, you tend to focus on what’s right instead of who’s right. The more I’d given up wanting to be right, the better the outcomes I had. I didn’t care about getting the credit; I cared about getting the results.