Recall how Ray Dalio, who had been so sure he was right about where the economy was headed until he was catastrophically wrong, shifted his mindset “from thinking, ‘I’m right,’ to asking myself, ‘How do I know I’m right?’” A powerful question for cultivating self-awareness.
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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.
“But how do you know you’re right?” he insisted. “How do you know Earthseed is true. Who says it’s true?” “You do, Dan.” I let him chew on that for a while, then went on. “You learn, you think, you question. You question us and you question yourself. Then, if you find Earthseed to be true, you join us. You help us teach others. You help others the way we’ve helped you and your sisters.”