Overview
Wharton professor Adam Grant explores the critical skill of rethinking: the ability to question your own opinions and open other people's minds. The book reveals how we get trapped in cycles of overconfidence, and how the most successful people treat their own views as hypotheses to be tested rather than truths to be defended. Grant provides evidence-based strategies for developing intellectual humility and fostering a culture of learning in organizations and relationships.
Grant is a Wharton organisational psychologist whose earlier book Give and Take (2013) made him a mainstream business writer. Think Again, published in 2021, argued for the underappreciated skill of rethinking — holding opinions loosely, changing your mind well, and creating environments where others can do the same. The book draws on research by Phil Tetlock, Julia Galef, and Grant's own interviews.
Key Ideas
Think Like a Scientist
The best thinkers approach their own beliefs with curiosity rather than conviction, constantly seeking evidence that might prove them wrong.
The Joy of Being Wrong
Reframing the discovery of a mistake as a moment of learning rather than failure transforms your relationship with knowledge and growth.
Motivational Interviewing
Instead of arguing people out of their beliefs, ask genuine questions that help them find their own reasons to reconsider; this is far more effective than preaching or prosecuting.
Who should read this
Readers who have noticed their own opinions tend to harden over time, and want to slow that calcification. Managers and teachers especially, since the book spends real time on how to foster productive disagreement in groups. The chapters on debate-as-dance and persuading extremists are practical.
Who might skip it
Skip if you want tight argument — Grant writes in the 'parade of short stories' style of recent popular psychology, and the book can feel more like a LinkedIn feed than a sustained case. Also skip if you've read Tetlock's Superforecasting; much of the intellectual debt is there.
The verdict
A book whose manner is less serious than its subject deserves, but whose message is urgently right. Grant's claim that rethinking is a skill, not a weakness, is the best counter I know to the ossification that hits most people's belief systems in middle age. The specific examples are thin but the frame is strong.
"The purpose of learning isn't to affirm our beliefs; it's to evolve our beliefs."
— Adam Grant, Think Again
If you liked this
Superforecasting by Tetlock and Gardner for the rigorous version. The Scout Mindset by Julia Galef for a similar argument in fewer pages.