The High Cost of Being Right: Why Certainty is the Enemy of Growth
We are essentially running 21st-century software on hardware designed for the Stone Age. You notice that while stubbornness might have kept us from eating the wrong berry 10,000 years ago, that same "wiring" now keeps us from making smart investments today. We are born stubborn. From an evolutionary standpoint, that trait is a feature, not a bug. In a world of predators and scarcity, sticking to what you knew was safe and refusing to deviate, was a survival mechanism. But there is a second trait that has hitched a ride alongside our survival instincts: willful ignorance. While stubbornness provides stability, our modern tendency to form concrete opinions on subjects we haven’t studied is a recipe for stagnation. We are losing the art of listening, and with it, the flexibility required to thrive in a rapidly changing world. The Echo Chamber of the Uninformed The "Xerox copy" effect is real. If everyone in a room has the same opinion, nobody is actually th...