Molly’s Reviews > Think Again: The Power of Knowing What You Don't Know > Status Update

Most of us are accustomed to defining ourselves in terms of our beliefs,
ideas, and ideologies. This can become a problem when it prevents us from
changing our minds as the world changes and knowledge evolves. Our
opinions can become so sacred that we grow hostile to the mere thought of being wrong, and the totalitarian ego leaps in to silence counterarguments,squash contrary evidence, and close the door on learning.

Great thinkers don’t harbor doubts because they’re impostors. They
maintain doubts because they know we’re all partially blind and they’re
committed to improving their sight. They don’t boast about how much they
know; they marvel at how little they understand. They’re aware that each
answer raises new questions, and the quest for knowledge is never finished.

Plenty of evidence suggests that confidence is just as often the result of
progress as the cause of it. We don’t have to wait for our confidence to rise
to achieve challenging goals. We can build it through achieving challenging
goals.

Some surveys suggest that more than half the people you know have felt like impostors at some point in their careers. It’s thought to be especially common among women and marginalized groups.

What we want to attain is confident humility: having faith in our capability
while appreciating that we may not have the right solution or even be
addressing the right problem. That gives us enough doubt to reexamine our
old knowledge and enough confidence to pursue new insights.

You can be confident in your ability to achieve a goal in the future
while maintaining the humility to question whether you have the right tools in the present. That’s the sweet spot of confidence.

The more superior participants thought their knowledge was, the more they overestimated themselves—and the less interested they were in learning and updating. If you think you know more about history or science than most people, chances are you know less than you think.

The less intelligent we are in a particular domain, the more we
seem to overestimate our actual intelligence in that domain. In a group of
football fans, the one who knows the least is the most likely to be the
armchair quarterback, prosecuting the coach for calling the wrong play and
preaching about a better playbook.

They found that in many situations, those who can’t . . . don’t know they can’t. According to what’s now known as the Dunning-Kruger effect, it’s when we lack competence that we’re most likely to be brimming with overconfidence.

The opposite of armchair quarterback syndrome is impostor syndrome,
where competence exceeds confidence. Think of the people you know who
believe that they don’t deserve their success