Persuadable: How Great Leaders Change Their Minds to Change the World

associated with them, then we can welcome new evidence as an opportunity to get closer to seeing the world the way it actually is.

humans are plagued by what psychologists call a status quo bias, meaning that we often have a strong preference for the current state of affairs over some alternative.

we shouldn’t maximize decisiveness any more than we should maximize persuadability. When we become too decisive, we also become close-minded and blind to new information. The world is just too fluctuating and unpredictable for this.

“The willingness and the ability to change is essential,”

“People think focus means saying yes to the thing you’ve got to focus on. But that’s not what it means at all. It means saying no to the hundred other good ideas that there are. You have to pick carefully.”

consider going one step further, and beyond changing your own mind, focus on actively persuading those with whom we have the most influence—our own tribes.

In a world that is unpredictable, ultracompetitive, and fast changing, being persuadable is the ultimate competitive advantage.

Any Bayesian analysis begins with an initial belief, aka a prior. In our case, the prior was the initial guess we had about the location of the target ball. Then we encounter objective information, which in our case was whether the new ball landed to the left or the right of the target ball. When you combine the two it gives you the improved belief

If we learn to treat all our beliefs as initial guesses with particular probabilities