The Courage to Think Differently: Challenging Workplace Dogmas
Six Contrarian Truths About Leadership and Personal Development
"Brilliant thinking is rare, but courage is in even shorter supply than genius."
This is a sentence from the first page of the first chapter of Peter Thiel's book Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future, co-authored with Blake Masters.
The sentence resonates with me and the echo chambers that most of my experience of the LinkedIn platform has become. It is so much easier to be one of the 95% of people who share something that someone else has written or reshare something for the nth time. It is so much more difficult to be one of the 5% who consistently take the intellectual risk by expressing their thoughts and opinions on topics close to their hearts.
Thiel then shares an interview question he used to encourage people to share their opinions about a topic that is important to them.
"What important truth do very few people agree with you on?"
I challenge you to come up with some answers to this question as it relates to your work and your business. As Peter Thiel says,
"This question sounds easy because it's straightforward. Actually, it's very hard to answer. It isn't easy because the knowledge that everyone is taught in school is, by definition, agreed upon. And it's psychologically difficult because anyone trying to answer must say something they know to be unpopular."
Thiel shares his format for a good answer to the question:
Most people believe in x, but the truth is the opposite of x.
Here are six of my answers to this question from the fields of coaching, leadership, and personal development.
Most self-help books on leadership and management are more than 200 pages and 50,000 words long, but the truth is that most of these books contain one idea and should be less than 50 pages. They are monographs with lots of padding and fluff, as required by traditional publishers, which serves them, not the audience.
Most organisations want collaboration and teamwork, yet they do just about everything possible to prevent it. Matrix reporting lines, frequent job rotations, new managers not being trained before stepping up, and reward systems incentivising individual accomplishments over collective ones are all symptoms.
Most coaches believe that a coach relying upon mental dexterity means they can coach anyone. Yet, the truth is that successful business people want an independent, confidential sounding board that gets what they are going through because they have done something similar in the past. They don't want a coach who is an HR professional or psychologist; they want a coach with battle scars from the realities of the challenges and opportunities they are now confronting.
Most people believe the insights from popular thought leaders (Sinek, Gladwell, Grant, Goleman, Edmonson, etc.) are grounded in robust research and are broadly applicable in their workplace. Yet, the truth is these people are master storytellers whose job is to sell more books. The authors selectively focus on research that supports their argument, which often means it is taken out of context or misused, often with disastrous consequences for people who try to apply it at work.
Most people say they dislike having a packed calendar full of back-to-back meetings with no room to breathe, but the truth is they don't say no to things because being seen to be busy is a desirable status for many of these people.
Most people, when sharing a reference to an article or research, believe that it supports their point of view, but the truth is that if they had read the primary research, they would quickly find it doesn't. The reality is that much of the regularly cited social science research is not broadly applicable with hilarious examples such as Yerkes Dodson, whose research on how anxiety affects performance relates to electric shocks given to laboratory mice over a hundred years ago.
Hopefully, by sharing my answers to this provocative question, I have put you in the mood to share your contrarian opinions. Remember, this exercise aims to get you to exercise your thinking skills and counter the numerous cognitive biases we inevitably allow to build up around us in the workplace.
📫 - A quote that I am currently pondering
"There are only two laws of Psychology.
The first law of Psychology: what people think, what people believe, what people say, and what people do are occasionally connected.
The second law of Psychology says: there is only the first law."
Dr Leandro Herrero
Hmmm, this quote could be the beginning of another answer to Thiel's interview question.
🧾 - An absorbing and insightful (short) read
ZERO TO ONE
Most people will have heard about Peter Thiel before reading this article. Maybe you have listened to him speak on a Podcast or read about him, as he is usually in the news for one reason or another. I encourage you to read this book, which stems from a course about startups that Thiel taught at Stanford in 2012. I always recommend going to the primary source of the evergreen wisdom that's out there, as the learning has the potential to be much more rewarding than social media snippets.
🤔 - If you did have the answer to this question, what would it be?
Would I still do this if no one will know?
I love the question and your answers to it. Here are three of mine:
- most people don’t realise how hampered they are in their productivity and professional development by not having an effective note taking habit and a “2nd brain” style way of organising them.
- the push system of work (as opposed to pull) where teams push work at each other and then use increasing degrees of senior power and airtime to shout priorities to the top is deeply unproductive and also mentally damaging for many of our staff.
- trying to predict the future on a project of any scale to any great degree of accuracy is largely a waste of time but planning for the uncertainty inherent in such endeavours is essential.