Change Your Mind

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Change Your Mind

December 22, 2010. By Peter Lloyd

Nobody can be right all of the time. Not even my dad. “I was wrong once,” he admitted with a rare twinge of humility, before continuing, “the time I thought I made a mistake.” Unlike my dad, the rest of us make lots of mistakes. We’re all wrong a good deal of the time. That’s why we have to change our minds from time to time. Not an easy thing to do. We need to get good at it, though, because changing your mind happens to be the definition of problem solving.

They say three little words stand in the way of solving just about any personal-relationship problem. You know them. You also know how difficult they are to pronounce in the heat of an argument. So let’s say them together... I was wrong.

Problem solving requires us to recite a similar three-word phrase no easier to pronounce. I don’t know.

Think about it. If you knew the answer, you wouldn’t have a problem. You have a problem, in most cases, because you’re wrong about something. The first step to solving your problem, then, is to admit that you don’t know the answer. To make any problem-solving progress you will have to change your mind about something.

In his book Dumbth, the consummate entertainer Steve Allen, creator of the Tonight Show and composer of more than a thousand songs, spotlights another good reason to change your mind—things are not what they seem. He gives some examples to which I’ve added my own:

The sky is not blue.

The moon and the sun are not about the same size.

The sun does not rise in the east and set in the west.

The moon is no bigger high in the sky than it is on the horizon.

A knife in a glass of water appears to be bent but it’s not.

All of these common illusions demonstrate the fact that our senses deceive us. They can’t be trusted. We understand today the relative proportions and motion of the sun and moon, but our ancestors had to discover the untruth of the obvious for themselves with hard, cold reasoning.

We have to continue to do the same. Urban legends, sensational untruths, advertising claims, and political promises bombard and deceive us every day. Some of them back their claims with statistics and research. Can you say, "weapons of mass destruction"?

False assumptions, based on myth or misunderstanding, stand in the way of effective problem solving. To solve any problem, do not neglect the first and most essential step. Admit that you don’t have the solution. Better yet, recognize what you have tried, understand why it doesn’t work, and reject it outright. It’s the only way to make yourself receptive to the new solutions you can then generate.

The body of what we call Truth continues to change and will continue to do so. If you want to even approach my dad’s record of accuracy, you're just going to have to get used to changing your mind.

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Peter Lloyd is co-creator with Stephen Grossman of Animal Crackers, the breakthrough problem-solving tool designed to crack your toughest problems.

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