I love being challenged by new ideas. I’ll certainly defend my point of view on any given subject, but I try to remain open to other possibilities. As Daniel Kahneman has said, it can be a great to be proven wrong because then you are “less wrong that you were before“.
On a recent episode of the 2Bobs podcast, Blair Enns got into this idea a bit as well when talking about finding information that is outside of our filter bubble. He said:
“I think because many of us, maybe even most of us, seek to ingest the information to cement our own biases instead of ingesting information that challenges our ideas, challenges our thinking.”
It’s a balancing act that I often struggle with. I want to dig deeper into the things I believe so that I can more soundly understand and defend them, but that’s not far off from the bias of a closed mind.
Having people around that don’t agree with everything that I believe is a great thing, provided that the conversations can remain civil. Those that think differently than I do but are caring and empathic people are some of my very favorites to spend time with.
Do you do anything in particular to avoid simply cementing your own biases?
