#15 Thinking Again at 40,000 Feet

Past plane trips; Think Again by Adam Grant

Hey Guys

Hope you had a good week!

I’m coming to you from a position that is - quite strangely - as unfamiliar as it is familiar, 13,053 metres / 42,824 feet above sea level:

I’m seated in seat 25H on a Singapore to Sydney Scoot 787-9 (“Big Yella Fella”) Dreamliner flight, high above the sprawling Australian desert with this amazing view of the plane’s wing:

I grew up in Sydney, and it has been over three years since I was last back.

With the removal of quarantine requirements by the Australian Government from the start of this month for returning Australians citizens living in Singapore, I jumped at the opportunity to:

1. apply to my company to work from Sydney temporarily; and

2. book tickets as soon as (1) was confirmed.

For as long as I can remember, I have loved taking plane trips. The packing, the booking of a taxi, the airport, the plane, the plane food, all of it!

As a kid, it was so exciting to travel with my family to a far-off destination (everywhere from Australia is far!!) and now, as an adult (questionable!) travelling independently, it’s a place entirely free of my daily distractions. This, combined with the anticipation of a new destination (and a cheeky splash of white wine), definitely inspires a degree of focus and calm that I have not experienced since March 2020.

So sitting in a plane feels so familiar, and at the same time unfamiliar because it has a fair amount of time since I was last in a seat.

Scoot is a Singapore-based low cost carrier airline, and as such there is no in-flight entertainment on board.  Entertainment is purely BYO, and for this 7 hour journey this has been my Rakuten Kobo Clara HD e-reader on which I have just finished reading the latest book by the Wharton professor, Adam Grant:

I would like to share seven passages from the book that I highlighted during this sitting:

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1. Grit may have a dark side. It may prevent rethinking:

When we dedicate ourselves to a plan and it isn’t going as we hoped, our first instinct isn’t usually to rethink it. Instead, we tend to double down and sink more resources in the plan.

This pattern is called escalation of commitment…[which] happens because we’re rationalising creatures, constantly searching for self-justifications for our prior beliefs as a way to soothe our egos, shield our images, and validate our past decisions

…

Ironically, it can be fueled by one of the most celebrated engines of success: grit. Grit is the combination of passion and perseverance, and research shows that it can play an important role in motivation us to accomplish long-term goals.

When it comes to rethinking, though, grit may have a dark side. Experiments show that gritty people are more likely to overplay their hands in roulette and more willing to stay the course in tasks at which they’re failing and success is impossible…[t]here’s a fine line between heroic persistence and foolish stubbornness.

Sometimes the best kind of grit is gritting our teeth and turning around.

2. Do not foreclose your identity. A work career should be seen as an action to take rather than an identity to claim:

In career choices, identity foreclosure (i.e. when we settle prematurely on a sense of self without enough due diligence, and close our minds to alternative selves) often begins when adults ask kids: what do you want to be when you grow up?

…

Kids might be better off learning about careers as actions to take rather than identities to claim. When they see work as what they do rather than who they are, they become more open to exploring different possibilities…

I’ve noticed that the students who are the most certain about their career plans at twenty are often the ones with the deepest regrets by thirty. They haven’t done enough rethinking along the way…

They get trapped in an overconfidence cycle, taking pride in pursuing a career identity and surrounding themselves with people who validate their conviction. The stakes seem too high to walk away; the sacrifices of salary, status skill and time seem too great.

For the record, I think it’s better to lose the past two years of progress than to waste the next twenty…[I]dentity foreclosure is a Band-Aid: it covers up an identity crisis, but fails to cure it.

3. Ask myself the following two career questions:

I encourage my students to put a reminder in their calendars to ask some key questions twice a year.

• When did you form the aspirations you’re currently pursuing and how have you changed since then?

• Have you reached a learning plateau in your role or your workplace and is it time to consider a pivot?

Answering these career checkup questions is a way to periodically active rethinking cycles.

It helps students maintain humility about their ability to predict the future, contemplate doubts about their plans, and stay curious enough to discover new possibilities or reconsider previously discarded ones.

4. Checkups aren’t limited to careers:

Checkups aren’t limited to careers - they’re relevant to the plans we make in every domain of our lives…Whether we do checkups with our partners, our parents, or our mentors, it’s worth pausing once or twice a year to reflect on how our aspirations have changed.

As we identify past images of our lives that are no longer relevant to our future, we can start to rethink our plans.

That can set us up for happiness - as long as we’re not too fixated on finding it.

5. Focus on something other than my own happiness…in order to be happy:

As we get older, we become more focused on searching for meaning - and we’re most likely to find it in actions that benefit there.

My favourite test of meaningful work is to ask: if the job didn’t exist, how much worse off would people be?

It’s near midlife that this question often begins to loom large. At around this time, in both work and life, we feel we have more to give (and less to lose), and we’re especially keen to share our knowledge and skills with the next generation…

“Those only are happy,” philosopher John Stuart Mill wrote, “who have their minds fixed on some object other than their own happiness; on the happiness of others on the improvement of mankind, even on some art or pursuit, followed not as a means, but as itself an ideal end. Aiming thus at something else, they find happiness by the way.”

6. Be open in work and in life:

At work and in life, the best we can do is plan for what we want to learn and contribute over the next year or two, and stay open to what might come next.

To adopt an analogy from E. L. Doctorow, writing out a plan for your life “is like driving at night in the fog. You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.”

…

Our identities are open systems, and so are our lives. We don’t have to stay tethered to old images of where we want to go or who we want to be.

The simplest way to start rethinking our options is to question what we do daily.

It takes humility to reconsider our past commitments, doubt to question our present decisions, and curiosity to reimagine our future plans. What we discover along the way can free us from the shackles of our familiar surroundings and our former selves.

Rethinking liberates us to do more than update our knowledge and opinions - it’s a tool for leading a more fulfilling life.

7. Focus less on proving myself, but rather on IMPROVING myself:

When you find out you’ve made a mistake, take it as a sign that you’ve just discovered something new.

Don’t be afraid to laugh at yourself. It helps you focus less on proving yourself - and more on improving yourself.

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With that, the pilot has just announced that we’re commencing our descent into Sydney and the cabin crew are handing out the incoming passenger cards and preparing the cabin for arrival:

I’d better get cracking with filling that out. If you made it this far, thank you for reading and I hope some of the passages above resonated with you as much as they did for me.

Will come back to you next week from Sydney!

Have a great week ahead!

David