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Wednesday, September 18, 2019

Challenge Your Default - Professor Adam Grant

You may remember David Foster Wallace talking about "default settings" as unconscious living - oblivious to freedom of choice and how to think.


Here's a TED Talk by Adam Grant - Professor at Penn's Wharton Business School that explains how our default browser may indicate more than we may realize.

Consider this metaphorically.


From TED 2016:

How do creative people come up with great ideas? Organizational psychologist Adam Grant studies "originals": thinkers who dream up new ideas and take action to put them into the world. In this talk, learn three unexpected habits of originals -- including embracing failure. "The greatest originals are the ones who fail the most, because they're the ones who try the most," Grant says. "You need a lot of bad ideas in order to get a few good ones."

Excerpt:

09:20

Now, in my research, I discovered there are two different kinds of doubt. There's self-doubt and idea doubt. Self-doubt is paralyzing. It leads you to freeze. But idea doubt is energizing. It motivates you to test, to experiment, to refine, just like MLK did. And so the key to being original is just a simple thing of avoiding the leap from step three to step four. Instead of saying, "I'm crap," you say, "The first few drafts are always crap, and I'm just not there yet." So how do you get there? Well, there's a clue, it turns out, in the Internet browser that you use. We can predict your job performance and your commitment just by knowing what web browser you use. Now, some of you are not going to like the results of this study --

10:06 (Laughter)

10:08

But there is good evidence that Firefox and Chrome users significantly outperform Internet Explorer and Safari users. Yes.

10:17 (Applause)

10:19

They also stay in their jobs 15 percent longer, by the way. Why? It's not a technical advantage. The four browser groups on average have similar typing speed and they also have similar levels of computer knowledge. It's about how you got the browser. Because if you use Internet Explorer or Safari, those came preinstalled on your computer, and you accepted the default option that was handed to you. If you wanted Firefox or Chrome, you had to doubt the default and ask, is there a different option out there, and then be a little resourceful and download a new browser. So people hear about this study and they're like, "Great, if I want to get better at my job, I just need to upgrade my browser?"

10:57 (Laughter)

10:58

No, it's about being the kind of person who takes the initiative to doubt the default and look for a better option. And if you do that well, you will open yourself up to the opposite of déjà vu. There's a name for it. It's called vuja de.





“It's okay not to know all the answers. It's better to admit our ignorance than to believe answers that might be wrong. Pretending to know everything, closes the door to finding out what's really there.”
― Neil deGrasse Tyson

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