Well, life is continuing with the theme from my last post - another full week. Not really from travel this time. My mom (in her 90s) suffered a fall a few weeks back and we’ve spent the last week watching over her in rehab. If things go according to plan (which when someone is in their 90s is not a given) we may have her back in her own apartment by the weekend, as we look for options for the next step - likely an assisted living facility. But I did manage to squeeze in a short audiobook this week. My review is again going to be on the short side.

When we think of “smart people” we often think about someone who “knows a lot of things”, someone who has put in the time to learn - either through schooling or the “school of hard knocks”. Intelligent folks, we think, are those who have the demonstrated ability to learn.

Adam Grant wants us to think about the importance of “unlearning” - the ability to rethink what we know in the light of new ideas or new evidence. Too many of us cling to our convictions about how things are, rather than acting like scientists and keeping an open mind, ready to take in new information and change our convictions accordingly.

This book takes us through the importance of rethinking and “unlearning” in our own personal lives, and in the work environment. In the middle of the book are a couple of chapters on “depolarizing our divided discussions”, which is really why I picked up this book. How do we handle conversations with folks who have different convictions than ours - political or otherwise - without having those conversations devolve into name calling or hurt feelings, but no changed convictions?

Perhaps not surprisingly the key to “depolarizing” is listening and being open to finding areas of agreement that we can build on to come to a common understanding. We need to be willing to negotiate to find the “win-win” rather than approaching conversations as “for me to win you must lose” situations.

RATING: Three and a Half Stars ⭐⭐⭐⭐

RATING COMMENTS: A relatively short audiobook full of ideas. Not really a “how to” book, it’s more of a “why” book. But the book will point you toward techniques to learn more about, so that you can dig in and learn how to really “think again”.

WHERE I GOT MY COPY: I checked out the audiobook from my library on the Libby app.