Too Short for a Blog Post, Too Long for a Tweet 355

 

Here are a few excerpts from a book I recently read, "Loserthink: How Untrained Brains Are Ruining America," by Scott Adams.

 

If you are dismissing your critics with labels they would not assign to themselves, you might be engaged in loserthink. If you call people who want everyone to have good healthcare a bunch of socialists, or you call people who want strong immigration control racists, you are not part of the rational debate. People who have good arguments use them. People who do not have good arguments try to win by labeling.

My nomination for the most loserthinkish advice in history is: “Stay in your lane.” That is the sort of advice that is better served to an enemy, not a friend. If everyone followed that advice, you wouldn’t have civilization. The world as we know it was engineered, designed, and built by people who left their lane and tried something outside their temporary skill stack. They figured it out as they went.

If you defend your point of view by saying some version of “The other side does it too,” you are abandoning the adult frame and entering a child frame. Children say, “My sister did it too!!!” Adults say, “I made a mistake. This sort of mistake is too common. Here’s what I plan to do about it.”

Refusing to admit your errors, or your team’s errors, locks you into a team sport mentality. That’s a mental prison. It makes you appear small and it doesn’t advance anyone’s interests. You’re more focused on the fight than the fix.

Loserthink involves waiting until you know how to do something right before you do anything at all. That strategy makes sense only when it is physically or financially dangerous to make a mistake. For most ambitions in life, we can jump in, make some mistakes, and figure it out from there. If you get embarrassed in the process, good for you! It means you just learned that embarrassment doesn’t kill you. And that, my friends, is like a superpower.