How to deal with life’s inevitable setbacks?

How can we be mindful of our mistakes, grow our intelligence, and adapt?

How can we practice the art of losing as a path to flourishing in our legal careers?

I attempt to answer these questions in a recent essay published in the Columbus Bar Association’s Lawyer’s Quarterly:

http://www.cbalaw.org/_files/publications/lawyers-quarterly/The%20Art%20of%20Losing.pdf.

“Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.” -Samuel Beckett

The Heath brothers – those prolific scientist-authors whose handy acronyms help us live better – are at it again. Their latest book, Decisive: How to Make Better Choices in Life and Work, helps us synthesize and apply years of robust research on improving our decision-making.

As always for the Heath brothers, an acronym focuses their teaching on how to make better decisions: “WRAP”

1. WIDEN your options. Investigate the full range of choices available to you. Do not simply accept the frame of the problem as it first appears to you. Re-frame it. Ask others who have faced the same or similar choices. Ask experts in the field too. Read and research the problem. Above all, do not hurry your decision. Time will allow both conscious and subconscious cogitation to lead you to additional options, likely making your choices more comprehensive and beneficial.
2. REALITY-TEST your assumptions. Do not merely seek to confirm what you already know (or assume you know). Rather, you should attempt to falsify what you know. Look for contrary evidence. Again, ask for outside opinions of experts, taking special note of those who disagree with your initial leanings or those who advise you to ask further questions. Listen to them. Be wary of anyone who simply confirms the direction in which you may already lean. These steps will help you avoid the self-serving and confirmation biases. http://lawyerthinks.com/2012/02/15/i-know-im-right-i-must-be-right-i-cant-be-wrong/.
3. ATTAIN distance before deciding. Again, take your to time to allow short-term emotions and thinking to subside. Wait, in other words, to make your decision. It is a physiological fact that your vision and thinking narrow when the stress and immediacy of a problem confront you. This is true no matter how cool under pressure you think you may be; this is your anatomy responding to millions of years of evolutionary training. Walk away, sleep on it, and – most importantly – write out your long-term goals and values to ensure that you take them into account. See more on waiting to make decisions. http://lawyerthinks.com/2012/11/10/slow-down-waiting-works-better-for-decisions/.
4. PREPARE to be wrong. Accept your fallibility in advance to help you see future obstacles and pitfalls. Be ready for bad outcomes. Be humble. Be careful not to over-identify with the decision. We all must make ambiguous choices based on incomplete information. We will get it wrong – a lot. Remember our fallibility. Only then can we hope to lessen the cognitive dissonance that prevents us from recovering and learning from our mistakes.

These four steps might also enhance conventional legal thinking and the problems we lawyers face in day-to-day practice. How might “WRAP for Lawyers” help?

1. WIDEN your options: Don’t simply accept the way you’ve framed similar legal problems in the past, or the way the law has treated past similar cases. Treat the legal choice facing you and your client as novel. See it with a beginner’s mind, a mind open to questions about the nature of the problem itself. This does not mean you disregard the settled law on the issue, but rather that you consider non-legal options too. How to do this? Ask a non-lawyer how she might frame the issue. Ask an intelligent 12 year-old what he thinks. Seek the opinion of a colleague unfamiliar with the specific area of law. In other words, don’t rely solely on your own conception of the problem.
2. REALITY-TEST your assumptions. Whatever you initially think about both the problem and the solution, you should doubt. You should, in fact, scrutinize the basic assumptions guiding your approach to the problem. Again, this does not countenance disregard for law, or respect for settled legal procedures. It urges instead that you compliment the standard lawyerly approach to decisions with questions for non-legal experts. Ask experts and those experienced with similar problems outside the legal system. Moreover, seek an opinion that disagrees with your or your client’s approach and suggested solution. This is formidable  for us lawyers, trained as we are in the art of advocacy (otherwise known as the “art of confirming our biases through selective evidence”). Put your biases on trial for their life! Ask someone who doesn’t share your view on the problem. Ask someone to point out the weakness of your positions. Don’t argue with them. Listen carefully, actively to them. Even pick up the mantle of their contrary arguments, helping them make the best case against you. Only then do you understand your legal choice.
3. ATTAIN distance before deciding. Wait as long as you practically can to make legal decisions, unless you truly face that rare thing called a “legal emergency.” For more on the benefits of waiting to make decisions, see  http://lawyerthinks.com/2012/11/10/slow-down-waiting-works-better-for-decisions/. What’s more, the legal system moves slowly for many reasons, some of them less than felicitous. But one reason for the seemingly snail-like momentum of many legal outcomes remains fruitful: we tend to get it right when we slow it down, let the emotional dust settle, and consider our solutions with more objectivity, dispassion. But we will still be wrong much of the time, which brings us to . . .
4. PREPARE to be wrong. Focus here on “prepare.” Indeed, as we say above, invite dissent and forecast the consequences of wrong choices as early as possible in your thinking. Not only will this “pre-mortem” analysis help you widen your frame of reference for the legal problem and develop solutions, it should also help remind you (and your client) of an inescapable reality: unpredictability and uncertainty endure as features of legal life, despite our best efforts to counter them.

But we can counter our automatic, habitual decision-making tendencies by employing the Heath’s “WRAP” procedure. In a metaphor the Heath brothers would surely endorse, let us “wrap” our legal minds around their new book, Decisive: How to Make Better Choices in Life and Work.  Let us make better decisions in law and life.

Whether personal, economic or legal, any kind of crisis strains our brains. Our thinking is wrecked, our emotions frazzled. Panic sets in.

Among the worst are those crises that threaten our credibility and our trust among those we need – our family, our friends, and often our clients in professional life.

How do we keep our heads when those around us may be losing theirs? How do we restore waning trust when a crisis erupts?

Two “damage control” masters, attorneys Christopher Lehane and Mark Fabiani, offer a user manual of sorts in their new book, Masters of Disaster: The Ten Commandments of Damage Control.

First among damage control principles is “Do no harm.”  We must counter our tendency to cover up our mistakes. Instead, come clean. As any student of presidential history knows, the cover up is always worse than the crime.

To avoid cover up, the authors tell us to accept responsibility right out of the gate. Do not blame others. Do not just spin the favorable facts while ignoring the damaging details. It will come back to bite you. Coming clean is the only way to stay ahead of the story.

Second, we must resist the impulse to take it personally. Crisis management and damage control are strictly business. This requires mental toughness and commitment to preparation. In other words, be disciplined in your response. Keep the long view in mind. It may take many small, measured steps to reveal the truth and restore credibility.

Credibility is our third damage control principle. It is king of damage control. We must manage both the flow of information and the expectations of all interested parties. But above all, our information must be accurate.

With these three principles in mind – no harm, discipline and credibility – we can follow what the authors call “The Ten Commandments of Damage Control” -

1. Provide full disclosure – everything that can come out, will come out. Be first. Stay ahead.

2. Speak to your core audience – focus on those whose trust must be restored. Speak to their concerns. But never pander.

3. Don’t feed the fire with knee-jerk reactions in the heat of the moment. Instead, tell them you are committed to finding out the truth, owning it, and fixing the problem.

4. Details matter – know them cold. One minor misstep on details can be easily magnified.

5. Hold your head high.

6. Tell the truth about what you know, what you don’t know, and what you’re going to do to remedy things.

7. Respond with force by keeping your message simple, repeating it, and speaking to the ones who need to hear from you.

8. First in, first out: once you know the details, get your story out there quickly and candidly. But know when you must hold back.

9. Keep your hands clean when putting your story out there. In other words, no “swiftboating” the opposition. You may need to expose your opposition’s real agenda.

10. Always protect your reputation. If the other side goes after it by spreading lies and misinformation about you, then hit them hard. Reveal their underhandedness and falsifications. But, again, be certain you’ve got all the facts. If you aim to destroy, make sure you’ve got them dead to rights. Otherwise, a backfire could be disastrous for you.

These commandments serve us best as principles, not hard-and-fast rules. They are guides, not prescriptions. Exceptions can swallow rules too easily in this highly contextual, fluid world of crisis management. The three reigning principles keep us in check – do no harm, don’t take it personally, and always maintain your credibility. These will help you through the crises.

And make no mistake: we will all face our own crisis soon enough, and many times over, most likely, in our professional and personal lives. Lehane and Fabiani teach us to meet the crises of our lives. Their principles may even help us become “masters of disaster” in damage control.

Simplifying the vast, burgeoning literature of cognitive science risks violating the very lessons this promising field inspires: be skeptical of your rationality; be wary of your gut instincts; be mindful of your mind’s certainties, blinds spots, and biases.

Thinking is complicated, laborious mental work for most of us. Respecting that complexity without reducing it, cognitive science can offer a few emerging lessons to help our mental labors:

1. Don’t just “blink.” Your gut instinct is not often your best guide to seemingly simple problems. Seemingly simple problems still require reasoning through. We’re just not that good at thinking, truth be told, even for what we assume are the smaller problems. In fact, more than 4-9 distinct variables of information can quickly overwhelm our brain’s built-in reasoning constraints. And even when dealing with smaller chunks of information, we should still rationally evaluate and “fact check” our gut instincts.
2. Novel problems need reasoning too. But first ask how your past experience might help you solve the new problem. Let experience and analogy guide you, at least to the extent these can offer practical, rational solutions. If the problem is truly unprecedented, then intuition or emotion probably can’t get you to the correct solution. The only way to solve a unique problem may be a unique solution. As Einstein wisely remarked, you can’t often solve a problem from within that problem’s frame of reference.
3. Embrace uncertainty—humility first, certainty last. Always entertain competing hypotheses. Always remind yourself of what you don’t know. Be especially wary of what you don’t know you don’t know, what Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld once called “unknown unknowns.”
4. You know more than you know. Your brain is acquiring wisdom through experience, trial and error.  Once you’ve become an expert (only after 7-10 years of practice) you can trust your intuitions in your domain of expertise.
5. Above all, think about your thinking. There is no secret recipe for decision making.  There should only be humble vigilance, our commitment to avoiding those avoidable errors in life.

These guides to better thinking come from the concluding pages of Jonah Lehrer’s “How We Decide,” one of the first popular non-fiction books to parse the cognitive and social science experiments from the last half of the twentieth century. Critics argue that Lehrer and similar journalists have over-simplified the science and, in some cases, misinterpreted the results. Those journalists are, say critics, guilty of the same cognitive crimes they attempt to elucidate.

Lehrer himself has come under fire recently for recycling his own writings and misquoting sources, among other journalistic breaches. We won’t adjudicate those charges here. But we can at least spot in the literature a growing consensus among the scientists themselves that the above advice demonstrably improves our thinking.

And the advice applies equally to us lawyers. We risk both complacency and hubris in our legal thinking. On the one hand, we often seek to solve legal problems based on what instantly “feels” right, and then we fit that feeling to the most convenient rules and procedures in the case. This is usually our intuitive or “blink” reaction to many, if not, most legal problems. In relying too heavily on our intuitive legal judgment, we often succumb to motivated reasoning that privileges our emotional, as opposed to our logical, minds. This, in turn, renders us more susceptible to many of the cognitive biases we’ve highlighted in this blog, e.g. self-serving, sunk-cost, and hindsight biases. Our snap judgments can lead us to error.

On the other hand, we also take great pains to construct rational, bullet-proof arguments, even those we build from disparate facts and ambiguous laws. In other words, the solutions we most often build in the legal system. Our inspired logic chopping, however, can isolate and abstract our self-selected evidence to the exclusion of other relevant information. We pick and choose. We are highly selective. Partisan. And when we select one thing, we necessarily leave something else out. This selectivity carries risks similar to those we encounter with gut reactions above – we select from unrecognized biases and implicit value judgments.

We thus swing between our cock-sure rationality and our snap intuition, with both ends of the spectrum governed in many cases by hidden, subconscious predispositions. To center this swinging pendulum of our legal thought and temper the influence of cognitive biases, we can regularly “think about our legal thinking,” reminding ourselves to carefully, slowly contemplate even the most obvious legal problems while simultaneously trusting our hard-won intuitions and expertise in certain legal matters. It is a question of balance.

Achieving balanced thought is perhaps our greatest challenge as lawyers. Balanced legal judgment is one of our defining virtues. This virtue is well served by regularly “thinking about our legal thinking.” Rationality and emotion might then swing less wildly in us lawyers. Of course, the mind’s pendulum will still swing. But at least we can swing mindfully along with it.

We decide too fast. We should take more time to think through the timing of our decisions. We should pause when faced with what seem like pressing, urgent questions. Indeed, the most pressing questions paradoxically require us to slow down the most. Wait. Time is more flexible than we think.

Always pressed for time in a profession that defines itself by the clock’s dollar, the client’s urgent needs, and the court’s deadlines, we lawyers can learn from the art and science of decision timing.

To begin, two broad questions frame the issue:

1. How long should we take to react or decide in a specific situation?

2. How then should we spend our time leading up to moment of decision?

The short answer: in most situations we should take more time than we do to decide. The longer we wait the better. And once we sense the proper time to make our decision, we should wait until that last possible instant. In other words, if we have two days, we should wait until the last minute of the second day to decide. If we have a year, we should wait until day 364. Even if we only have seconds, we should stretch it as long as we can before deciding. As contrary as this advice appears, years of cognitive and neuroscientific research have confirmed that waiting until the last possible moment to act or decide results in the best outcome. This is as true for athletes swinging baseball bats as for stock brokers deciding retirement investments. And it is true for us lawyers.

It is, in fact, the essence of professional judgment for lawyers – when to make a decision. Timing is everything for us. How do we weigh the immediate versus distant consequences? The best lawyers know how to manage time. They are “masters of delay,” as Frank Partnoy puts it in his new book, Wait: the Art and Science of Delay. Able lawyers can, of course, act quickly. But the most able go slow. They use both intuition and analysis to wait for the ideal time to make their move. These lawyers, using our 2-step decision framework above, “understand how long they have available to make a decision, and then, given that time frame, they wait as long as they possibly can.”

Before we turn our attention back to the legal profession, let’s look at test cases from the worlds of finance and medicine, two arenas where decision making means the difference between health and disaster. First, take Mad Money’s wild man Jim Cramer. He frenetically, theatrically renders ad hoc investment decisions to his eager audience. What results? Study after study has shown that people who followed Cramer’s snap decisions lost almost 1/3 of their money in less than two months. The same result over the long term: Cramer’s investors underperformed the market. Fast decisions led to losses.

Now compare Cramer to Warren Buffet. He studies the market, reads financial statements, and prepares all the time. But what he doesn’t do is act quickly. He delays his decisions as much as possible. He takes the long view. And he steadily out-performs the competition. His disciplined delay creates the best financial decisions.

We see this same phenomenon in medicine. Complex medical decisions, including diagnosis and treatment, require “pause points,” during which the doctor must stop to check his procedure, thinking, and instincts. These pause points slow down the tempo of decision making and lead to better medical outcomes, especially during surgery. As a twist on the old saying goes, “Don’t just do something. Stand there!”

Back to us lawyers. How might waiting, slowing down, and managing time improve our performance? Consider how often we question and interview witnesses and clients and other lawyers. Does the way we manage the timing of our questions matter? Most definitely. Partnoy provides an illuminating example. He captures the fascinating timing of 60 Minutes’ Steve Kroft interviewing President Obama about the killing of Bin Laden.

Kroft was only given a few mintues to interview Obama.  The reporter had to manage his time very carefully. This required intense preparation up to last minute before Kroft sat down with the President. As the interview begins, Kroft asks a closed-ended question about how Obama feels, which invites a short but emotive response from the President. And it gets one. It slows things down and seemingly sets the tone for an open, inviting conversation on a difficult subject.

But, then, by keeping his follow-up questions closed-ended and short, Kroft elicits two additional kinds of answers: medium length answers with a mix of emotion and fact, and also short length answers with just facts. These are meticulously prepared questions combined with an experienced questioner’s sense of tempo and control. Kroft further manages time, and thus control, by effective use of silence following a short, powerful answer to a close-ended question. By drawing out the silence between them, the questioner solidifies the impact of the answer.

More fascinating still is the way Obama, a master of timing himself, orients to Kroft’s short questions by offering even shorter answers, at one point simply answering with one word declarations, e.g., “Yes.”

Kroft, not to be outsmarted, resorts to shorter questions himself. Here again, silence – the ultimate delay in conversation – works to the questioner’s advantage. He lets the last short answer hang for devastating effect, filled with connotation and atmosphere for the audience while simultaneously allowing the questioner to reclaim control of the dialogue. The back and forth becomes a mini-battle, each man attempting to get inside the other’s decision making loop.

We see that sometimes being slower than your opponent is better. For instance, by appearing slow to your opponent, you may lead them to believe that fast, short answers will gain advantage. But not always, as this exchange between Kroft and Obama reveals:

Trying to set Obama up for a quick “yes-no” response, Kroft asks close-endedly: “Is this the first time that you’ve ever ordered someone killed?”

But Obama sees the timing ploy. Recognizing that a quick response might open the door to inquiries about illegal assassinations, Obama retreats to the longer, slower (more evasive?) answer: “Well, keep in mind that, you know, every time I make a decision about launching a missile, every time I make a decision about sending troops into battle, you know, . . .” and on and on he goes for what amounts to more than a 50-word answer. Slower was better.

For a telling peek at the two master communicators skillfully using time – and the art of delay in particular – watch the entire sequence at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AuYFhbkwMyI (part 1) and http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rZtVDGRCMHU&feature=relmfu (part 2). Equally interesting is Al Tompkins’ dissection of Steve Kroft’s interview methods at http://www.poynter.org/latest-news/als-morning-meeting/131544/dissecting-the-kroftobama-60-minutes-interview/. Tompkins gives a crash course in how and why to break all the rules of interviewing by skillfully deploying open, closed, and “non-question” questions, among other techniques. Tompkins’ piece highlights the essence of timing in decision making.

For us lawyers the Kroft-Obama interview serves as a wonderful, instructive reminder that tempo rules, that good timing is more than just technique, and that slow moves often work better than fast ones.

The late Carl Sagan brought us many lasting intellectual treasures, among them an inspiring blend of enthusiasm, imagination, and knowledge about our cosmos. A lesser known, but still immensely useful, contribution to the never-ending search for knowledge is Sagan’s “Baloney Detection Kit,” a list of mental tools to avoid our ever-present tendency toward “magical” thinking.

Sagan’s final book, The Demon-Haunted World, contains the kit along with many examples from the world of pseudoscience.

On our own quest for rationality and lucidity in legal matters, we lawyers, too, can learn from Sagan’s example. Let us push back against our own lazy legal thinking by recalling the “Baloney Detection Kit.” In every case where we must prove something, in every case where our client makes a factual claim, and in every case where the facts matter – in other words, in all cases, we should apply the following questions:

• How reliable is the source?

• Does this source make similar claims?

• Have the claims been verified by another reliable source?

• How does the claim fit with what we know about how the world works?

• Has anyone gone out of the way to disprove the claim or has only supportive evidence been sought?

• Does the preponderance of evidence point to the conclusion or another?

• Is the claimant employing accepted rules of reason and research?

• Is the claimant providing explanation of observed phenomena or merely denying the existence of explanation?

• If the claimant proffers a new explanation, does it account for as many phenomena as the old explanation?

• Does the claimant’s personal beliefs and biases drive the conclusion, or vice versa?

Michael Shermer offers a similar list of tools to debunk nonsense in his book, Why People Believe Weird Things:

• Anecdotes do not make proof.  E.g., 100 Kansas farmers see UFO without corroborative physical proof.  Remember, we are fallible human storytellers
• Scientific language does not make science.  E.g., end run around missing evidence by sounding impressive.
• Bold statements do not make statements true.  E.g., Remember “cold fusion”?  Enormous claims made for its power and truth but supportive evidence is scarce as hen’s teeth
• Hearsay does not equal correctness.  E.g., they laughed at Copernicus, laughed at the Wright Brothers, and yes, well, they laughed at the Marx Brothers.
• Burden of proof always on the person making the claim.
• Rumors do not equal reality.
• The unexplained is not inexplicable.  E.g., magicians don’t tell their secrets because their tricks are simple but difficult to perceive.
• Failures are rationalized—errors get us closer to the truth.  Don’t rationalize; admit.
• After-the-fact reasoning.  E.g., baseball player who does not shave and hits 2 home runs. It must be the beard!  Correlation does not necessarily equal causation.
• Coincidence.  E.g., conjunctions of events without apparent causal relationship.  We don’t understand probability very well.  Human mind is designed to make easy connections.
• Representativeness—remember the large context in which the event occurs.  Always analyze the event for its representativeness of its class, e.g., Bermuda triangle has heavy ship traffic, making accidents more likely.
• Emotive words and false analogies—tools of rhetoric designed to provoke emotion and obscure rationality.
• Ad ignorantiam—appeal to ignorance, i.e., if you can’t disprove it must be true:  if you cant’ disprove the existence of psychic powers, then they must exist.  Absurd.
• Ad Hominem—discredit the person by personal attack.
• Hasty generalization—improper induction or prejudice, conclusion drawn before the facts are in.
• Over reliance on authority.
• Either-Or fallacy (fallacy of negation or false dilemma)—dichotomize to discredit one position, forcing them to accept the other.
• Circular reasoning—fallacy of redundancy, begging Qs, conclusion merely restates the premises.
• Reductio ad absurdum—slippery slope—carry argument to its logical end, reducing it to an absurdity.
• Effort inadequacy—need for simplicity because thinking is hard work.  Solutions may be simple but usually are not.
• Ideological immunity—built up immunity to change in system of ideas.
• The observer changes the observed.  E.g., anthropologist studies a tribe, a scientist observes an electron
• The equipment constructs the results.  E.g., size of telescope influences our belief about the size of the universe

When you want to convince someone, you can make an argument or  you can tell a story. Which path do you choose? If you argue, you focus on logic, truth, coherence. If you tell a story, on the other hand, you aim at emotional connection, imagination, and verisimilitude. Analysis for argument, drama for story.

You can test your argument against the rules of reason and empiricism. Arguments are right or wrong, logical or illogical. Stories don’t work that way. We don’t test stories in the same way. Instead, we connect emotionally to narrative, to the unfolding particulars of the character, the conflict, and the theme. This is not to say that stories can’t convey powerful, revelatory truths. The best ones usually do. But that’s not why stories appeal to us, at least not primarily why. Stories, unlike arguments, appeal to us because they create meaning, and meaning is what renders us human.

So, how do stories create this meaning? Where does meaning come from? Through language, naturally, if not entirely. We use words to tell a story. Fine, you say, but this only pushes the question further back: how then do words make meaning? Here, again, we must further refine our question, the end of the regress: how do our minds make meaning?

Recent cognitive science and linguistic research suggests that our minds make meaning through embodied simulations. When we hear or read the words of a story, those words trigger the parts of our brains usually reserved for action and perception. That’s right, words create simulations in our minds using the same parts of the brain we use for directly interacting with the world, such as eating, grabbing, running, hugging . . .

Meaning, then, is not simply a matter of definitions, as many of us dictionary-lovers previously believed. Rather, according to the embodiment theory, our brains construct meanings through the same mental networks that allow us to see, hear, feel and act in the world. We come to understand language by automatically, subconsciously simulating in our minds what it would be like to experience the things described.

This insight may not seem all that revelatory until we consider the implications. George Lakoff says it best in his introduction to Louder Than Words – The New Science of How The Mind Makes Meaning:

“Every thought we have or can have, every goal we set, every decision or judgment we make, every idea we communicate makes use of the same embodied system we use to perceive, act, and feel. None of it is abstract in any way. Not moral systems. Not political ideologies. Not mathematics or scientific theories. And not language.”

In other words, meaning is not about abstract definitions. It is about our experience in the world. And because meaning is about our experience – our specific actions and perceptions – it is intrinsically personal to each of us. Moreover, these personal meanings are changeable and constructive, not stable and fixed. So, to answer this blog entry’s titular question, meaning is something you construct in your mind based on your own experiences.

Which brings us full circle, back to the choice between story and argument with which we began. Do you argue or tell a story? What once appeared a live choice between two alternatives now reveals itself to be a rhetorical question. Of course, you tell a story, as you must, as only you can, as you create meaning for yourself and others.

Three assumptions misguide our practice in all facets of our personal and professional lives.

1. Practice makes perfect. No, practice makes permanent. Practice can be wasteful and unproductive unless you practice fewer, more important skills better and more deeply.

2. Practice with purpose. No, practice with concrete, measurable objectives. Make each objective achievable, just beyond your current capabilities.

3. Practice to improve your weaknesses. No, practice your “bright spots” or the skills you already do well. Practice is often most effective for taking your good skills to masterful levels of performance.

You’ll find these and other helpful guides to the art and science of practice in “Practice Perfect: 42 Rules for Getting Better at Getting Better,” by Doug Lemov, Erica Woolway and Katie Yezzi.

The book offers useful, sometimes counterintuitive, but always well-tested guidance on how to precisely engineer our practice to transform our talents.

The book teaches us, as its subtitle says, how to “get better and getting better.”

As you practice your talents, remember to isolate single skills at which you’re already good, then set incremental objectives to achieve mastery.

We listen to the President’s Press Secretary with skepticism. We’re skeptical because we know the Press Secretary’s job is to justify the President’s policies and decisions. The Press Secretary, no matter how suspect the President’s decision, will always defend it. Not just defend it, but find ways to praise the decision. The Press Secretary is trying a lot harder to “look” right than “be” right.

Is the Press Secretary aware of this? Does he see himself as a cynical manipulator, a media savvy wordsmith who cares more about appearing right than actually being right? Not if he’s like you and me. Like us, his moral intuitions come first, and his strategic reasoning comes second. Our reasoning mind is more like a politician who wants votes than a scientist who wants truth.

But we don’t so easily see this about ourselves. Instead, we believe we’re rational, objective, and fair-minded in our beliefs. We use reason and evidence, we tell ourselves, to reach conclusions about our most important beliefs, such as politics, religion, and morals. Those with different beliefs, on the other hand, fail to reason as well as us. They’re emotionally driven to their conclusions. They ignore the facts. They just don’t get it.

This is our own personal, in-house Press Secretary at work. Our inner politician. And he’s almost always at work when we think and act in the world, especially when we make judgments about right and wrong. In fact, recent research in cognitive science reveals the following five features of our minds:

1. Our conscious reasoning works like an inner “press secretary” who reflexively justifies all that we say and do.

2. Our inner “press secretary” covers up our white lies and routine mistakes so effectively that we convince even ourselves that we’re honest and error-free.

3. Reasoning can take us to any conclusion we want to reach. When we want to believe something, we ask ourselves “Can I believe it?” But when we don’t want to believe something, we ask ourselves “Must I believe it?” We answer yes to the first and no to the second.

4. We’re all obsessed with what others think of us, whether we acknowledge it or not.

5. We’re “groupish” in moral and political matters, which means that we use our reasoning to support our group. Our reasoning is motivated. It is confirmatory, not disinterested.

These findings force the uncomfortable conclusion that reason is not all it’s cracked up to be. In fact, our faith in the power of reason may be something of a delusion. As neuroscientist Jonathan Haidt says, “It is an example of faith in something that does not exist.”  Haidt and other moral intuitionists caution us to be wary of the idea that reason is an entirely noble, god-like attribute of humans, an attribute that leads us to moral truth. If this were true, then moral philosophers should be more virtuous than the rest of us. They’re not, as studies have shown over and over again.

So, says Haidt and others, anyone who values truth should stop worshipping reason. The distinctively human ability to reason developed not to find truth, but instead to help us argue, persuade, and manipulate in social settings. Under this evolutionary view, reason is an adaptation that promotes our survival, not truth.

Putting aside for the moment whether this evolutionary account of reason is itself true, let’s consider the implications of Haidt’s conclusion. Does it mean we throw out reason and simply “go with our gut?” Well, in certain situations, such as interpersonal judgments and consumer choices, the answer may be “yes,” according to researchers. But the larger point is simply that we must be very careful about any one individual’s ability to reason.

We must be careful about individual reasoning because each of us, left to our own unchecked rationality, will just find evidence to support the position we already hold. The confirmation and self-serving biases we’ve explored before in this blog are powerful, almost insurmountable. As individuals we’re simply not that good at being open-minded, truth-seeking reasoners. We intuitively care too much about our own self-interest and reputation.

But in diverse groups, where we challenge and test one another’s evidence, we can produce better reasoning that comes closer to the truth. To counter the overwhelming influence of our inner Press Secretary, we should invite a small crowd of cognitively diverse, good-natured skeptics to the table where we might find, as the saying goes, two (or more) heads really are better than one. Such cognitive diversity embraces multiple perspectives, opens debate on alternative solutions, and promotes counterarguments to the all-powerful inner Press Secretary. Why? Because diverse groups usually outperform their homogenous counterparts, whether on the scale of the small business or the city or the entire ecosystem. History persistently teaches us that cognitive uniformity leads to stagnation or, worse, death.

At the same time, even within cognitively diverse groups we must always guard against conformity and common incentives to avoid the well-known “group think” phenomenon. We must not surround ourselves only with like-minded people. We must seek out different views; we must embrace dissent. In doing so, as Haidt reminds us, “the truth will emerge as a large number of flawed and limited minds battle it out.”

Why do some people wilt when faced with setbacks? Why do others thrive in the same circumstances?

Imagine you’re given a puzzle to solve in a certain time. It’s not too hard. But it does challenge you. You complete it on time. You’re pleased. Now you take on a harder puzzle. This one demands mental skills you’ve not studied or previously encountered. You’re stumped. You fail to solve the puzzle. Time’s up.

How do you react to your failure? Your reaction, say cognitive scientists, tells us a lot about whether you will wilt or thrive in the face of life’s inevitable setbacks.

Some among us – and we’ve all done this at one time or another – react to such failures by saying, “This is a waste of my time, I’m bored, I’m just not very good at this.” Others, however, respond, “I can do this, I’m getting this now, this is interesting.”

Two radically different responses to the same failure. Keep in mind that neither group solved the puzzle. Both groups failed. But that’s not the point, say researchers.

The point is why we respond so differently to our failures. It’s not because of our abilities. It’s not because of our interest either. We’re both capable and engaged in solving the puzzle. So, why the difference?

The answer is simple, yet life-changing, according to Ken Bain in his newest book, “What the Best College Students Do.”

Those who wilt see intelligence as a fixed trait, whereas those who thrive believe that you can expand your smarts with effort. If we believe we’re born with a certain level of brainpower and nothing changes it, then failure to solve the puzzle worries us that we’re just not as smart as we had hoped. We’re confronted with a challenge to our view of ourselves as smart. And so we want out. We often quit.

If, on the other hand, we see effort as mattering more than intelligence, then everything changes. If we see intelligence not as some fixed quality but rather as a collection of abilities that can be improved with effort over time, then we just want to get better at solving puzzles. We no longer care whether we “look smart” to ourselves or others. And that makes all the difference.

Psychologists distinguish between “helpless” and “growth” mindsets. The former believe they just can’t do something because they “aren’t that smart.” The latter feel that they can master new skills and grow their abilities if they try. When they fail, they look for new strategies. And they thrive in the face of setbacks.

Why do many believe that intelligence is a stable, fixed trait that we can’t do anything about? Some say our culture contributes to this false notion. IQ tests and praising smarts instead of effort both probably instill the idea that we’ve either got it or not. In other words, we’re conditioned to believe life depends on our innate level of intelligence, not on how hard we work at growing and stretching our cognitive abilities. On this view, intelligence is a ladder and your place on the rungs is stuck for life.

Can we come up with a better, more encouraging, and more realistic metaphor for intelligence? How about a tree with countless branches, with unique and interconnected limbs representing the many capabilities within each of us to flourish in different ways? On this tree of intelligence, we still maintain standards and we still strive to achieve them, but we are less driven by the desire to compete with others for the best grades or the highest test scores.

This change in attitude toward intelligence can alter our sense of self as well. We’re less inclined to value ourselves based on where we rank or which rung of the ladder we’ve ascended. Instead, we’re more inclined toward intrinsic motivation, the kind that seeks to achieve personal bests rather than winning competitions with others. The only competition is with ourselves. This intrinsic motivation will feed our appetite for learning and grow our minds. Failures then become a kind of nourishment for our own intellectual development, not judgments about our worth or status. Embracing our failures in this way, we become lifelong learners on the vast and flourishing tree of knowledge. We grow our knowledge. We embrace failure to think better.