I sometimes ask people, usually in a workshop setting where they cannot easily escape, to tell me about the last time they genuinely changed their mind about something that mattered. Interestingly, most people cannot come up with an example from the past year. Many cannot come up with one at all. And these are, almost without exception, intelligent and thoughtful people who would describe themselves as open-minded and evidence-driven.

The reason, I think, is that we quietly convert our opinions into property. A position starts out as a provisional best guess, but becomes something we own. Abandoning it feels like a public admission that the earlier version of us was wrong, which for most people is a genuinely threatening prospect. So we defend positions long past the point where we privately believe them, and we experience each new piece of contrary evidence as an attack to be repelled rather than information to be used.

The antidote I keep coming back to is the discipline practiced in the VC community: strong opinions loosely held. And specifically practicing the change of mind in public rather than in private. Say the words out loud: I argued for this last quarter and I now think I was wrong, and here is what changed my thinking. You will notice that the people around you trust you more rather than less. A person who has never publicly revised a position is not demonstrating good judgement; they are demonstrating that their conclusions are not connected to evidence in any meaningful way. So, as a reflection for today: what is the last thing you genuinely changed your mind about? And if the answer takes more than a moment to find, what does that tell you?