In this Adam Grant Think Again review, Snarky Suzie bravely question whether rethinking is truly revolutionary or just another well-marketed crisis of confidence.
Step Into The Cult Of Rethinking
If you’ve ever woken up thinking, “Maybe I should question my opinions, my beliefs, and that questionable 2013 tattoo,” then congratulations.
You’re already living Adam Grant’s dream.
His book, Think Again: The Power of Knowing What You Don’t Know, is a 300-page pep talk for people who already have opinions about cognitive biases.
And let’s pause for a moment to admire the true genius of self-help branding.
That delicate art of turning human insecurity into a catchy subtitle.
Mark Manson cursed his way to enlightenment with The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fck.
Brené Brown taught us to wrap our emotional unraveling in a warm blanket with The Gifts of Imperfection, and James Clear convinced us that our salvation lies in smaller, better-organized habits.
And now, Adam Grant joins the pantheon with The Power of Knowing What You Don’t Know.
A phrase so humbly self-assured it practically meditates on its own.
Of course, according to researcher Brené Brown, vulnerability isn’t weakness, but courage — “uncertainty, risk, and emotional exposure,” the birthplace of empathy and love.
Which is beautiful, truly.
But in the modern self-help economy, it’s also the birthplace of hardcover sales and TED Talks standing ovations.
If you’d like a full-on vulnerability deep dive — complete with emotional exposure and courage, check out my Brené Brown: Strong Ground review.
It’s all part of the great Self-Help Irony Olympics: the more you package your existential doubt, the more certain your marketing team becomes.
Somewhere right now, probably someone’s drafting "Think Again Again: The Meta Power of Doubting Your Doubt."
Adam Grant organizational psychologist, TED darling, and the patron saint of PowerPoint enlightenment.
This time he invites us to “think like scientists.”
Which, in self-help terms, means doubting yourself just enough to seem enlightened on LinkedIn, but not enough to stop giving keynotes about it.
The premise is noble: unlearn what you know, embrace being wrong, and find joy in your intellectual humility.
The execution? A little like watching someone proudly explain gravity to Isaac Newton.
Adam Grant Think Again Review
Grant’s thesis is simple: we should celebrate the art of being wrong.
The irony, of course, is that he’s very right about being wrong.
He’s so right, in fact, that he wrote a whole book proving how right he is about the benefits of not being right.
It’s the kind of paradox that makes philosophers swoon and LinkedIn coaches salivate.
Grant divides his rethinking revolution into three neat boxes: individual, interpersonal, and collective.
In other words: rethink yourself, your friends, and your group chat.
- Individual Rethinking: Be confident enough to admit you’re clueless — but stylishly.
- Interpersonal Rethinking: Help others question their ideas, but with compassion. (Translation: gaslight them politely.)
- Collective Rethinking: Build cultures that encourage open-mindedness, unless it’s the company Slack channel, in which case, mute it.
He also introduces “thinking like a scientist,” a mindset where you form hypotheses, instead of opinions, and seek data instead of dopamine.
It’s a refreshing idea.
If you forget that scientists spend 80% of their time proving themselves wrong and 20% explaining that to people who skimmed the abstract.
Case Studies In Rethinking: Heroes, Fires, And Smartphones
Grant’s stories are his secret sauce — equal parts corporate parable and emotional TED fuel.
There’s Wagner Dodge, the firefighter who survived by rethinking his survival strategy, while everyone else didn’t.
There’s the tragic cautionary tale of BlackBerry, which refused to rethink itself into the future (pour one out for your old BBM contacts).
And of course, there’s the classic “debate changed a white supremacist’s heart” story — a self-help favorite since time immemorial.
Each example he hammers home the point:
f you don’t rethink, you die. (Metaphorically, professionally, or literally, depending on your Wi-Fi signal.)
And yet, somewhere between the emotional crescendos and corporate takeaways, you start to notice something:
Every story ends with the re-thinker winning.
There’s no messy middle, no glorious failure.
Just a triumphant “See?
Being wrong makes you right!” moment.
It’s tidy, inspiring, and deeply unrealistic — much like the idea that your manager will ever admit fault in a quarterly review.
The Self-Help Scientist Paradox
Grant’s central metaphor — “think like a scientist”, sounds bold until you realize it’s just the grown-up version of “keep an open mind.”
Scientists form hypotheses and test them with data.
Meanwhile, the rest of us form opinions and test them on Twitter (aka X).
The book celebrates intellectual humility, but it also markets it like a product.
You can practically hear the pitch: “Finally a self-help book for people too smart for self-help books.”
This is not just about growth; it’s about branding your self-doubt.
Preacher, Prosecutor, Politician, Scientist: The Hogwarts Houses of Bias
One of Grant’s most viral frameworks, and you can tell he loves a framework — is his taxonomy of mindsets:
The Preacher, the Prosecutor, the Politician, and the Scientist.
It’s like BuzzFeed meets behavioral psychology.
- The Preacher: Defends sacred beliefs, which in 2025 means refusing to delete Facebook.
- The Prosecutor: Argues to win, typically in the comments section of a news article no one asked you to read.
- The Politician: Seeks approval, a.k.a. every influencer ever.
- The Scientist: Seeks truth — but still checks the analytics after posting it.
Grant encourages us to channel our inner Scientist — curious, skeptical, data-driven.
But let’s be honest: nobody reads self-help to become less confident.
We’re here for validation, not the scientific method.
If we wanted uncertainty, we’d check our dating app messages.
“Embrace Being Wrong”: The Rebranding Of Failure
One of the most memeable ideas in Think Again is that being wrong isn’t failure.
It’s growth.
“Embrace mistakes,” Grant says. “Find joy in being wrong.”
Which sounds lovely until you realize that society only celebrates people for being wrong after they’ve turned it into a bestselling redemption arc.
For every Wagner Dodge, there are a thousand people who just got fired for rethinking the wrong policy at the wrong meeting.
Still, Grant’s message is clear: rethink or regret.
And honestly, who doesn’t want to feel morally superior while apologizing?
Corporate Curiosity: The Business Of Doubt
Grant’s workplace advice is where the satire writes itself.
He argues that the best leaders admit what they don’t know.
Which is cute, but let’s be real — when was the last time your CEO said, “I have no idea what I’m doing”?
He references studies about startup founders who “think like scientists” and pivot based on data.
Revolutionary: people who change course when something doesn’t work… succeed.
Next up: water is wet, meetings are pointless, and synergy isn’t a real thing.
But the real magic of Grant’s argument is its packaging: intellectual humility as a corporate superpower.
Admit you’re wrong, and suddenly you’re not just human — you’re innovative.
Bonus points if you can quote Albert Einstein while doing it.
Self-Help’s Favorite Echo Chamber
The genius (and absurdity) of Think Again is how it preaches open-mindedness.
To the most close-minded audience of all: people who think they’re already open-minded.
Grant’s readers are, by definition, the ones who already attend “rethinking” workshops between meditation apps and leadership retreats.
We’re not talking about a revolution here.
It’s a rebranding of confirmation bias with better lighting.
“We favor the comfort of conviction over the discomfort of doubt,” he writes.
True. But we also favor the comfort of reading about doubt from someone with a PhD and a podcast.
In the end, Grant isn’t just asking us to rethink, he’s selling us the feeling of having rethought, without the inconvenience of actually changing our minds.
It’s intellectual exfoliation: scrub off the dead opinions, keep the glow.
Think Again — Or Don’t
So, what do we learn from this Adam Grant Think Again review?
That it’s a clever, well-researched, and occasionally self-unaware ode to doubt.
That rethinking is noble, but monetized humility still feels suspiciously confident.
And that if you can quote Socrates, drop a data point, and stay humble while doing it.
Congratulations — you’ve achieved Enlightenment 2.0.
Maybe the biggest irony of all is that Think Again succeeds because it tells us exactly what we want to hear:
That we’re capable of change, that being wrong is secretly right, and that our intellectual flexibility makes us superior to everyone who hasn’t read Adam Grant.
And in the end, isn’t that what self-help is all about?
Final Thoughts: Adam Grant Think Again Review
Let’s give Grant credit — he’s trying to make humility cool again.
He’s the Marie Kondo of mindsets, helping us declutter our convictions and thank them for their service.
But as any self-help enthusiast knows, the real dopamine hit comes from believing we’ve evolved, not actually doing it.
Think Again is less a guidebook for growth and more a mirror for modern narcissism.
A beautifully written reminder that even our doubts have become content.
So by all means, rethink.
Rethink your habits, your biases, your Netflix queue.
But remember: true humility might just mean closing the book before you post about it on social media.
Snarky Suzie’s Closing Hypothesis: If knowledge is power, and knowing what you don’t know is wisdom, then realizing how much you love pretending to rethink might just be enlightenment.
Now You Rethink, Too
Go forth, dear reader. Question your assumptions.
Challenge your opinions.
And maybe — just maybe — rethink why you keep buying books that tell you to do exactly that.
Chapter Quotes With A Side Of Snark
These following quotes are found in this book:
Original: “Progress is impossible without change; and those who cannot change their minds cannot change anything.” —George Bernard Shaw
Original: “Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge.” —Charles Darwin
Original: “I have a degree from Harvard. Whenever I’m wrong, the world makes a little less sense.” —Dr. Frasier Crane
Original: “Arguments are extremely vulgar, for everybody in good society holds exactly the same opinions.” —Oscar Wilde
Original: “Exhausting someone in argument is not the same as convincing him.” —Tim Kreider
Original: “It’s a rare person who wants to hear what he doesn’t want to hear.” —Attributed to Dick Cavett
Original: “When conflict is cliché, complexity is breaking news.” —Amanda Ripley
Original: “No schooling was allowed to interfere with my education.” —Grant Allen
Original: “If only it weren’t for the people… earth would be an engineer’s paradise.” —Kurt Vonnegut
Original: “A malaise set in within a couple hours of my arriving. I thought getting a job might help. It turns out I have a lot of relatives in Hell, and, using connections, I became the assistant to a demon who pulls people’s teeth out. It wasn’t actually a job, more of an internship. But I was eager. And at first it was kind of interesting. After a while, though, you start asking yourself: Is this what I came to Hell for, to hand different kinds of pliers to a demon?” —Jack Handey
