Transcript

MAN

I think there's a tricky balancing act that Dom is unlearning, because I think one of the ways that you grow and develop through-- particularly in the later stages of your career. When you're at an early stage of your career, you're kind of picking up the core nuts and bolts of how you get to somewhere. It's almost that there's a base level of stuff that you have to get and do.

But over time, those ossify. And just because those are the things that got you to a successful point in your career, you kind of hold onto them like holy treasures. And it's incredibly difficult to drop them. And it's one of the things-- again, to come back to software developers, one of the things that I see great software developers doing is once they have established that there is a newer, better technology out there to be able to achieve things, they will drop something that they have spent many years developing expertise in to go and learn the new thing. And it takes an awful lot of confidence in your own ability to be able to do that.

I'm intensely curious. And I genuinely-- I think over time, one of the things that I've done, and again, this is a personal thing similar to what Dom has outlined, I am more than willing to change my mind at the drop of a hat if I find a convincing argument to the contrary of what I am currently holding as a belief, and I deliberately seek those out.

And actually, one of my-- when we come to what I unlearned this week, because there's a couple of articles where I think they exemplify that to a certain extent. But I think you need to be willing to change, try out new things, willing that you're not always going to succeed. But at least give new approaches a go.

MAN

Occasionally, one-on-one time with people. Because if you look at unlearning, it's normally going to the core of one of your beliefs and you need to let go of it. And I wouldn't just kind of mention this. At some point, you need to have that reflective moment and go, I'm going to drop that now.

But the weird thing is, that thing you're dropping has probably paid you a really good dividend. It's probably been a good servant for you for a number of years. But when you change your lens from the past and look to the future, you're pretty confident it's not going to be a servant in the future. So you make a conscious decision to drop it before it fails. And that does require some good faith. It requires some confidence.

I think generally, you talk about curiosity. People with the growth mindset tend to get this more than people with a fixed mindset, where you're just happy just doing. But I think it's a little bit more than just the growth mindset. It's that real curiosity to go and do something new, but not do more. It's I want to do something new, So I have to stop something to give myself the cognitive capacity to do it, and be willing to fail. And it's not easy.