Adam Grant

Sim Sitkin wrote a great paper on what he called a strategy of small losses, which is what's the tiniest experiment you could run to figure out if your hypothesis is wrong?

And then that saves you a ton of time and energy and maybe money too because you're able to rule it out as opposed to sort of throwing a lot of good money after bad.

And so it sounds like you find yourself doing that on a regular basis.

Yeah, you do do that.

And it's...

I didn't fully understand it until you describe it now.

Because I'm used to people, I know lots of people who are indecisive or wishy-washy.

But they usually have ambivalent opinions and a lot of uncertainty.

And you bounce from one extreme to the other.

Yes, yes, yes, yes.

And this is what I was getting at when I misspoke a moment ago and said, you go from one extreme to the other.

It sounds like you're going from one extreme to the other.

Yes.

And I misperceive it as you actually having, like you loved an idea and now you hated it when really that was your mode of experimentation is, I hear you saying you have to embody it.

You have to live as if you've already committed to the option in order to know what you really think of it.

No, no.

I was actually thinking Herminia Ibarra, provisional self.

You are trying on a new wardrobe.

You haven't bought it, but you're looking like you're looking at this wardrobe from every angle and you're admiring everything that's great about it.

And then you find something you don't like about it.