Mental Liquidity · Collab Fund

Changing your mind should be considered a skill, a practice to be exercised. I find that it is both too easy to make up your mind, and too hard to change it once made up.

Beliefs take effort and investment, and it hurts to realize that there may be limited ROI on your hard-fought convictions. For a lot of things in life – particularly politics, investing, and relationships – people don’t necessarily want the truth; they want certainty. Changing your mind is hard because it’s an admission that the certainty you once thought you held was an illusion. The path of least resistance is to cling to beliefs for dear life.

A question I love to ask people is, “What have you changed your mind about in the last decade?” I use “decade” because it pushes you into thinking about big things, not who you think will win the Super Bowl.

This is a great question to consider journaling about.

Be careful what beliefs you let become part of your identity. Religion and politics are contentious because almost by definition your beliefs are part of your identity – you’re not just dealing with ideas and philosophies, but tribes and belonging.

This specific call out is incredibly important to me. It also connects well with the mindfulness concept of keeping your identity small, as small as you can reasonably make it. Changing your mind is nothing compared to changing your identity.

I also think the article misses a key aspect of identity, and that is that marketers have figured out how to slip things into your identity. The callout of politics and religion is valid, but these days nearly anything can be sold to you as a component of your identity. Don't buy it.