People who are right a lot listen a lot and change their minds a lot. — Jeff Bezos

People who are right a lot listen a lot and change their minds a lot.

Author: Jeff Bezos

Insight: We tend to think of confident people as the ones who stick to their guns, who know what they believe and defend it fiercely. But there's something counterintuitive happening with the people who actually get things right: they're remarkably willing to abandon their positions. They listen not to be polite, but because they genuinely expect to be wrong about something. This isn't weakness—it's the opposite. It takes real confidence to say "I didn't think about that" or "You've changed my mind." In everyday life, this shows up in how we handle disagreements. Most of us are busy waiting for our turn to talk, mentally preparing our rebuttal. But people who make good decisions do something different: they ask follow-up questions, they sit with uncomfortable ideas, they actually consider that the other person might see something they don't. Changing your mind isn't a failure; it's a sign you're paying attention to new information instead of just defending old positions. The practical angle here is that listening well is actually a skill you can practice, and it makes you smarter. Not because everyone else is always right, but because every conversation contains data you didn't have before. The person who collects the most useful data wins.

Source: The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon, p. 272, 2013