How to keep getting smarter

The smartest people I’ve met:

They retrain their minds to enjoy being wrong.

They get a dopamine hit when proven wrong because they’re excited to be closer to the truth. The truth is addictive.

In contrast, if you refuse to lose a debate, your brain keeps running old firmware.

(I realized this after comparing humble versus tribalist people arguing on Twitter. Personally, to be comfortable being wrong, I needed to appreciate that being occasionally wrong doesn’t make me look dumb to people I admire. People judge you more on your trailing average of thoughts than on the last thing you said. And good friends don’t care either way.)

Julian Shapiro