If You Want to be “Right,” Be Willing to Change Your Mind a Lot

It sounds simple enough, but ideas are often so ingrained in our heads that it's easy to get lost in your own opinions. During a Q&A session at 37 Signals, Bezos shares this insight:

• He said people who were right a lot of the time were people who often changed their minds. He doesn't think consistency of thought is a particularly positive trait. It's perfectly healthy—encouraged, even—to have an idea tomorrow that contradicted your idea today.

The idea is that you should consider your point of view as temporary. It's always changing, and if you come to a point where you want to go back and re-evaluate an idea, that's not a bad thing. We're all wrong a lot of the time, and backtracking on an opinion shows that you're open to new ideas that challenge the way you view the world. After all, remember that, "only imbeciles never change their minds."