The Scout Mindset - Why Some People See Things Clearly and Others Don't

Scout mindset is what allows you to recognize when you are wrong, to seek out your blind spots, to test your assumptions and change course.

Life is made up of judgment calls, and the more you can avoid distorting your perception of reality, the better your judgment will be.

Two years later, Musk decided to invest most of the remainder of his PayPal profits into an electric car company, Tesla. That, too, he gave a roughly 10 percent chance of success.

Elon Musk: If something’s important enough you should try. Even if the probable outcome is failure.

scouts aren’t motivated by the thought, “This is going to succeed.” They’re motivated by the thought, “This is a bet worth taking.”

Nevertheless, you can almost always do a rough estimate that’s better than nothing. As we’ve seen, Elon Musk estimated a 10 percent chance of success and a 90 percent chance of failure for Tesla. But the value of success would be enormous—

The “self-belief” model of motivation assumes that if you acknowledge the possibility of failure, then you’ll be too demoralized or afraid to take risks. In that model, people who believe that failure is unthinkable are the ones who try the hardest to succeed. Yet in practice, things often seem to work the other way around—accepting the possibility of failure in advance is liberating. It makes you bold, not timid. It’s what gives you the courage to take the risks required to achieve something big.

Musk admitted that he actually feels fear very strongly. He’s just learned to manage that fear by coming to terms with the probability of failure. “Something that can be helpful is fatalism, to some degree,” he explained. “If you just accept the probabilities, then that diminishes fear. So in starting SpaceX, I thought the odds of success were less than 10 percent, and I just accepted that probably I would lose everything.”

So, what exactly sold Doerr on Amazon? I’ll let him explain: “I walked into the door and this guy with a boisterous laugh who was just exuding energy comes bounding down the steps. In that moment, I wanted to be in business with Jeff.”

When people claim that “admitting uncertainty” makes you look bad, they’re invariably conflating these two very different kinds of uncertainty: uncertainty “in you,” caused by your own ignorance or lack of experience, and uncertainty “in the world,” caused by the fact that reality is messy and unpredictable.

One reason people don’t like hearing uncertain answers is that it leaves them at a loss for how to act. You can reassure them by following up your uncertainty with a plan or recommendation.

being wrong isn’t inherently a failure.