A recent Vox Conversations episode brought me towards a book about scout mindset. This is the basis of making your mind more inquisitive to look for information and understand everything fully instead of defending your beliefs.

I wrongly presumed that this was obvious to everyone, and then immediately realised that I was defending my static position already. I started to think about what happens when your beliefs become so ingrained in you that they become part of your personality. Are you the Apple guy? The Android girl? The iPad dude?

When your very person is framed by something you believe in, how can you ever hope to look at anything with a scout mindset. I’ve been guilty of this in the past, and projected my own bias onto many different things. We all have these things in us that we believe in, but the real thing to take away from this approach is to be mindful of them and make sure it doesn’t cause you to miss any information or mean you’re defending your position because you feel like it’s personal.

Beliefs don’t have to be permanent.