you cannot be a good academic unless you’re always…
Page 56 you cannot be a good academic unless you’re always willing to cross in the excepted wisdom, even to believe that you are yourself might be wrong. To question your own beliefs and actions is often the best way of learning.
— from Expanding Your Range (Growth/Change/Education/Learning/Habit) · 21 letters on life and its challenges by Charles handy
In the book
Fourth, and this is a hard one, love truth more than you love being right — which means being willing to admit you are wrong, and welcoming new information even when it overturns a belief you held dear, because now you finally have the truth. To question your own beliefs and actions is often the very best way to learn, and acquiring real knowledge is not passive: it takes deliberate, sustained effort. Treat every mistake as a lesson rather than a failure — the only real mistake is the one from which you learn nothing — and learn to interrogate information instead of simply swallowing it, thinking like a fact-checker who refuses to treat popularity as proof. — Expanding Your Range (Growth/Change/Education/Learning/Habit)