A special for Momentum 2016 “Hello Future” #cmbmomentum16

I once accepted an award for being the smartest boy in my high school.  It was one of my finer moments.

Don’t misunderstand.  I didn’t really win the award.  I simply walked up on the stage and accepted it before they had the chance to announce the real winner much to the amusement of my giggle-at-anything classmates.

This week in Orlando our little industry will gather at Disney Really Nifty Resort to learn what we can from really smart guys and gals.  “Learn what we can” is the catch phrase, literally.

What is most familiar is most believable, and the stuff we haven’t yet learned is inevitably unfamiliar.  That tends to make us skeptics.

“It’s what you learn after you know it all that counts.”
~John Wooden

Confirmation bias is “the tendency to develop a quick belief about a situation and then seek out information that bolsters our beliefs.” Chip and Dan Heath “Decisive. How to Make Better Choices in Life and Work”

In other words, we tend to believe what we already believe.  Today’s political campaigning is dependent on it.

Consequently we’re skeptical of people that aren’t like us and tell that us things we’ve never heard before.

This week at Momentum, Michelle Younkman and her team have assembled several smart people that probably aren’t like us and will share things we’ve never heard before.  There’s a chance that we could learn a lot from them.

But we’ll have to admit we don’t know it all.

“…you can’t learn anything when you’re trying to look like the smartest person in the room.”
~Barbara Kingsolver