To sharpen your thinking, use ChatGPT as a Socratic partner. Feed it your argument and ask it to generate both supporting points and strong counterarguments. This dialectical process helps you anticipate objections and refine your position, leading to a more robust final synthesis.

Log your major decisions and expected outcomes into an AI, but explicitly instruct it to challenge your thinking. Since most AIs are designed to be agreeable, you must prompt them to be critical. This practice helps you uncover flaws in your logic and improve your strategic choices.

Open-mindedness is not a passive virtue but a competitive advantage. "Strategic tolerance" is the deliberate act of engaging with opposing views and information you dislike. This process pressure-tests your own ideas against reality, making you and your business strategies more resilient and effective.

Our brains are wired to find evidence that supports our existing beliefs. To counteract this dangerous bias in investing, actively search for dissenting opinions and information that challenge your thesis. A crucial question to ask is, 'What would need to happen for me to be wrong about this investment?'

AI models tend to be overly optimistic. To get a balanced market analysis, explicitly instruct AI research tools like Perplexity to act as a "devil's advocate." This helps uncover risks, challenge assumptions, and makes it easier for product managers to say "no" to weak ideas quickly.

When confronting seemingly false facts in a discussion, arguing with counter-facts is often futile. A better approach is to get curious about the background, context, and assumptions that underpin their belief, as most "facts" are more complex than they appear.

True independent thinking requires the ability to disagree, even with your heroes. A powerful test of this 'disagreeability' is to identify the person you admire most—a podcaster, creator, or thinker—and clearly articulate a specific point on which you diverge from their views. This prevents intellectual subservience.

To achieve intellectual integrity and avoid echo chambers, don't just listen to opposing views—actively try to prove them right. By forcing yourself to identify the valid points in a dissenter's argument, you challenge your own assumptions and arrive at a more robust conclusion.

To counteract the brain's tendency to preserve existing conclusions, Charles Darwin deliberately considered evidence that contradicted his hypotheses. He was most rigorous when he felt most confident in an idea—a powerful, counterintuitive method for maintaining objectivity and avoiding confirmation bias.