In 1974, Stephen Hawking bet Kip Thorne a subscription to Penthouse magazine that a bright object in Cygnus wasn’t a black hole.
Sixteen years later, Thorne proved it was.
Hawking lost the bet, and the magazines were delivered.
This wasn’t the last time he made and lost a public wager.
He also bet Peter Higgs $100 that the Higgs boson would never be found.
When it was, Hawking paid up and congratulated Higgs.
Hawking understood a simple truth.
Being wrong isn’t the problem.
Refusing to change your mind is.
Abraham Lincoln filled his cabinet with rivals who had openly opposed him.
Most leaders surround themselves with yes-men.
Lincoln wanted the opposite.
He needed people to tell him where he was blind.
That’s how he won the war.
The CIA uses Red Teams—groups tasked with proving assumptions wrong.
When intelligence seems airtight, a Red Team tries to poke holes in it.
After the raid that killed Osama bin Laden, White House officials credited Red Team analysis for preventing a catastrophic mistake.
History is full of people who changed their minds and changed the world.
Steve Jobs resisted the idea of third-party apps on the iPhone.
He wanted a closed system.
But his team pushed back, and he eventually relented.
That decision turned the App Store into a trillion-dollar ecosystem.
Warren Buffett dismissed tech stocks for years.
He considered them too risky.
Now, Apple is Buffett's largest investment.
It’s worth more than double his No. 2 holding, Bank of America.
Richard Feynman, one of the greatest physicists of the 20th century, doubted that light could behave as both a particle and a wave.
He resisted it for years.
Then, through experiments and curiosity, he changed his mind.
He helped develop quantum electrodynamics and won a Nobel Prize.
Oprah Winfrey dismissed the idea of launching her own network.
She thought traditional TV was the only way forward.
Then she changed her mind, bet on herself, and built OWN, a media empire that reached millions with its motto "Dream it, do it."
Before the 2008 crash, most economists ignored extreme outliers.
They clung to models that assumed the world was predictable.
Then came Nassim Taleb.
He saw the flaw.
He called these rare, unpredictable events Black Swans.
And the rest is history.
Brad Pitt didn’t build a team of agreeable people in Moneyball.
He surrounded himself with those who challenged assumptions and rethought how baseball teams are built.
Over Christmas, I read “Creativity, Inc.” by Ed Catmull, a co-founder of Pixar.
Ed pulls back the curtain on Pixar’s biggest creative secret.
They foster creativity through candour.
At Pixar, candour isn’t just encouraged—it’s engineered.
The tool?
The Braintrust.
A group of trusted peers who tear apart films in progress—not to tear them down, but to make them better.
They have no hidden agendas, and no one is motivated by credit or looking good.
As Ed puts it, their job is to “push towards excellence, and root out mediocrity.”
The Braintrust starts with the basic premise:
“Early on, all of our movies suck. Pixar films are not good at first, and our job is to make them… go, as I say, ‘from suck to non-suck.’”
Can you imagine that?
Here’s one of Pixar’s founders saying that all their films suck at first.
Not exactly the genius origin story we love to tell.
We want to believe in the myth of instant brilliance.
Some lone genius, locked in a lab, sketching Woody with one hand, coding with the other, fueled by espresso and divine inspiration.
Then—boom—lightning strikes, the servers hum, the pixels align, and a masterpiece is born, flawless, and Oscar-ready.
But that’s not how creativity works.
Great ideas don’t appear fully formed.
They start messy, clumsy, incomplete.
And that’s okay.
The Braintrust turns rough drafts into gold.
It helps creatives see what they’re blind to.
Because when you’re inside the jar, you can’t read the label.
You get lost in the weeds.
We all do.
“The Braintrust is valuable because it broadens your perspective, allowing you to peer — at least briefly — through others’ eyes…It’s the film, not the filmmaker, that is under the microscope.”
Interestingly, the Braintrust has no authority, it doesn’t give orders or demand changes.
It only identifies loopholes and asks the right questions.
The director calls the shots.
And that’s rare.
Most leaders don’t want pushback.
They tune out boat rockers and listen to bootlickers.
A choir of yes-men makes great cheerleaders but rethinking—changing your mind–requires something else.
A challenge network.
The more power, status, or expertise you gain, the easier it is to fall into an echo chamber.
The smartest minds in the world knew the cost of not being challenged.
They already knew what they believed.
What they wanted was to be proven wrong.
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