Tim Cook shares the No. 1 trait that set Steve Jobs apart from most people: ‘Very few people have that skill’

Tim Cook learned a lot from Steve Jobs in the 13 years he worked with the late Apple co-founder.

“For those of us that were fortunate enough to work with him, he was the teacher of a lifetime,” Cook told The Wall Street Journal on Sunday. The lessons he picked up from his longtime mentor more than justified his decision to ignore doubters and leave a good job at Compaq to join Apple in 1998, he said.

“I thought I had a chance of a lifetime to work with a genius that started the entire industry,” said Cook.

Cook was particularly “enamored” with one specific skill he learned from Jobs, he said: “Not to be married to my past views. Not to be so proud you can’t change your mind when you’re presented with new evidence in things. He could change like this. I, initially, was sort of taken aback by that. And, then I became so enamored with it.”

Cook went on to call Jobs’ willingness to change his mind on any topic “a brilliant skill” — and one that’s less common than you might think.

“Very few people have that skill, because they get married to their past views,” said Cook.

People often form opinions based on emotions, like fear or anger, making it much more difficult for them to stray from their long-held beliefs, research shows. Those cognitive biases are often so strong that even a new set of clear facts might not convince a person to change their mind, University of Connecticut human development professor Keith Bellizzi wrote in 2022.

The ability to change your mind can be of great benefit to leaders, who often rely on research and opinions from employees to shape their decision-making. Seeking out and weighing a range of informed opinions, which psychologists also call “cognitive flexibility,” is key to getting smarter and making better decisions, research shows.

One of Amazon’s famous leadership principles, penned by founder Jeff Bezos, is that good leaders “are right, a lot.” The idea isn’t that people who know everything should become leaders — it’s that you increase your chances of being right by proactively seeking out differing opinions and being willing to change your mind.

“With practice, you can be right more often,” Bezos said in a speech at the Pathfinder Awards in Seattle in 2016. “People who are right a lot, they listen a lot, and people who are right a lot, change their mind a lot.”

Bezos passed that attitude to his successor, current Amazon CEO Andy Jassy. “I often question my most closely held beliefs on a particular topic to see if they’re really right,” Jassy said in July. “The key is to get the right people involved in giving feedback, listen to the different perspectives and then think about the best possible answer for customers or for the business. It doesn’t matter if it was your idea or not.”

Similarly, Jobs passed the trait to his successor, Cook.

“He loved to debate and he loved [having] someone to debate him,” Cook added. “And, you could always change his mind if you had the best idea. We changed each other’s minds. That’s the reason it worked so well.”

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