You can lock yourself in an identity to feel safe, or you can stay fluid enough to survive what is coming. You cannot do both.
Most people do not defend their ideas. They defend their egos. When a long-held belief is challenged, they do not see a debate over facts or a presentation of new data. They feel a direct, violent attack on their core identity. Being close-minded is fundamentally a defense mechanism. It protects a fragile sense of self from the deep discomfort of being wrong, the embarrassment of inconsistency, and the fear of social exile.
But that protection is a prison.
If you tie your identity to your current set of beliefs—to your politics, your business model, or the culture surrounding you—you lose the ability to navigate reality. You freeze in place. The world moves, and you stand still, angrily insisting that the world is wrong.
I experienced the friction of this early in life. Growing up in Brazil, I was immersed in a strictly Catholic environment. I spent eleven formative years, from the age of four to fifteen, wearing the uniform of a Catholic school. What struck me, even as a child, was not necessarily the theology itself, but the profound, daily hypocrisy of the adults around me.
Week after week, I watched people claim to live by one set of pure virtues inside the church doors, only to walk outside and behave in ways that directly contradicted the sermons. They were performing an identity. They believed they were “good people” simply because they belonged to the right group and said the right words, totally disconnected from their actual output in reality.
That dissonance forced an early choice upon me. I could either blindly accept the societal script to fit in, protecting the ego by blending into the crowd, or I could separate myself from the noise and look for actual truth. I chose the latter.
Having Asperger’s made this choice natural. While society views neurodivergence as a deficit, I have always viewed it as my greatest superpower. It naturally stripped away the emotional static that kept others bound to their social tribes. It forces me to be highly logical—to gather data dispassionately and delay judgment, rather than relying on the shallow stereotypes and groupthink passing for wisdom. Because I did not attach my ego to my geography or the local culture, I consumed Anglo-American media exclusively. It simply made more logical sense to my brain than the illogical noise outside my door. I was a fish out of water in my own country, but oddly enough I was entirely comfortable in my detachment.
This lack of geographical ego is what allowed me to relocate to the UK at twenty-eight. To some of the people from my previous life, the move was shocking and incomprehensible, for others was an inevitability waiting to happen. In their framework, identity was tied to soil, to blood, and to staying exactly where you were planted. To me, it was a purely logical transition. It was an alignment of internal software with the correct external environment.
If I had been close-minded—if my ego had demanded I stay “loyal” to a cultural identity that did not fit me just to please the expectations of others—I would have spent my life trapped in a context that was not mine.
The Middle Way
To truly understand open-mindedness, you have to look past modern self-help and look at ancient frameworks. I may have grown up Catholic, but when it comes to the mechanics of the human mind, Buddhism understood the assignment thousands of years ago.
The core of Buddhist philosophy is the concept of Majjhima Patipada—the Middle Way.
The story goes that Prince Siddhartha Gautama began his life in extreme luxury and hedonism, completely sheltered in a palace, indulging every desire. When he finally ventured outside and witnessed suffering for the first time, he rebelled entirely against his upbringing. He swung to the absolute opposite extreme, adopting severe asceticism. He lived in the forest, starved himself nearly to death, and subjected his body to extreme deprivation in the search for truth.
Neither extreme—total indulgence or total deprivation—brought him clarity.
It was only when he abandoned both extremes and found the “middle way” that he achieved enlightenment.
Close-mindedness is an extreme. It is the absolute anchoring to one position, one dogma, one absolute truth that you refuse to question. It is walking blindly. But the opposite—believing nothing at all, floating through life with zero conviction, being swayed by every passing wind—is just as dangerous.
Open-mindedness is the Middle Way. It is the ability to hold a strong belief, execute on it with total conviction, but remain fluid enough in the center to completely abandon it the moment reality provides new data.
It is the courage to stay in the middle, avoiding the comfort of dogma, and dealing with the constant, dynamic balancing act of navigating reality as it actually is.
Illusion of Egalitarianism
To remain open-minded, you must follow the data wherever it leads, even when it shatters the illusions society holds most dear.
For a long time, I considered myself a classic liberal. I believed fully in the egalitarian ideal—the comforting notion that under the surface, men, women, and people from all cultures are entirely exactly the same. It is a beautiful story. It is the narrative Western society has been aggressively feeding itself for the last forty years.
But it is not true.
When you spend your life observing human behavior, you realize that the “equal-box” experiment is failing. Men and women have different internal software. Different cultures have fundamentally different operational drivers. We are not blank slates. The assumption that we can flatten everyone into a generic, equalized identity ignores the base code of biology and millennia of cultural evolution.
When I finally allowed myself to be open-minded enough to look at the data—and the resulting societal friction—I had to abandon that egalitarian belief. Ignoring inherent differences is not progressive; it is a path to chaos. If you design systems, governments, or relationships based on the fantasy that everyone is identical, those systems will inevitably break under the weight of reality.
It was deeply uncomfortable to change my mind on this. I had to let go of an idealistic worldview to embrace a nuanced, sobering reality. But truth must always outweigh comfort.
The Dispassion to Pivot
If a refusal to change your mind restricts your personal growth, in business, it kills you.
In the corporate world, I frequently observe leaders who realize they are marching their company down the wrong path. The objective data is flashing red. The revenue is dropping, the user engagement is failing, and the architecture is cracking. The appropriate, logical move is to execute a total U-turn immediately. But what happens?
The leader’s ego kicks in. A U-turn would mean admitting, publicly, that they were wrong. They fear the board, the team, or the market will perceive them as “inconsistent.” They fear losing their authority. So, rather than looking foolish for a single afternoon by correcting the course, they double down on the failure. They manipulate the data. They build new rationale for the bad strategy. They drag the entire company toward a cliff just to protect the optics of their leadership.
This is the catastrophic cost of tying your emotional identity to a business strategy.
Throughout my career, I have conditioned myself to embrace the U-turn across all businesses. There is an undeniable sting when you realize you have spent months building the wrong thing or pursuing the wrong market. But I prefer the sharp, immediate pain of pivoting over the slow, compounding agony of defending a losing hand.
If you strip your ego away, a U-turn is no longer an admission of personal defeat. It is simply a data correction.
Reality does not care about your ego. Reality does not care how hard you worked on the wrong idea. It will simply crush you. The open-minded operator aligns with reality immediately. The close-minded operator fights reality and dies.
The AI Macro-Reality and Techno-Feudalism
The necessity of the open mind has never been more urgent than it is right now.
During the Industrial Revolution, the pace of technological change was remarkably slow. It took decades for steam power and mechanization to fully overwrite manual labor. If you were a worker who violently rejected the looms—if you literally smashed the machines in protest—you could still stubbornly protect your identity, and the economic shocks would be absorbed over generations. You could afford to be close-minded and still survive.
We no longer have the luxury of time.
The AI revolution is not moving in decades. It is moving in weeks. The systems that govern knowledge labor, creativity, and business operations are rewriting themselves in real-time. Yet, I watch intelligent, highly educated white-collar professionals react to this shift with absolute denial. They post on LinkedIn about how the “human element” will always be required. They mock the current limitations of language models, reassuring themselves that a machine could never replicate their specific nuance, their strategy, or their art.
They are defending their egos, just like the leaders refusing to U-turn.
The cold, logical reality is that the middle class is about to face the most violent disruption in economic history. We are rapidly transitioning into a potential state of ‘techno-feudalism.’ A massive amount of value will be generated by a very small, hyper-agile class of operators who control the automated capital (the “AI lords”). For everyone else, the traditional mechanisms of earning a living by exchanging cognitive labor for a salary will evaporate.
I do not look at this unromantically, nor do I look at Universal Basic Income (UBI) as some socialist utopia. I look at UBI as an inevitable, mathematical necessity to prevent total societal collapse and revolution when the cognitive labor market bottoms out.
If you remain close-minded today—if you tie your ego to your current job title, your current skill set, or the way the world worked in 2019—you will not just fall behind. You will become irrelevant overnight. The machine will inevitably improve, the market will adjust, and you will be left clinging to a version of reality that no longer exists, unemployable and bitter.
The Courage to Be Disliked
To remain open-minded in a culture that rewards tribalism requires the ultimate form of sovereignty: the courage to be disliked.
Society wants you to pick a side and stay there forever. Algorithms reward extremity. If you refuse to be boxed into a singular political, cultural, or professional identity—if you insist on evaluating data logically and changing your position when warranted—you will inevitably anger the tribe you leave behind.
When you make a massive pivot, people will call you inconsistent. When you abandon a failing philosophy, people will call you disloyal. When you realize your egalitarian ideals were wrong, people will call you prejudiced. When you tell the truth about the AI-driven reality we are entering, people will call you a cynical doomer.
Let them.
The truest regret you can carry at the end of a long life is not the regret of failing while trying something new. It is the regret of never having moved. It is the regret of realizing you spent your limited decades anchored to a dead idea, in a dead location, defending a dead strategy, simply because you were too proud to admit you were wrong.
Strip the makeup off. Let your ego take the hit. Accept the U-turn.
Be ready to change your mind. Reality is changing whether you are ready or not.