Strategic Living

Ajar Minded

To be open minded is claimed to be a virtue. It signals intellectual flexibility, willingness to learn, and resistance to propaganda. But like most virtues taken to extremes, open mindedness can become its own liability. A mind that’s too open doesn’t adapt. It absorbs everything indiscriminately, unable to distinguish truth from nonsense.

The opposite extreme, closed mindedness, is equally destructive. A closed mind hardens around existing beliefs, rejecting new information regardless of quality. It mistakes consistency for integrity and stubbornness for strength. It can’t update, can’t grow, and eventually becomes brittle.

Neither extreme works. What you need isn’t an open mind or a closed mind, but rather, an ajar mind, selectively receptive, capable of letting in what’s valuable while filtering out what isn’t. This requires constant recalibration, discernment, and the uncomfortable work of deciding what deserves consideration and what doesn’t.

Open Mind

The idea that you should “keep an open mind about everything” sounds reasonable until you try to live it. If you genuinely entertained every claim, every perspective, every possibility with equal seriousness, you’d be exhausted. You’d spend your life reconsidering settled questions, weighing absurd alternatives, and second guessing functional beliefs.

Should you keep an open mind about whether the earth is flat? Whether vaccines cause autism? Whether historical atrocities happened? Whether basic arithmetic is a social construct? If your answer is “no, those are settled,” then you’ve already acknowledged that open mindedness has limits. You’ve decided some questions don’t deserve endless reconsideration.

At the end of the day, you have finite mental resources, and those resources are better spent on questions that actually warrant attention rather than wasting them on claims that have been thoroughly debunked or are so implausible they’re not worth serious engagement.

However, deciding what deserves consideration requires judgment. And judgment can be wrong. The thing you dismiss as obvious nonsense might turn out to be correct. The consensus you trust might be mistaken. History is full of ideas that were once dismissed as ridiculous but later proved true, and vice versa.

This doesn’t mean you should treat all claims equally. It means you need a process for filtering. Criteria that let you distinguish between “this challenges my assumptions in a productive way” and “this is pointless.”

Closed Mind

A closed mind doesn’t just reject bad ideas, it rejects all ideas that contradict what it already believes. It treats existing beliefs as sacred, immune to revision, and interprets every challenge as an attack rather than an opportunity to refine understanding.

This becomes a self fulfilling prophjecy: you only accept information that confirms what you already think, which strengthens your confidence in what you already think, which makes you even less likely to accept contradictory information. Over time, the gap between your beliefs and reality widens, but you never notice because you’ve insulated yourself from feedback. Conformation bias is extremely powerful.

Closed mindedness feels like strength because it has conviction, stands firm, and refuses to be swayed by trends or pressure. But it’s often just fear disguised as principle. Fear that if you question one belief, others will crumble. Fear that admitting you were wrong means you’re weak or foolish. Fear that uncertainty is intolerable.

The irony is that closed mindedness makes you more vulnerable, not less. If your beliefs can’t withstand scrutiny, they’re fragile. If you can’t update when evidence changes, you’re stuck navigating with an outdated map. Rigidity is not resilience.

Ajar Mind

Be open enough to let valuable ideas in while being closed enough to keep garbage out. This requires a few practices:

Criteria

Not all ideas deserve equal attention. Some filtering questions:

These filters can still fail. But they prevent you from wasting time on ideas that don’t meet a minimum threshold of plausibility or significance.

Additionally, while this entry is focused on objective measures, there are also subjective factors. Mainly in the realm of art, music, film, storytelling, etc. While there are some objective measures to determine what is “better,” a lot of it comes down to personal subjectivity. If you don’t like a specific artist’s music, no amount of objective reasoning is going to convince you otherwise. You simply don’t like it, even if you’ve tried to get into it. In this way, taste does apply to some things. If you don’t like the taste of something, there isn’t much you can do to convince your brain otherwise. Still, when it comes down to objective purposes, taste is not an excuse.

Adapt(ivism)

Being ajar means you’re willing to change your mind when evidence warrants it, but you don’t change your mind lightly. There’s a difference between flexibility and instability.

Updating beliefs should happen when:

Updating shouldn’t happen just because:

The skill is distinguishing between “I was wrong and need to update” and “someone is trying to manipulate me into abandoning a correct belief.”

The Fallacy of Equality

One common mistake is confusing open mindedness with treating all perspectives as equally valid.

Being ajar doesn’t mean giving equal weight to astrology and astronomy, creationism and evolution, or conspiracy theories and evidence based conclusions. Some ideas have earned their place through rigorous testing and accumulated evidence. Others haven’t. Treating them as equivalent is intellectual negligence. It conflates “willing to consider alternatives” with “pretending all alternatives are equally plausible,” which they’re not.

The ajar mind asks: “What’s the evidence? What’s the track record? What explanatory power does this have?” It doesn’t ask “Does someone believe this?” because people believe all kinds of nonsense.

For example: “I believe climate change is real and anthropogenic based on overwhelming scientific consensus, but I’d update if compelling counter evidence emerged” is ajar minded. “I believe climate change is real and anyone who disagrees is an idiot” is closed minded. “I’m not sure, all perspectives are valid” is empty minded. Even if beliefs align with political correctness or morality, that does not mean they are true.

NOTE: I am NOT disasgreeing with climate change here. I am just demonstrating that your beliefs can be true, but even if they are, that does not justify treating those who don’t share that belief as lesser. Think for yourself, but give others that same respect.

When to Close the Door

Some ideas don’t deserve reconsideration. Not because you’re closed minded, but because they’ve been tested and found wanting so many times that revisiting them is a waste of resources.

You don’t need to keep an open mind about whether 2+2=4. You don’t need to seriously entertain flat earth theory. You don’t need to reconsider whether slavery was bad. These aren’t closed minded positions, they’re settled conclusions based on overwhelming evidence and reasoning. Closing the door on settled ideas frees up mental resources for questions that actually matter. The person who spends their time debating basic arithmetic isn’t being intellectually rigorous, they’re being distracted by nonsense and wasting their time.

This means knowing which doors to close and which to keep ajar. And that requires judgment, which is fallible, which means you’ll sometimes close doors that should’ve stayed open or leave open doors that should’ve been shut. But that’s the cost of being finite. You can’t perfectly sort ideas. But you can get better at it over time by tracking which beliefs served you well and which led you astray.

Boy, Do I Love Doors

It goes without saying that being ajar minded requires constant work and recalibration over time. And it should be noted that this isn’t about doubting everything constantly. It’s about maintaining enough self awareness to catch when confidence has drifted into arrogance or when openness has drifted into gullibility.

The ajar mind is the only way to simultaneously stay honest, authentic, and functional. Too open and you lose coherence. Too closed and you lose accuracy. The balance itself shifts with context, evidence, and stakes, but the work of finding that balance is what keeps you tethered to reality and to yourself.

You can’t be right about everything. But you can be wrong in ways that correct yourself.