The Escape Fire

Intelligence is traditionally viewed as the ability to think and learn. Yet in a turbulent world, there’s another set of cognitive skills that might matter more: the ability to rethink and unlearn. 
— Adam Grant, Think Again: The Power of Knowing What You Don’t Know (2021)

In 1949, a smokejumper named Wagner Dodge found himself running uphill from a wildfire that was about to overtake him. He stopped, lit a match, and set fire to the grass at his feet. Then he lay down in the ashes. His crew thought he’d lost his mind. Twelve of them died. Dodge survived because the ground he’d burned had nothing left for the wildfire to consume. He called it an escape fire.

Adam Grant uses Dodge’s story to illustrate a point. What happens when we stop defending what we know and start getting curious about what we don’t? Most of us, he argues, default to one of three modes. We preach when our beliefs feel threatened, prosecute when we spot flaws in others, and politick when we want approval. Any of us who have sat in a meeting will recognize all three. None of them involve actually questioning anything.

The alternative is what Grant calls “scientist mode.” A scientist treats beliefs as hypotheses, not identities. When the data contradicts the hypothesis, they don’t dig in. They get curious. Grant offers a handful of concrete practices for living this way, and most of them will sound familiar to anyone working a program.

First, we define ourselves by our values, not our opinions. If “I’m the kind of person who values honesty” is the foundation, we can change our minds without feeling like we’ve lost ourselves. But if our identity is built on being right about how recovery should look, what sobriety means, or which meetings matter, then every challenge feels like an attack on who we are.

Second, we build a challenge network—not people who cheer us on, but people who push back. Recovery gives us both. But a friend who only agrees with us isn’t doing the job. The people who help us grow are the ones willing to say what we don’t want to hear. When we do disagree, Grant suggests asking how rather than why. When we explain why we hold a view, we dig in. When we try to explain how we’d act on it, we soften.

Third, we ask ourselves a simple question on a regular basis. “What evidence would change my mind?” If we can’t answer that, we’ve stopped thinking and started preaching. The Tenth Step is built on exactly this principle. A daily inventory not to confirm what we already believe, but to catch ourselves where we’ve been wrong and promptly admit it. Grant also suggests we learn to enjoy being wrong—to treat each mistake not as a failure but as a discovery. That’s scientific thinking in spiritual clothing.

We live in a world changing so fast that rethinking is no longer optional. The First Step is exactly this. We admit that our most deeply held belief—that we can manage our addiction on our own—is wrong. Everything that follows depends on our willingness to keep doing that, one day at a time.

Wagner Dodge survived Mann Gulch because he let go of the plan that was killing him and invented a new one in real time. We can do the same. Not abandon what we know, but hold it loosely enough that when the ground shifts, we can shift with it.