33 published lessons with this tag.
Every system you build for clear thinking, aligned action, and self-correction rests on a single prerequisite: your ability to notice what is happening — in your mind, in your environment, in the gap between them — and externalize it before it disappears.
Your cultural assumptions are invisible to you until you encounter a different culture.
Information separated from its context becomes ambiguous or misleading.
Your schema about a thing is never the thing itself — useful but always incomplete.
No schema perfectly represents reality but some are more useful than others for a given purpose.
There is no single correct way to categorize — categories serve purposes.
Ideas supported by multiple independent lines of evidence are more reliable.
If a root concept is wrong everything organized beneath it inherits the error.
An untested schema is a hypothesis not knowledge.
If no possible observation could prove your schema wrong it is not a useful model.
If your schema is correct it should make accurate predictions about what will happen next.
Test the smallest piece of your schema first before relying on the whole structure.
When direct testing is impossible look for indirect evidence and converging indicators.
Having trusted people review your mental models catches errors you miss.
Even a well-tested schema may fail in new contexts or at different scales. Validation tells you where a schema works, not that it works everywhere. The boundaries of your tested conditions are the boundaries of your warranted confidence.
Confidence based on tested schemas is categorically different from confidence based on untested assumptions.
Finding out your schema is wrong teaches you more than confirming it is right.
Your schema for how learning works determines how effectively you learn.
Your epistemology — your theory of knowledge — is the meta-schema that governs all others.
Not all sources of schemas are equally reliable — evaluate where your models come from.
Some genuine tensions must be managed rather than resolved.
Two contradictory observations may both be accurate from different perspectives.
Some contradictions are features not bugs — they reflect genuine complexity in reality.
Your collection of schemas should work together without conflict. Coherence is not agreement — it is the absence of unresolved contradiction, where each schema strengthens rather than undermines the others.
Good integration preserves the diversity of your schemas while connecting them.
Forcing integration where it does not exist or oversimplifying to achieve coherence.
Your fully integrated collection of schemas is your functional worldview.
Vague agents do not fire reliably — specificity is required.
Agents for how to structure emails presentations and difficult conversations.
Most decisions you face are variations of types you have encountered before.
Spend minimal time on easily reversible decisions and maximum time on irreversible ones.
Direct results and other peoples reactions are both valuable but different types of feedback.
Real situations often involve several interacting feedback loops simultaneously.