7 published lessons with this tag.
Changing how you categorize things is a sign of learning not inconsistency.
Every schema has a shelf life. The mental models that made you effective last year will make you rigid this year — unless you build deliberate mechanisms for evolving them. Schema evolution is not optional maintenance. It is the core discipline that separates adaptive thinkers from intelligent people trapped in outdated frameworks.
Revising a model in response to evidence is the defining act of a strong thinker. The refusal to update is not confidence — it is cognitive debt accumulating interest.
Incremental schema revision is less disruptive and more accurate than complete overhauls. Small, frequent updates preserve continuity with what already works while correcting what does not. Large, rare overhauls destroy functional structure alongside dysfunctional structure, overwhelm working memory, and introduce more errors than they fix.
Refusing to update schemas means making increasingly poor decisions over time. Rigid schemas do not merely fail to improve — they actively degrade your judgment, because the world changes while your models do not. Every day you operate on an outdated schema is a day your decisions drift further from reality. The cost is not a one-time penalty. It compounds.
Something can be true now and have been false before without contradiction.
Resolving contradictions often requires updating one or both of the schemas involved. The contradiction is not a flaw in reality — it is a flaw in the model. And the resolution is not choosing a side. It is evolving the schema until the contradiction dissolves into a more accurate representation of how things actually work.