Rethink Everything

Rethink everything.

At some point we were spoon fed material. They said, here, these are the facts. We took the information and ran and that is what created our model. No one told us to think from first principles, or to even really question what we were given. “This is the information you need to know to get an A on the test.”

Why did no one ever tell us that humans are mostly made of fluid? Why did they teach us anatomy as it applies to muscles and bones but not the water our bodies are mostly made of? Why didn’t they teach us how breathing influences movement or how humans may move as a pressurized system and not a system of levers and pullies? We didn’t know enough to ask the right questions.

We are now working with humans with an incoherent model. It works for us sometimes and doesn’t work for us other times. We may not even know why it works when it works. Whether you agree to this or not you are operating with a set of rules and information which guide your decision making. The more arbitrary rules we are working with the more chaotic are model becomes and the harder it becomes to make good decisions that lead to good outcomes with our clients.

We have to admit that we can’t fully understand reality and we are sort of guessing as to what the best interventions are to apply. However, are you guessing from a coherent or incoherent model? The more coherent your model becomes based off of first principles the more accurate your guessing may become. We won’t ever know for sure, but we can become more and more accurate over time.

We should operate from more humility. We should question everything we thought we knew. We can’t throw our whole playbook out as that gives us nothing to operate from. But we can continue to refine our model and refine our approach. If we want to give our clients, the best experience possible we have to ask better questions and we have to think better.