Challenging assumptions
We make general assumptions every day, in nearly everything we do. We take things for granted. We come to believe things to be real or true that simply aren’t. It’s time we start challenging our assumptions and learn how to become better versions of ourselves.
Ziya Tong, in her book The Reality Bubble, uses the concepts of time and space to illustrate this point.
Time itself is a construct. It is not a physical thing. We cannot go to the store and buy minutes. It is a concept designed and defined to act as a universal measure. If we have a meeting at 1 PM on Tuesday, there is no ambiguity about it (time zones notwithstanding).
The same with distance. If we say a wall needs to be 8’ tall and 12’ wide, we have the same understanding of what those measurements mean.
But the world isn’t so black-and-white. It is not a binary this or that.
Laws are similar to time and distance in that they are constructs (you won’t find them on sale at the mall or part of your Amazon Prime subscription). But they differ in one key aspect. Whereas we have defined a minute as 60 seconds and a foot as 12 inches, laws are interpreted. How we understand a law today may change when viewed through a different lens or applied to a new circumstance. In other words, there is no single truth.
Also, consider this. The Statue of Liberty doesn’t know she is the Statue of Liberty. She has no awareness, no self of her own. She means only what meaning we give to her through our own interpretations, no matter how superficial or deep those may be. (H/T to Brian Koppelman during his interview on The Tim Ferris Show.)
It is the same case with life in general. We, as individuals, are constantly changing (for better or worse). Constantly evolving. Our interpretation of an experience today is likely to change down the road. What we thought was a truth then we may believe to be a different truth tomorrow. But our perspectives and interpretations serve as a construct for how we navigate life.
While these constructs are necessary to give us uniformity and some consistency, we cannot make everything into a fact, rule or absolute thing. But that is exactly what we tend to do with our perceptions and basic assumptions. We tend to take them as true. As fact. As real. They’re not. We say things like, “We’ve always done it that way.” Or, “That’s just how it’s done.” Or even, “There’s really only one way to do it.”
This is absolutely false. And the true innovators know this. They challenge those assumptions. They find better ways to achieve the desired outcomes. They outperform.
We exist in a world where there are multiple “truths.” Knowable and unknowable. Obvious and non-obvious. Real and imagined. We can rely on some of these truths for a while, but they will inevitably change. They no longer will hold the same meaning we once ascribed to them, no matter how hard we try to cling to them.
In fact, the very definition of “truth” has been debated for centuries. In one way or another, the debates come back to the same basic premise. As Paul Pardi writes in the Philosophy News article “What is Truth,” “The challenge is that our view of truth is very closely tied to our perspective on what is true… We never access reality because we can never get outside our own beliefs to do so. Out beliefs function as filters that keep reality (if such a thing exists) beyond us… Truth then is constructed by what we perceive and ultimately believe.” (“Truth” from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy and “What is Truth” by Neel Burton, M.D. in Psychology Today also serve a great references on this topic.)
You will be better served allowing yourself to accept certain things as given (time, distance, temperature, etc.) and others as “true for now.” At the same time seek out new truths or new interpretations of the truths you hold dear.
In their book, An Everyone Culture, authors Robert Kegan, Lisa Lahey, et al., write, “When we treat an assumption as if it were the absolute truth, we allow it to rule our actions. We allow it to shape everything we see. We don’t consider or explore other possibilities, and so it continues to hold enormous power over us.”
Think about all of the assumptions (truths) you make in your work and personal life. Challenge some of those assumptions. Look at them from a different perspective. If you had a blank slate and had to design those things from scratch, what would that new design look like? Can you make something less efficient yet more effective?
This is hard. You have to make yourself vulnerable, even if only to yourself. You have to be willing to admit that what you have believed–or at the very least willingly and openly accepted–may be wrong. It likely is wrong. Or not entirely true. But once you are able to make yourself vulnerable and break free of this idea that your assumptions are true, you open yourself to learning, growth and improvement.