Explore past nudges
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Every mental model you carry was built by someone who was wrong about something adjacent to it. Alfred Korzybski — the Polish-American thinker who founded General Semantics in the...
What is the last problem you named — and what category of solution did that name automatically rule out before you'd...
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Most decision frameworks assume you are the same person at the end of an analysis as at the beginning. You are not. The Polish-American philosopher Alfred Korzybski spent years...
Think of a decision you're currently in the middle of. What word or phrase did you use when you first described it to...
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A map is not the territory it represents — but most leaders forget this and start navigating by the map alone. Alfred Korzybski, the Polish-American linguist who founded General...
Think of a belief you hold about someone on your team or in your life. When did you last actually test it against...
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There's a concept in General Semantics called 'semantic reaction' — the moment when a word or category triggers an automatic response before any actual thinking occurs. Alfred...
What is one habit you describe using language of identity ('I'm a person who...') rather than behavior — and what would...
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Attention has a shape — and in medicine, that shape is almost always borrowed from whoever taught you first. The linguist Alfred Korzybski spent decades arguing that the...
When did you last ask someone with a fundamentally different role — not specialty, but role — what they were seeing in...
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A map is not the territory — but the interesting problem isn't that we confuse them. It's that we fall in love with particular maps and stop noticing when the terrain has shifted....
Name one mental model you use constantly at work — then name the last time new information actually changed it.
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The best science fiction thrillers don't invent entirely new realities — they take one familiar assumption and quietly remove it. That's also how the sharpest thinking works....
What is the one assumption holding your current understanding of a problem together — and what would your thinking look...
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When a financial system goes live, something quiet happens: the database schema becomes invisible. The fields, the table relationships, the naming conventions — they stop being...
What would you have to rename — a field, a table, a report column — if you wanted your system to accurately describe...
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When a product team argues about which feature to build next, they think they're having a prioritization debate. They're usually having a language debate. Alfred Korzybski, the...
Name one word your product team treats as shared vocabulary — then write down exactly what you would measure to prove...
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When a product team falls in love with their roadmap, something quietly breaks — the map starts to replace the territory. Alfred Korzybski, the founder of General Semantics, spent...
What did you actually do last week that contradicts the mental model you hold of yourself as a professional?
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When a doctor delivers a diagnosis, something strange happens to time — the patient's past gets rewritten and their future narrows to a single storyline. The philosopher Alfred...
What is the opposite of how you currently explain a diagnosis or prognosis — and would that version leave more room for...
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The map is not the territory — but most of us argue over maps as if cities could be wrong. Alfred Korzybski coined that phrase in the 1930s, and it cuts right to the heart of how...
Which mental model do you treat as fact so automatically that you've stopped noticing it's a choice?
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The map is not the territory — a principle Alfred Korzybski introduced in the 1930s that remains one of the most practically powerful mental models you can carry. Every framework...
Which mental model do you currently rely on most — and what kind of evidence would actually cause you to revise or...
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