When you've held a position of responsibility long enough, you start mistaking your accumulated judgments for reality itself — the map becomes the territory so slowly you never notice the switch. The 11th-century Persian philosopher Al-Biruni called this the central problem of knowledge: every observer brings a 'screen of habituation' that filters raw experience into something legible, but that screen also ossifies. His solution, radical for his era, was structured estrangement — deliberately studying a tradition so foreign to his own (he spent years learning Sanskrit to understand Indian philosophy from the inside) that his inherited categories had no foothold, forcing genuine encounter with the unfamiliar. This pairs strikingly with what developmental psychologist Robert Kegan described as 'subject-object shifts' — the moments when something you've been entirely identified with (an assumption, a role, a way of reading people) becomes visible to you as a thing you hold, rather than a lens you see through. The practical move isn't to seek more information. It's to periodically put yourself in situations where your existing categories genuinely don't fit — a conversation, a text, a context that refuses to be absorbed into what you already know.

What assumption about a person close to you has gone unexamined so long it no longer feels like an assumption?

Drawing from Islamic philosophy of science and epistemology (Al-Biruni school), combined with constructive-developmental psychology (Robert Kegan) — Al-Biruni (Kitāb al-Hindī / Book of India, c. 1030 CE) and Robert Kegan (The Evolving Self, 1982)