Dead reckoning — the practice of navigating by calculating where you must be based on your last known position, heading, and elapsed time — was the backbone of aviation before GPS, and it contains a principle that modern cockpits have quietly abandoned: you should always know what you expect to see before you look at the instruments. The pilot who checks a gauge to discover information is in a different cognitive state than the pilot who checks a gauge to confirm or deny a prediction. William James, in his lectures on pragmatism, argued that truth is not found — it's made through active anticipation meeting experience. Passive reception, he insisted, produces neither good navigation nor good thinking. The degraded version of flying, and of running a practice or a training cycle, is when you're only reacting to what the dashboard shows. The sharper version is when you've already committed to an expected reading — and you're checking whether reality agrees. Run your next pre-flight, staff huddle, or weekly workout debrief as a prediction first: write down what you expect to see, then look. The gap between prediction and instrument is where the actual information lives.

Name a decision you made last week by reacting to what you saw — versus one you made by first committing to what you expected. What was different about how those two decisions felt, and which one turned out better?

Drawing from American Pragmatism — William James (Pragmatism, 1907)