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. Alfred Korzybski, the Polish-American linguist who coined that phrase in the 1930s, observed that the mental models we build to simplify reality gradually become invisible to us — we stop treating them as tools and start treating them as facts. The model that helped you understand a colleague, a market, or a technical system three years ago is still running quietly in the background today, filtering everything you see. The practical move isn't to distrust all models — it's to schedule deliberate 'map audits': pick one assumption you haven't questioned in over a year and ask what evidence would have to exist to update it. Not what would change your mind — what *evidence* would you actually accept.

Name one mental model you use constantly at work — then name the last time new information actually changed it.

Drawing from General Semantics — Alfred Korzybski