Simone Weil wrote that attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity — and she meant it almost violently seriously. Most product work treats attention as a resource to be allocated: roadmaps, sprints, prioritization frameworks. But Weil's concept of *attention* (developed in her 1942 essay 'Reflections on the Right Use of School Studies') is something stranger — a complete suspension of your own agenda so that reality can speak first. Dorothy Winnicott, working in a different key entirely, described a similar move in therapy: the practitioner who 'holds' the patient doesn't impose a framework but creates a space where the other person's actual shape can emerge. Together, these ideas suggest something uncomfortable for product managers: your mental models aren't tools you use to understand users — they're the walls that prevent users from being fully seen. The practice isn't better frameworks. It's the brief, disciplined act of dropping your frameworks entirely before you pick them back up.

Name a user assumption you haven't seriously questioned in the last three months — not because evidence confirmed it, but because your process never created space to challenge it.

Drawing from Phenomenological Philosophy / Object Relations Psychology — Simone Weil (Reflections on the Right Use of School Studies, 1942) synthesized with D.W. Winnicott (Playing and Reality, 1971)