Failure spreads differently than success. When something works, we credit the method. When it fails, we tend to blame execution — the people, the timing, the unlucky circumstance. This asymmetry is not laziness; it's built into how we construct explanations. The 19th-century philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce called this 'the fixation of belief': once a mental model produces a satisfying result, the mind stops treating it as provisional and starts treating it as settled. The model quietly graduates from hypothesis to habit, invisible to the very person using it. What Peirce understood — and what most frameworks training skips — is that a belief becomes truly fixed not when we stop questioning it, but when we stop noticing that there's anything left to question. For you, the practical move is this: take one model you currently use confidently — for prioritization, for reading people, for sizing bets — and deliberately construct a case where it failed silently, producing a plausible result that was actually wrong. Not a dramatic failure. A quiet one. That's where the fixation lives.

Which model do you apply fastest — almost without pausing — and when did it last surprise you with a wrong answer?

Drawing from American Pragmatism (philosophy of inquiry) — Charles Sanders Peirce ('The Fixation of Belief', Popular Science Monthly, 1877)