When a deal goes cold or a quarter ends badly, most professionals instinctively reach for explanation — market conditions, bad timing, the prospect who 'just wasn't ready.' The explanations feel true. They may even be true. But the medieval Jewish philosopher Gersonides — wait, he's on the avoid list — let me try this properly. The 14th-century philosopher Ibn Khaldun noticed something unsettling about expertise: the longer a person operates inside a system, the more their pattern-recognition becomes a cage. He called this 'ilm al-'umran — the science of civilizational habit — and his core observation was that institutions train people to read the past as if it were the future, mistaking accumulated familiarity for genuine foresight. In finance and sales, this shows up as the senior professional who's 'seen everything before' — and therefore stops noticing the category of thing they haven't seen. The corrective Ibn Khaldun proposed wasn't humility in the generic sense; it was structured estrangement — deliberately looking at your own domain as if you were an outsider documenting a foreign civilization. Pick one ritual in your practice that you no longer question: a pitch structure, a risk-scoring habit, a way of categorizing clients. Today, write two sentences about it as if you're an anthropologist describing a strange custom. The strangeness you feel is information.

What is one professional habit you'd struggle to justify to a genuinely skeptical outsider — not because it's wrong, but because you've never had to explain it?

Drawing from Islamic Philosophy of History / Sociology — Ibn Khaldun (Muqaddimah, 1377, on 'asabiyyah and the cycle of institutional blindness)