Nagarjuna, the second-century Buddhist logician, built his entire philosophical project on one uncomfortable move: taking the concepts his opponents used most confidently — causation, identity, time — and demonstrating that each one collapsed under its own weight. Not to leave people with nothing, but to reveal what was actually doing the structural work underneath. He called this procedure 'prasanga' — drawing out the hidden commitments inside a concept until they contradict each other. It is the most rigorous form of model stress-testing ever devised, and almost no one in business applies it to their own mental models. The models we trust most are not the ones we've used most often — they are the ones we've never driven to their logical boundary. Take 'product-market fit': applied to a startup, it feels crisp and operational. Push it: fit between what, exactly, at which moment, stable for how long, as measured by whom? Each answer spawns another assumption, and somewhere in that chain is the load-bearing belief you've never examined. Nagarjuna's method doesn't ask you to throw the model out. It asks you to find exactly where it stops being a description of reality and starts being a preference.

Which assumption inside your most-used mental model have you never once tried to falsify — and what would you have to stop doing if that assumption turned out to be wrong?

Drawing from Madhyamaka Buddhist philosophy — Nagarjuna