When you're deep in a product sprint, the version of yourself doing the work feels obvious and stable — the decisive PM, the clear thinker, the one who ships. But the 13th-century Japanese poet Kamo no Chomei, writing from a ten-foot hut after watching Kyoto burn and flood and collapse, noticed something unsettling: the self you identify with is largely a function of the environment that shaped it, and when the environment changes, that self becomes a stranger. He didn't mean this as loss. He meant it as data. What Chomei intuited, and what developmental psychologist Robert Kegan later mapped rigorously in his theory of 'subject-object transformation', is that growth isn't about adding capabilities — it's about making previously invisible assumptions visible enough to examine. You stop being your mental models and start having them. The PM who 'knows' that good products require ruthless prioritization isn't wrong, but if they cannot step outside that conviction and question it in context, they're not using a framework — they're being used by one. Today, pick one belief about your work that you've never had to defend, because it's always just felt true. That's the one worth questioning.

What is one operating principle in your work that you'd feel defensive if someone challenged — and what does that defensiveness tell you about whether you're holding the principle or it's holding you?

Drawing from Japanese Recluse Literature / Developmental Psychology — Kamo no Chomei (Hōjōki / An Account of My Hut, 1212) synthesized with Robert Kegan (The Evolving Self, 1982)