William James made a claim in 1890 that product teams still haven't fully reckoned with: most of what we call 'thinking' is actually habit running on autopilot. The mental models you built in your first three years of doing this work didn't get filed — they got installed. They now run silently, selecting which information counts as signal, which user complaints feel like noise, and which solutions feel 'obviously right.' The Indian logician Dignāga, writing in 5th-century Buddhist epistemology, called this *pratyakṣa* contamination — the way prior conceptual categories silently colonize what presents itself as direct perception. You think you're seeing the problem fresh; you're actually re-running a template. The practical implication isn't to distrust your intuition, but to notice when a solution arrives too quickly, without friction. Speed of certainty is often the fingerprint of an old model masquerading as new insight. Today, when something feels obvious, ask what year that obviousness was formed in.

What did you last change your mind about — not because new data arrived, but because you noticed the frame you were using was wrong?

Drawing from Buddhist Epistemology (Dignāga school / Pramāṇavāda) — Dignāga — Pramāṇasamuccaya (Compendium of Valid Cognition), c. 480–540 CE