A mental model, once useful, becomes a kind of acquired blindness. The 11th-century Persian physician and polymath Al-Ghazali described this problem precisely in his autobiography Deliverance from Error — not as ignorance, but as taqlid, the unexamined adoption of inherited frameworks. The danger isn't that you lack models; it's that the models you trust most are the ones you've stopped seeing as models at all. They've become the glass, not the view. For a product manager, this is the hidden cost of experience: you built a schema that worked during a specific competitive moment, a specific team configuration, a specific user maturity level — and it worked so well it calcified into 'how things are.' Al-Ghazali's prescription was radical and practical at once: deliberately induce doubt in the most settled beliefs, not to destroy them, but to re-examine their foundations. The ones that survive re-examination are genuinely load-bearing. The ones that collapse were always scaffolding dressed up as structure. Today, take the mental model you'd be most reluctant to question — the one that feels like obvious good sense — and ask what it was designed to solve for, and whether that problem still exists.

What would you have to give up — in speed, in confidence, in professional identity — if the mental model you use most reliably turned out to be wrong about your current context?

Drawing from Islamic Philosophy / Sufi Epistemology — Al-Ghazali — Deliverance from Error (c. 1108 CE), particularly his method of systematic doubt applied to inherited belief frameworks