The best science fiction thrillers don't invent entirely new realities — they take one familiar assumption and quietly remove it. That's also how the sharpest thinking works. Alfred Korzybski, the founder of general semantics, spent decades pointing out that most human conflict arises from confusing our mental map of something for the thing itself — treating our model of reality as if it were reality. Sci-fi does this as a plot engine: what if gravity worked differently, what if memory could be edited, what if time ran backward? The genre's real trick is disciplined subtraction. Remove one assumption, follow the consequences ruthlessly, and an entirely unfamiliar world snaps into focus. You can apply this today: pick one belief you hold about a relationship, a project, or a problem at work, and ask what changes if that single belief isn't true. Not as a thought experiment — as a serious rehearsal for being wrong.

What is the one assumption holding your current understanding of a problem together — and what would your thinking look like if you pulled it out?

Drawing from General Semantics — Alfred Korzybski