Restraint is a creative act. The Jain philosophical principle of *anekāntavāda* — the doctrine that any complex reality can only be truthfully described from multiple partial standpoints — was originally a logical and ethical teaching, but it contains something that transforms how you approach hard problems. Hemachandra, the 12th-century Jain polymath, used it to argue that asserting your view too forcefully was a form of intellectual violence: it closed off the very perspectives that might complete your understanding. The practical implication is strange and useful: your most confident framing of a problem is probably the one most worth temporarily abandoning. Not because you're wrong, but because the solution you can't yet see is likely hiding behind the assumption you've stopped questioning. Today, when you hit a creative impasse, try stating the problem from the standpoint of the person or constraint you find most inconvenient — not to be fair to them, but because that's where the unexamined assumption usually lives.

What assumption about your current hardest problem have you never actually tested — only inherited from how the problem was first handed to you?

Drawing from Jain epistemology — Hemachandra