When your thinking feels muddy, the instinct is to add — more information, more frameworks, more time in the meeting. But the 11th-century Jewish philosopher Maimonides had a radical counter-proposal: clarity is achieved not by accumulating what you know, but by systematically stripping away what you falsely believe you know. In his 'Guide for the Perplexed,' he argued that the mind reaches genuine understanding through a process of negation — you don't define God by asserting attributes, you remove wrong ones until something true remains. That same logic applies to your thinking about any hard problem. The fog in a decision isn't usually a lack of information; it's the presence of inherited assumptions dressed as obvious truths. Try this on Friday: instead of asking what else you need to know about the problem in front of you, ask which belief about it you'd be embarrassed to defend out loud — and start there.

What did you treat as an obvious given this week that, if someone asked you to defend it in one sentence, you actually couldn't?

Drawing from Medieval Jewish Philosophy (Maimonidean rationalism) — Moses Maimonides (Guide for the Perplexed / Moreh Nevukhim, c. 1190 CE)