There's a peculiar trap that smart people fall into more often than others: the better your mental models, the more invisible their edges become. Ibn Khaldun, the 14th-century Arab historian and sociologist, observed that every civilization develops its own 'asabiyyah' — a binding logic, a shared framework so internalized that its members can no longer see it as a framework at all. It just becomes 'how things are.' Modern cognitive science calls this 'functional fixedness,' but Khaldun's version cuts deeper: it's not just that you stop seeing alternatives, it's that your very success in using a model confirms its completeness. The practical move, especially on a Friday when you're wrapping up a week's worth of decisions: pick one conclusion you reached this week that felt obvious, and ask what model made it obvious. Name the model out loud. That small act of externalization is often enough to crack it open.

What decision this week felt so obvious you didn't notice you were making it?

Drawing from Islamic Philosophy / Cognitive Psychology — Ibn Khaldun (Muqaddimah) and Karl Duncker (functional fixedness research)