Menno ter Braak, the Dutch critic and philosopher writing in the 1930s, argued that the most dangerous form of self-deception is not lying to others but becoming fluent in your own mythology — the story you've rehearsed so many times it feels like fact. What makes this sharp for product work is that the same cognitive mechanism operates on both scales: the person and the product both accumulate a narrative of themselves that slowly diverges from what they actually are. The psychologist George Kelly called this 'constructive alternativism' — the idea that any event can be interpreted through multiple incompatible frameworks, and the one you habitually reach for becomes, over time, invisible to you as a choice. The practical implication is uncomfortable: the self you think you're realizing may be the self you constructed at 27, or after a particular failure, or during a stretch of unusual success — and it has been quietly governing your interpretation of every new signal ever since. The work of self-realization, then, is not excavation toward some authentic core. It's the periodic, slightly vertiginous act of noticing which framework you're standing in — and asking whether you chose it or inherited it.

Name the story about yourself that you would be most reluctant to test against evidence. What is that reluctance protecting?

Drawing from Constructive Psychology (Personal Construct Theory) — George Kelly (The Psychology of Personal Constructs, 1955)