Nagarjuna, the 2nd-century Buddhist logician, spent his career demonstrating something uncomfortable: that every concept we rely on to anchor our thinking secretly depends on other concepts for its meaning, none of which can stand alone. He called this śūnyatā — the emptiness of inherent existence — but the practical edge of his argument isn't mystical. It's diagnostic. Any mental model you're using to navigate a product decision is borrowing its coherence from assumptions you haven't examined, which are in turn borrowing from assumptions below those. The model feels solid because you stopped digging. Nagarjuna's method — the Mādhyamaka dialectic — was to press on the load-bearing concepts until the hidden dependencies surfaced, not to destroy understanding but to reveal exactly where it was secretly leaning. For a leader running on mental models, the discipline this suggests is specific: when a framework gives you a confident answer, ask what the framework's own key terms require to be true. Not the conclusion — the vocabulary. 'Retention' requires a definition of 'user.' 'Alignment' requires a theory of what counts as agreement. The model that felt complete was already resting on something you hadn't decided.

Pick the mental model you've used most confidently this month. What does its central term — the noun at the core of it — require to be true in order to mean what you think it means?

Drawing from Mādhyamaka Buddhist Philosophy — Nagarjuna (Mūlamadhyamakakārikā, c. 150 CE)