When a product team falls in love with their roadmap, something quietly breaks — the map starts to replace the territory. Alfred Korzybski, the founder of General Semantics, spent decades warning about exactly this: we mistake our representations of reality for reality itself, then defend the representation rather than updating it when evidence disagrees. His phrase was blunt — 'the map is not the territory' — but the deeper implication is rarely applied to the self. Every mental model you carry about who you are as a thinker, leader, or builder is also a map. Your identity as 'a systems person' or 'a user advocate' or 'someone who trusts their gut' is a representation, not a discovery. And like a product roadmap written six quarters ago, it can silently organize your perception while the actual terrain shifts underneath. The discipline Korzybski called 'consciousness of abstracting' — staying aware that every label you apply, including to yourself, is a compression that loses information — is the specific habit that keeps self-knowledge from calcifying into self-story. Carry one label you've used to describe yourself this week and ask whether it's describing something real or something you've stopped checking.

What did you actually do last week that contradicts the mental model you hold of yourself as a professional?

Drawing from General Semantics — Alfred Korzybski (Science and Sanity, 1933)