Jack Baty Daily

Daily notes from Jack about everything

Westenberg: The Map Is Not the Territory

Joan Westenberg:

Perhaps (perhaps) we don't fear action so much as we fear feedback. As long as our model stays in our head, it can be perfect. The moment we test it against reality, we have to confront our wrongness. And for highly analytical people, being wrong feels like a moral failing rather than a normal part of learning.
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Third, and this is harder, you have to learn to metabolize feedback differently. When reality contradicts your model, it’s not a failure signal; it’s data. Neutral, immutable data. That's the whole point of making models in the first place, to test them against the world and update them. But you can only get that data by acting. The model serves the movement, not the other way around.

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