Staring Is Not Reading

An assumption is not a forecast.

It’s a tool, and you pick it up for what it lets you do next, not for its odds of coming true. When I’m stuck because I’m not sure I have the right answer, I assume there are no right answers. When I’m stuck on what people will think, I assume nobody will read it. (Somebody is reading this. Hi.)

Neither of those is true, and neither one has to be. Each works by quietly walking somebody out of the room. The first dismisses the grader. The second sends the audience home. Stuck almost always has somebody standing over it, and a good assumption is just a polite way of asking them to leave.

A German philosopher named Hans Vaihinger built an entire philosophy on this move. He called it Die Philosophie des Als Ob, the philosophy of as if, and his argument was that a huge share of human thinking runs on ideas we know are false, kept around because acting as if they were true gets us somewhere. He worked out the core of it in 1877 and didn’t publish the book until 1911. (He needed a steady job first, which I find enormously comforting and why I didn’t open my bar until I was moving along in my marketing career.)

He drew a line I keep coming back to. A hypothesis says this might be true, go check and a fiction says treat it as true and see where it takes you.

One is waiting to be proven. The other is only waiting to be used.

Truth still gets a vote. It just votes last. You find out whether an assumption holds by moving on it, and by the time you know, you’ve usually traded it for a better one…

None of this makes the choosing easier. You can carry a whole drawer of good assumptions and the act is identical every time: look straight at the decision and make it. Staring is required. Staring is not the decision.

My daughter is almost six and learning to read, so I get to watch this in real time. She stares at a word as if it might volunteer itself… it never does. The word only shows up after she commits to a sound for the first letter, out loud, maybe wrong.

Even the rules kids get handed for this are fictions. When two vowels go walking, the first one does the talking. Somebody counted, back in the sixties, and that rule holds less than half the time. Kids still get taught it, because it gets a five-year-old to open her mouth.

Nobody can correct a sound you haven’t made.

That sentence is most of leadership, isn’t it?

A team stuck on a decision is usually a room full of people staring at the same word, waiting for the person in charge to make the first sound.

Leaders stall by asking for more information, because waiting feels neutral. It isn’t. Waiting is an assumption too. It assumes the answer is on its way. Sometimes the most useful thing a leader can say is that this is all of it, and this is our guess. We’ll assume the best possible answer will never arrive.

Say the guess out loud, labeled as a guess. “We’re acting as if this is true, and we’ll know by the end of the month.” Now the team has two permissions at once: to move, and to tell you you’re wrong. Dress the same guess up as a fact and they’ll defend it for you. Keep it in your head and they’ll wait.

And here’s the truth for anyone with a bit of career experience…They already know you’re guessing.

The only choice you get is whether you guess where they can help.

Emree, my daughter, will never get the word by staring harder. She gets it the way everybody does, by making a sound she isn’t sure of and letting the page tell her how wrong she was.

Stay Positive & Say The First Sound