The Limits of One Perspective
We all live inside our own heads, and that’s a problem. While we can be very good at executing plans or refining strategies, we are often blind to the factors we don’t even know we’re missing.
There’s an opportunity on perception correction: How can we escape the limits of our first-person perspective without monumental efforts? To answer that, we need to look at what we don’t know.
The Known-Unknown Matrix
A helpful way to visualize this is through the Known-Unknown Matrix, which divides our world into four categories:
- Known Knowns: Things you are aware of and can explain clearly.
- Known Unknowns: Questions you know you don’t have the answers to yet.
- Unknown Knowns: Things you know intuitively but rarely put into words.
- Unknown Unknowns: The factors you can’t name yet, but that still shape your life.
The fourth group: Unknown Unknowns is the most dangerous. When you’re juggling work, family, and personal projects, these hidden factors don’t just surprise you; they quietly change the direction of the road you’re on. A single unseen factor can make months of progress irrelevant or open a path you never thought possible.
The Real Bottleneck: Discovery
The challenge isn’t just learning new things; it’s discovery. Learning helps you improve what you can already see, but discovery changes what you see.
Our real limit isn’t intelligence—it’s exposure. We need to be exposed to:
- Ideas that don’t fit our current worldview.
- Situations that challenge our core assumptions.
- Feedback we can’t fully control or filter.
AI as an External Reference Point
This is where AI becomes more than just a tool for execution. It can act as an external reference point.
In other articles, we’ve discussed how AI can help us ask better questions or handle small tasks to free up mental space. In this context, AI helps us notice what we’ve stopped questioning and to expand the space of what can be seen.
By using AI to explore different perspectives, we are using it to reveal paths we wouldn’t have noticed on our own.
Call to Action
Try out the following prompt:
Using the Known–Unknown matrix, and based on everything you know about me, identify the 10 most critical unknown unknowns that could materially affect my identity, decisions, or long-term trajectory. Focus on blind spots and hidden variables, not advice or generalities.