Yakir's Blog

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Unlearn Judgment to Rediscover Curiosity

In kindergarten classrooms, a subtle tragedy unfolds daily. Five-year-olds who entered the room bursting with questions begin learning to swallow them. The transformation is as predictable as it is heartbreaking.

Young children are natural scientists. Their brains light up with dopamine when they stack blocks, mix paints, or press buttons simply to discover what happens next. They’ll dismantle a toy not to break it but to understand it, mixing curiosity with fearlessness in perfect proportion. Studies show they ask more than 100 questions daily and not for validation, but from genuine wonder. Why is the sky blue? What happens if I drop this? Why do adults go to work? Each answer sparks three new ones, creating an endless cascade of learning driven by intrinsic curiosity rather than external rewards.

Around age six, something shifts. The questions slow, then transform. External metrics like grades, praise, comparison with peers, begin replacing the internal compass of curiosity. The fear of being wrong gradually outweighs the thrill of discovery. School systems built on standardized answers leave little room for experimental thinking. The child who once proudly announced “I tried it five different ways!” now anxiously asks “Is this right?” The scientific mind doesn’t disappear; it goes underground, buried beneath the weight of performance anxiety and social conformity.

This is less a critique of education than an observation of how we might rebuild it. When we understand that children’s natural experimental mindset represents not immaturity but sophisticated learning machinery, we can design environments that preserve rather than replace it. What if assessment measured growth through experimentation rather than conformity to answers? What if we valued the quality of questions as highly as the accuracy of responses? Perhaps then we wouldn’t have to teach adults elaborate frameworks to recover what they once knew as children: that curiosity, not certainty, is where true learning begins.

What knowledge gap are you carefully hiding rather than turning into an opportunity for discovery?

Serious Play Solves Serious Problems

Great breakthroughs often look ridiculous, at first. Watson and Crick built wobbly physical models of DNA like children with construction toys. Einstein imagined riding alongside light beams. These were forms of serious play that accessed parts of the mind that logical analysis alone cannot reach.

Playfulness creates a psychological environment where experimental thinking flourishes. When we approach challenges with humor and humility, our brains release the grip of perfectionism and enter a state neurologists call “cognitive flexibility.” We begin to see connections invisible to our serious mind. That awkward feeling of looking silly shifts from an obstacle to a signpost that reads, “you are venturing into territory where genuine discovery lives.” The discomfort is the point. It signals you’ve left the well-mapped regions of certainty for the uncharted landscapes where innovation happens.

The relationship between play and discovery isn’t accidental; it’s neurologically hardwired. In playful states, our prefrontal cortex loosens its executive control, allowing disparate neural networks to communicate in ways they normally don’t. This is why breakthrough ideas often arrive during moments of playfulness. Walking the dog, taking a shower, doodling in meetings, often places our “procrastination” takes us. We’ve misunderstood these as distractions when they’re actually sophisticated cognitive tools. The mind that feels safe to play is the mind capable of seeing what others miss.

Our organizations desperately need this capacity but systematically eliminate it. We’ve built cultures that value appearing competent over being curious, looking knowledgeable over admitting uncertainty. The antidote isn’t more seriousness but less. Creating spaces where we can ask “What if…?” without preemptively answering “That won’t work.” The most innovative teams aren’t those with the most impressive credentials but those who have preserved or recovered the child’s willingness to experiment without fear of looking foolish.

What problem in your work might benefit from approaching it with deliberate playfulness rather than determined seriousness?

Learn With The Intent To Teach

With every book you finish and skill you cultivate, a curious pattern emerges. Your awareness of what remains unknown expands more rapidly than your actual knowledge. Each scientific principle mastered reveals branches of deeper inquiry; every philosophical concept understood presents doorways to unexplored frameworks. The horizon of ignorance stretches further with each step of progress. (Search: “Dunning–Kruger effect”)

This widening circle of recognized unknowns represents intellectual maturity. Beginners in any field speak with certainty while masters qualify their statements with nuance. The novice believes challenges have single correct solutions; the veteran sees a landscape of tradeoffs. The amateur philosopher makes bold proclamations about human nature; the seasoned thinker acknowledges the limits of their perspective. This humility is a natural consequence of seeing [slightly] more completely; like climbing a mountain only to discover entire mountain ranges beyond.

With the explicit intention to teach others, we activate entirely different neural pathways and cognitive processes that transform surface knowledge into integrated understanding. The brain processes information differently when retention becomes necessary for teaching rather than mere recognition. Reading about cognitive biases casually might leave faint impressions; studying them with the intention to explain them to colleagues creates mental models with staying power. This difference resembles the gap between tourists who photograph landmarks versus cartographers who map terrains. Both visit the same locations but one leaves with souvenirs while the other creates navigational tools.

This transmission mindset creates strategic thinking almost as a side effect. When you regularly organize knowledge for others’ understanding, you naturally begin identifying patterns, connections and principles that transcend individual facts. Your mind builds conceptual scaffolding that supports not just what you currently know but accelerates integration of future learning. The frameworks themselves become valuable intellectual property; ways of seeing that illuminate previously hidden relationships.

What specific domain of knowledge currently fascinates you that deserves this transmission-quality attention? Select something meaningful yet bounded; perhaps a framework for decision-making or a scientific principle with wide application. Spend thirty minutes today organizing your understanding as if preparing to share it with someone who needs this knowledge tomorrow. Notice how questions arise that hadn’t occurred to you before; these gaps represent your next valuable learning opportunities.

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The Path of Least Resistance

Water never argues with the landscape; it simply finds the lowest point and flows. This effortless navigation isn’t laziness but nature’s profound efficiency. We humans, with our complex brains and social structures, often miss this fundamental wisdom.

Most of our struggles come from fighting against natural currents rather than working with them. We force ourselves into careers that reject our strengths, relationships that require constant justification, and habits that feel like pushing boulders uphill. The resistance itself becomes our identity; we wear our struggle as a badge of honor rather than recognizing it as a signal. Perhaps the universe speaks through friction, telling us when we’ve gone off the path.

Meaningful growth requires effort, but there’s a subtle difference between productive resistance, the kind that builds strength, and obstructive resistance that simply wastes energy. The former feels like using muscles; challenging but energizing. The latter feels like walking through mud; depleting and diminishing. I think our intuition knows the difference if we learn to listen closely enough.

What current are you fighting today? Notice where you expend energy maintaining structures that might better be released. The path of least resistance is not passive surrender; its is alignment with your natural flow state where your unique talents meet the world’s needs. Where might you accomplish more by struggling less?

The Opportunity Cost of Never Experimenting

Innovation lives in the deliberate allocation of resources toward the unexplored.

Reserve most of your energy for what’s working well, but deliberately set aside resources for exploration. Google famously implements this through their “20% time” policy, where employees can dedicate one-fifth of their working hours to projects of personal interest, an approach that birthed Gmail, Google News, and countless other innovations. This isn’t blind risk-taking. It’s calculated curiosity, a strategic allocation of attention to possibilities that may outperform everything currently succeeding.

Most organizations protect the established while starving the experimental, then wonder why they face disruption from smaller, hungrier competitors willing to try what seems uncertain.

The smallest experiments often yield disproportionate insights. A single afternoon testing a new approach, five conversations with customers about an unformed idea, or two hours pursuing a creative technique outside your comfort zone might reveal pathways impossible to discover through planning alone. You’ll build up a systematic practice of learning through practical application.

What would happen if you blocked three hours this week for an experiment nobody expects you to pursue? Choose something small enough to complete but significant enough to matter. The value isn’t in the outcome but in what you learn about possibilities previously invisible to you.

Your Perspective Problem Is Hiding in Plain Sight

The lens you choose today shapes the world you inhabit tomorrow. Our consciousness perpetually balances between two ancient storytellers. One spinning tales of caution, the other weaving narratives of possibility. Neither speaks the whole truth. Each moment, each interaction, each opportunity silently transforms as it passes through these invisible filters, becoming either luminous with potential or shadowed with risk, depending not on its inherent nature but on the cognitive frame we’ve unknowingly selected.

Our brains aren’t neutral observers. The negativity bias pulls us toward potential threats and problems, making criticism stick while compliments slide away. This evolutionary inheritance serves as both protector and saboteur, keeping us safe from dangers while potentially blinding us to opportunities. Meanwhile, our optimism bias works in opposition, creating a sunny forecast that underestimates obstacles and overestimates our likelihood of success. These cognitive mechanisms operate below awareness, subtly coloring every decision.

We can deliberately employ re-framing to navigate between them. In the same business scenario, “this project has a 70% chance of success” transforms completely when re-framed as “this project has a 30% chance of failure.” Both statements contain identical information but trigger entirely different emotional responses and risk calculations. By intentionally shifting between frames, we unlock multi-dimensional thinking that neither pure optimism nor pure pessimism can provide.

What decision are you currently viewing through a single frame? Try this: take your current challenge and deliberately frame it three different ways: the optimistic view, the cautious perspective, and the utterly neutral framing. Notice how some elements only becomes visible when you shift perspective. Which insights emerge when you rotate the problem through different cognitive lights? What reality have you been missing by standing in just one spot?

The Sculptor’s Approach to AI Interaction

Within every AI model lies a universe of potential responses, waiting silently like forms trapped in marble.

The art of sculpture offers a compelling metaphor for how we might understand AI interaction. When a sculptor approaches a block of stone, they work with its inherent properties, revealing what possibilities exist within its structure. Similarly, our prompts to AI systems can be viewed as careful, deliberate strokes that uncover what mathematically exists within the model. The responses aren’t created from nothing but revealed from a vast landscape of statistical patterns and possibilities that were present all along, waiting to be accessed through the right combination of words.

This sculptor’s framing offers a fresh understanding of AI interaction. When we prompt these systems, we navigate through a forest of potential completions. Our words serve as guides through this labyrinth, illuminating certain branches while leaving others in darkness. The artistry lives in developing an intuition for which words will unveil the most beautiful, useful pathways among countless alternatives. Skilled prompting resembles skilled sculpting. Both require an understanding of what lies beneath the surface, and both demand knowing precisely where to apply pressure and angle the tools of our language.

What might change in your approach if you viewed each AI interaction as revealing rather than constructing? How would your prompts evolve if you imagined them as gentle tools uncovering pre-existing possibilities? Which prompting techniques might help you better sense the shapes waiting within the probabilistic stone? When you next encounter unexpected output, consider what this reveals about both the material itself and your sculpting technique. Was your chisel too blunt, your angle too steep, or have you perhaps uncovered an interesting vein in the material worth following further?