What am I missing? How to find your blind spots without looking harder
What capacity around me is lying unused, and what unmet need could it be matched to?
Question 9 of the Index
You have gone over it. You have asked the people you trust and they agreed with you, and the agreement did not settle anything, because what worries you is not whether your reasoning is sound. It is whether you are reasoning about the right thing.
A blind spot is not a gap in what you know. It is a gap you cannot look at directly, because the thing that would show it to you is the same faculty that is producing it. That is why asking harder does not work, and why asking a friend often does not either: a friend who likes you is working from your account of the situation, and your account is where the missing piece went missing.
What does work is a question aimed at the frame rather than at the contents. Not am I right about this, but what would have to be true for the opposite to be right. Most people can answer that in one sentence. Most people have never been asked it. And the sentence is usually the thing that was missing.
There is a second move, uncomfortable enough that it tends to get skipped. Ask what you would have to admit about yourself if the other side turned out to be right. You do not have to answer it out loud. The speed of the flinch is already information.
Where blind spots sit
Blind spots in decision making tend to sit in three places: the option you never put on the list, the person whose view you summarised instead of asking for it, and the cost you counted as zero because it falls on you later. A checklist can name those places. It cannot look into them for you, because you would be the one holding it.
That is the limit of most advice on how to challenge your own thinking. It asks you to be the reasoner and the auditor at once, and the auditor shares every assumption the reasoner has. ‘What am I not seeing?’ is a question that needs asking from outside, by a person or by something built to keep asking after you have answered.
You do not need to be told what you are missing. You need to be asked the question you have been steering around. Put the situation in, in your own words.
No account, no card, one exchange. Yours to keep.