Question what everyone takes for granted

Choose one widely shared assumption — in your field, your culture, or your circle — and examine it honestly.

Why it works

Socrates was most useful (and most dangerous) when questioning what everyone assumed they knew: what courage is, what justice requires, what makes a good life. The mechanism is deautomatization: surface-level consensus feels like knowledge but often is not; examining it reveals either genuine grounds or surprising uncertainty. In contemporary life, this is the practice of first-principles thinking — not accepting convention as reason.

How to do it

1. Identify a claim in your professional or personal life that is treated as obvious and unquestioned.
2. Ask: what is the actual evidence for this? What does it assume? Are those assumptions justified?
3. Take the question seriously for a week before deciding whether the consensus holds.
4. If it doesn’t hold, say so — and update your behavior accordingly.

Evidence

First-principles reasoning and debiasing from received wisdom are associated with better decision quality and innovation in creative and analytical contexts. Socratic questioning is the ancient form of this deautomatization. (mechanistic)

Questioning received wisdom can produce productive revision or reflexive contrarianism — the discipline is to follow the question honestly, not to be systematically skeptical as an identity.

Common mistake

Questioning received wisdom as an intellectual performance or a way to seem unconventional, without genuinely being willing to update beliefs when the examination supports them.