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Each night I answer a few questions in my daily review.
One of them is What surprised me?
I ask it to correct my model of the world.
In 1940 the mathematician Norbert Wiener started work on aiming anti-aircraft guns.
Gunners had to aim where a plane would be moments later. So he and the engineer Julian Bigelow built a predictor that guessed that spot.
They measured the gap between where they predicted the plane would be and where it went. Then they fed that gap back into the next guess.
Each miss corrected the next prediction.
Wiener named the idea in his 1948 book Cybernetics, from the Greek word for steersman.
Flo Conway and Jim Siegelman tell the story in Dark Hero of the Information Age.
A surprise is that gap. It shows where your model of the world was off.
Write down what surprised you and ask why it surprised you. Each answer feeds your next guess and you become a better predictor.
One question a night turns each surprise into a correction.
What surprised you today?