I was once a journalist. Here is the most important thing I learned.

Early in my career, I was a journalist, and it taught me many lessons I have used in every non-journalism job since.?Here are just a few of them –

·??????Stay curious.?Never stop asking questions, and listen to understand.?

·??????Observe what people do, not just what they say.?

·??????Ask yourself what someone has to gain when they offer you a story.

·??????No matter how reliable the source, no one person has the full picture.?

·??????Beware of people whipping up word salads – they either don’t know what they’re talking about or they’re hiding something.

·??????Little lies tend to lead to bigger lies.?

·??????Don’t be too precious about your own work.?It can always be improved, so be gracious about feedback.

·??????Be accountable for errors and correct them.

Unfortunately, much of journalism has changed since I practiced it.?An editor once said to me, it’s not just your job to ask one person the weather and another person the weather and to write, “John says it’s pouring, but Jessie says it’s overcast.”?Your job, he said, is to get outside and determine whether there is precipitation or not.

Those are all worthy lessons, but there’s one more that looms above the rest in importance: Do not write the story ahead of time.

I worked for wire services, filing multiple stories a day on all kinds of subjects.?Since I had to write fast, it was tempting to start mentally composing a story before I finished filling in the gaps. This is a terrible practice.?We should be unfaithful to any assumed narrative. ?Our presumptions are warped with bias, so we must hold our own perspectives loosely.?If we cling to our preconceived story, we'll be so busy trying to find facts that fit that we'll miss what’s right in front of us.

When done properly, the work of a journalist requires an open mind, persistent questioning and intent observation.?This is good training for every job and life experience I’ve had since.?Many people don’t make a habit of stepping back and wondering what is happening and why.?Or how things might be different.?They consider their first take on what’s around them as immutable fact.?And they resist any changes to that narrative.?These are not my favorite people.?They are too confident about things that don’t stand up well to scrutiny, including the idea that there is only one way to see the world, which is not a very interesting or accurate way to see the world at all.

But I get it.?It’s easy to fall in love with our own narratives.?It’s happened to me.?I’ve seen it happen to others, in my personal life and in the office.?The corporate world is full of cautionary tales of companies that have written their stories ahead of time and never amended their strategies to reflect new realities.?Latent competitors have wiped out those that could not imagine a different narrative unfolding.?

It's human nature to stick to our stories when they’re losing credibility. ?We end up trying to find anything to prop up our disproven ideas instead of flipping the script.?We avoid acknowledging the death of a narrative that never really existed but we thought to be true.?Sticking to a story that isn’t real becomes the cause of a great deal of suffering, for the one who wrote it and for the ones around who can see, plain as day, that it's fantasy.?

So don’t write the story ahead of time – or if you must do so, change it when faced with new information. Call it a pivot and be glad for the learning.?You’ll end up with something closer to the truth.

In my work, we practice agile, an iterative way of developing products.?Agile in non-technical terms is this: you make up a story about what people need.?To be fancy, you might call this a hypothesis.?And then you see if it’s true.?And when it’s not, you adjust the assumptions.?And you keep going until you’ve created something good.?And then you keep going until you’ve developed something extraordinary.?You learn to revel in surprise and respond to the unexpected.?You let your solution be molded by learning.?The hypothesis coming up against hard reality reshapes the story every time.? No one runs around insisting the original story should stand.

It's better to work in this way, understanding that the story written by assumption will most certainly require an open mind and heavy edits before it will reveal any truths.?I believe it’s also better to live in this way, open to changes in perspective so we can grow.

As Albert Einstein said, "The mind that opens up to a new idea never returns to its original size."

The more open the mind, the more complete the story.