My bewitchment with information is different. It is with the mind’s hunger to understand, ‘its desire to know’ as Aristotle said. And that kind of knowing seems to require three things: 1) supplying the facts, 2) seeing the social collective context and 3) dismantling denial.

I agree with Carl Rogers who asserted that the human baby arrives complete with unconditional self-regard and expects to find that as the culture of their life. Children have to be cudgelled into giving up this expectation. We grow unwillingly into adults who disdain and withhold appreciation. Fortunately, thinking pairs can restore both our experience of it and our expertise at it. And before we know it, we live it.

To put its wisdom simply, one could say the fundamental human challenge is this:

It’s hard to learn if you already know.

Unfortunately, we are hardwired to feel as if we know—as if we see reality itself rather than a version of reality filtered through our biases, backgrounds, or expertise. But we can unlearn the habit of knowing and reinvigorate our curiosity.

Because when you start focusing on extending the charitable assumption to the people around you, you find yourself giving it to yourself a bit more as well. We were introduced to many of these concepts on our very first day, at the meeting for new hires. Those meetings were in themselves unusual; my Cornell friends had gone on to work for large restaurant companies who didn’t do anything of the sort. And the importance of those meetings within USHG’s culture sent an immediate signal: “There’s a certain way we do things here, and it’s bigger than teaching you how you move through the dining room or how to spiel a dish.

By studying some of the most beautiful examples of people whose latent potential popped into view when they came into frame, I became increasingly attuned to seeing and sensing the encodings and fire of those around me.

Then one day, I woke up to realize that my entire emotional state had changed, not just in my work, but across my entire life. Instead of feeling frustrated with what people are not, I’d made a monumental shift to feeling grateful for what they are. I wish I’d made this shift decades earlier but as the Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter pointed out, “Wisdom too often never comes, and so one ought not to reject it merely because it comes late.