When I was in secondary school, our English teacher gave us a novel to read.
To be honest, I wasn't exactly excited. I started reading because I had to, not because I wanted to.
The first chapters were... fine. I met the characters, followed the story and, like most readers do, I quietly started filling in the gaps myself.
"I know where this is going." "I know who I like." "I know who's making the wrong decisions."
Without realising it, I wasn't just reading the story anymore. I was writing part of it myself.
Then something happened. The next chapter was written from someone else's perspective.
I remember stopping for a moment. Not because the story had changed. Because it hadn't.
- The conversations were the same.
- The events were the same.
- The facts were exactly the same.
Only now I realised that I had been seeing only one part of the picture.
Suddenly the person I thought was selfish wasn't. The decision I thought was stupid suddenly made perfect sense. The assumptions I had confidently made a few pages earlier quietly fell apart.
For the first time, I wasn't reading to find out what would happen next. I was reading because I wanted to understand what I had missed.
Funny enough... More than twenty years later, that still happens to me.
Not with novels. With people.
- An operator tells me why a procedure is never followed exactly as written.
- A maintenance engineer explains why the same equipment keeps failing.
- Someone in QA asks one innocent-looking question.
- Or a production colleague casually mentions something everyone else assumed was obvious.
And suddenly I feel exactly like that teenager again.
The story hasn't changed. Only my understanding of it has.
I've started to believe that this is where experience really begins.
Not when you have all the answers. But when you recognise the feeling of being completely convinced... and become curious anyway.
That is probably why one question keeps coming back in almost every project I do.
"What am I missing?"
Because every now and then, someone opens the next chapter.
And I realise I wasn't reading the whole story after all.
What was the last conversation that completely changed how you looked at a situation?
