The Hidden Cost of Unchallenged Assumptions
Introduction
There is a peculiar confidence that comes from knowing how things work. We know how to greet someone, what counts as polite, how to tell a joke, and which places feel welcoming. We rarely stop to consider that much of this knowledge is local. It belongs to the world we have experienced, not necessarily to the world as a whole.
Then someone fails to laugh at a joke, misunderstands a gesture, or sees a familiar place completely differently. For a moment, what seemed obvious becomes strange. That small disruption can be the beginning of a much bigger discovery: our assumptions are not the same thing as reality.
Why This Post Matters
Assumptions help us navigate everyday life. Without them, every interaction would require starting from scratch. But they can quietly become limits when we stop treating them as working explanations and start treating them as unquestionable facts.
That matters in workplaces where colleagues interpret the same behaviour differently, in communities where people form opinions about neighbours they have never met, and in relationships where we believe we already know what someone means. It matters, too, in the private stories we tell ourselves about where we belong and what we are capable of doing.
The problem is not that we have a perspective. Everyone does. The problem begins when we forget that it is only one perspective.
The Joke That Exposed an Invisible Wall
At eighteen, Wesley Warshawer attended a volleyball event at the University of Arizona and met an exchange student from Japan. The student asked him to explain Halloween. That alone was unfamiliar territory: Wesley had never needed to explain a holiday he had always known. Then he tried a knock-knock joke.
He said, “knock knock.” His new acquaintance waited silently. The expected response, “who’s there?”, never came. What Wesley had treated as universal was simply a shared convention between people who had learned the same kind of joke.
The exchange was funny, but its implication stayed with him. If something so ordinary could be unknown to another person, what else had he mistaken for common knowledge?
“He doesn’t know what that is, and and think about how many things I don’t understand about him and his culture. ⁓ And it just showed me as an eighteen year old it’s not, you know, ⁓ there’s just so much we don’t know and ⁓ and really just solidified this idea of we’re in a bubble. And so ⁓ I became obsessed with trying to leave my bubble so that I could ⁓ could learn because I just realized in that moment I had never even conceptualized of a person not understanding this paradigm of knock knock who’s there.”
That moment did not make him an expert on another culture. It made him more aware of how much he had yet to learn. There is an important difference. Curiosity begins not with having the right answer, but with realizing that our familiar answer may not travel very far.
When Common Sense Is Only Local Knowledge
Wesley began to reconsider moments when he had judged other people for not knowing things that seemed elementary to him. Growing up near the Mexican border, he once found it ridiculous when a visitor suggested joining a ski team in a desert community. He also remembered laughing at someone who mispronounced “tortilla.”
From inside his own experience, these mistakes seemed obvious. But the same logic worked against him abroad. In South Korea, he offered to walk his Korean tutor home after an evening lesson, intending to be considerate. She interpreted the offer differently, and the exchange became uncomfortable. In India, a fellow student warned him that raising his hand to ask a question could be perceived as disrespectful in that classroom.
Neither experience establishes a universal rule about an entire country. Both show how quickly a well-intentioned action can acquire a different meaning in a different setting. Good intentions do not automatically guarantee shared understanding.
The lesson is not to become afraid of speaking or acting. It is to replace the reflex to judge with a willingness to ask what context we might be missing. That small shift creates room for humility, and sometimes for a needed apology.
The Stories We Tell About People We Have Never Met
After living and studying abroad, Wesley returned to work in Silicon Valley. He considered himself worldly, yet eventually noticed that his daily surroundings represented a narrow slice of the United States. He wondered how much he really understood about people elsewhere in his own country.
When remote work made travel possible, he spent about eighteen months moving through rural American communities. He wanted to test the picture of deep division that he had absorbed from a distance. Rather than asking only which political side someone supported, he invited people to describe what a fair healthcare or immigration system might look like.
He found that conversations could reveal shared concerns beneath different labels. That does not mean genuine disagreements disappear, or that a few personal encounters can settle national political questions. It means that a label often tells us less about a person than we imagine.
In Alabama, a restaurant owner heard that Wesley worked in California and immediately assumed he held particular political views. The irony was hard to miss: Wesley had travelled to challenge his own assumptions and found himself on the receiving end of someone else’s.
The same habit can turn inward. We may decide a community would never welcome us, that a profession is not for people like us, or that a conversation is certain to go badly. Sometimes there are real reasons for caution. Other times, we are treating a prediction as though it were evidence.
Curiosity Is a Way of Testing What We Think We Know
What makes Wesley’s experiences useful is not the distance he travelled. It is the approach he brought with him. He entered unfamiliar places, asked ordinary questions, listened to answers, and allowed his expectations to change.
There is a distinction between seeking experiences that confirm our view and seeking experiences that might correct it. The first can feel reassuring. The second requires accepting that we may have been wrong, perhaps for years.
Curiosity is not the same as assuming everyone will be kind or every unfamiliar situation will be safe. Sound judgment still matters. But where the risk is manageable, a conversation or experience can provide better evidence than a stereotype, a headline or an inherited belief.
And there is no requirement to sell everything and move across the world. Wesley suggests that a different community, cultural event or place of worship might be within an hour of home. He also described a personal rule: try something new every week. The scale can be small; the willingness to learn is what matters.
Lessons for Living Life Audaciously
Living audaciously is often imagined as a dramatic leap: leaving a job, crossing an ocean, beginning something nobody expects. Those decisions can be bold. But so can the quieter act of admitting, “I might not understand this as well as I think.”
The next time someone behaves in a way that seems inexplicable, consider what they may know that you do not. When you dismiss a place or opportunity, ask whether your conclusion comes from direct experience or from a story you have accepted. When a familiar belief is challenged, resist the urge to defend it before you have heard the other person out.
Audacity, in this sense, is not certainty. It is the willingness to let new evidence change you. A wider world does not always require a longer journey. Sometimes it begins with the courage to question the wall you have been calling the horizon.
