why is “why” important?

When we're immersed in our lives, we're operating within a system of beliefs, expectations, habits, and assumptions. We make decisions based on what we’ve established and presumed to be true. This programming comes from experience, inputs, consequences, and what we’re taught.

Here’s the hitch: we cannot objectively evaluate a system while treating all of its assumptions as unquestionable.

When a mechanism stops working, you don’t assume the whole thing is trash, you go through the system to find the broken component. You sit back and think about how it works, you look up the error code, you look at the evidence, you consider replacement parts or upgrades.

That is why detachment is important; not emotional detachment but intellectual detachment.

The ability to temporarily separate what we think we know, what we inherently believe, and what we assume long enough to analyze the problem and decide how to move forward; rather than lighting the whole car on fire, maybe we pause long enough to realize it probably just needs fuel.

A reasonable challenge creates space between assumption and conclusion. A passage popularized by Stephen R. Covey in The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People states, ‘between stimulus and response, there is space. In that space is our power to choose our response.’ I will take that one step further and say, in that space is our power and our possibility.

We're not questioning for the sake of being contrary. We're questioning to understand whether our conclusions are sound.

And now  you have the value of Theory; to move from accepting what seems true to understanding why we believe it to be true, and determining whether that belief still holds up under examination.

Imagine two women who are equally successful in their careers. Both feel burned out. Both feel something is missing.

One concludes, "I need a new job.”
The other asks, "What is it about my current job that's making me feel this way?"

The first has identified one possible solution. The second has opened an investigation.

Neither is wrong or right, but the second woman has created an opportunity to discover whether changing careers would actually solve her problem.

And this, my friend, is where we start.