Welcome to “Beyond Success,” the podcast for high-achievers seeking deeper meaning, fulfillment and purpose. Now, here's your host, world-renowned leadership coach and therapist, David Tian, PhD.
David: A smart, capable person, sits down and says, “I need to get clear on my values.” They usually say it calmly, sometimes with urgency, sometimes with a kind of relief, like they finally named the problem and now the solution should just follow, but if you listen closely, something really weird shows up.
The more they talk about their values, the less clear they become. They sound principled. They sound serious. They sound like someone who has done the work, but when it comes time to decide, they hesitate or they over correct, or they reach for the same justifications that they've been using for years, just dressed up a little bit better. Here's the uncomfortable possibility: sometimes values talk isn't helping someone think more clearly. Sometimes this value talk is actually helping them to stop thinking. [01:04.8]
Values can become a way to end the conversation in your own head, a way to silence doubt, a way to shut down discomfort, a way to feel settled without actually seeing the situation any more clearly than before. That's why values can start to feel heavy, moral, performative, even exhausting. You're carrying them around like a weight instead of using them as orientation, and it's not because values don't matter. It's because something upstream has already gone wrong.
Before anyone can think clearly about values, they have to be able to sit in a very specific internal state, a state that most high-performers are trained to avoid, and this is the state of not knowing—the state of confusion, of unfinished thought, of having no clean answer yet. [01:51.7]
That state doesn't just feel intellectually uncomfortable. It feels emotionally risky. It can bring up anxiety, self-doubt, even a quiet sense of exposure. You're aware that you don't know and that awareness doesn't, for most people, feel neutral. It feels personal. If that state feels intolerable, the mind automatically reaches for certainty. It reaches for principles. It reaches for convictions and it calls that clarity. This episode is about what has to come first, the capacity to stay in not knowing long enough for real thinking to happen instead of grabbing for certainty too soon.
When someone says, “I know what matters,” a simple question is worth asking here. What does “know” actually mean there? It might mean “I can defend it if it's challenged.” It might mean “It sounds noble and reasonable” It might mean “The people I respect would agree with me.” All of those are familiar. They're also socially useful. They help you explain yourself. They help you avoid looking confused or unprepared. [02:59.1]
But there's another meaning that often hides underneath. Sometimes “I know what really matters” really means “This ends the debate in my head that I can't stand,” and that's the most dangerous one, because ending the debate feels like relief. You can feel your shoulders drop. The tension relaxes or eases. The inner noise quiets down, and it feels like stability. It might feel like clarity. But relief is not the same thing as true understanding and stability is not the same thing as truth.
When the main function of a belief is to assuage your discomfort, then that belief is doing emotional work, not epistemic work. It's helping the mind feel settled, not helping it see more accurately, and this is where a lot of very smart people start getting stuck. They reach a point where uncertainty starts to feel unbearable. [03:54.5]
The questions don't resolve quickly enough. The trade-offs don't line up cleanly enough. Every option carries a real cost, not just strategically, but emotionally and relationally as well. Someone will be disappointed. Something important will be lost. An identity might have to change. Instead of staying with that tension, the mind naturally closes the question. It grabs for principle. It grabs for value or conviction, and then it calls that knowing.
Now, there's a name for this pattern and it's worth naming because it shows up everywhere, especially among people who care deeply about doing or seeing themselves as thoughtful and responsible, and I call this “premature epistemic closure.” Premature epistemic closure—all that means is that the question of what's true or right gets closed off too early, not because the answer is actually clear, but because sitting with the uncertainty feels too uncomfortable. [04:57.1]
Once that happens, thinking doesn't deepen actually, it narrows. The sense of clarity increases, but judgment silently degrades, and because it feels like confidence, almost no one notices it when it's happening. That kind of premature closure doesn't happen because people are careless or they're shallow. It happens because pressure does something very specific to the mind.
To see this clearly, it helps to borrow an idea from the famous psychiatrist Wilfred Bion. Bion spent his career studying what happens to thinking when people are under real strain, not mild stress, but the kind of pressure where decisions carry a lot of weight and mistakes cost something real or severe. His core claim is simple and unsettling—thinking is not the default response to uncertainty. The default response is to get rid of the uncertainty. [05:54.3]
When the mind meets a question that feels too heavy or too complex, or too costly to leave open, the mind doesn't naturally slow down and think more carefully. The mind looks for the fastest way out, not because it's lazy, but because your mind is trying to regulate the internal pressure, and that exit can take a few familiar forms.
Sometimes it shows up as deciding too fast. The speed itself creates a kind of relief. Action replaces reflection and movement itself feels like progress. Sometimes it shows up as declaring certainty. The tone firms up. The language sharpens, and then the ambivalence disappears, but not because it was resolved, but because it became intolerable.
Sometimes it shows up as clinging to a principle. A value gets elevated to absolute status. That principle doesn't guide the decision anymore. It ends the discussion. It ends a discussion internally and it ends a discussion externally as well.
Sometimes it shows up as moralizing the choice. One option becomes right and the others all become suspect. The emotional complexity of the situation silently drops out of view. [07:06.8]
All of these moves feel different on the surface, but underneath they're all doing the same job. They reduce internal load by shutting the question down. There's a clean name for this mechanism. I call it “epistemic short-circuiting.”
Think of it like an electrical system. When the load gets too high, the system doesn't become more precise. It jumps the fuse. Power drops. The strain goes away. In the mind, that fuse is uncertainty. When uncertainty feels unbearable, the system cuts it off. The result feels like clarity. It often sounds like confidence, but what actually happened is that thinking stopped prematurely—and once that happens, the problem isn't that the person lacks intelligence or integrity or values. The problem is that the conditions required for true thinking are now no longer present. [07:58.4]
Once thinking shuts down early, it leaves behind a very convincing substitute, and that substitute is certainty. Certainty feels clean. Uncertainty feels messy. Clean feels controlled. Clean feels respectable. Clean feels like you know what you're doing, but messy feels like confusion, weakness, or being exposed without a plan, so most people don't stay with messiness for very long.
High-achievers are especially trained out of it. From early on, they're rewarded for speed, for sounding confident, or having an answer ready when others are still hesitating. Decisiveness becomes a virtue. Conviction becomes a signal of competence and uncertainty becomes something that you have to manage away as fast as possible. Over time, the mind learns a simple equation: “The faster that I can sound certain, the safer I am, the clearer I appear, the more trust and respect I get.” [09:00.0]
That equation works well in most situations. It helps you execute. It helps you lead teams, helps you get promoted. It helps you win in competitive environments. But here's the uncomfortable part—a lot of what gets praised as strong leadership is actually just anxiety with good posture. The certainty isn't coming from understanding. It's coming from discomfort with leaving the question open.
The clean answer doesn't just reassure other people. It regulates the person who is giving it. It reduces the internal pressure. It makes the moment more tolerable for that person. There's a really important distinction here—some uncertainty really does get resolved through action. You test something. You ship it. You make the call. Feedback arrives and the situation becomes clearer, and speed, in this case, helps a lot. Waiting longer would only add friction. [09:53.7]
But there's another kind of uncertainty, the kind of uncertainty that involves trade-offs, identity, values, or long-term consequences. The kind where action taken too quickly doesn't actually resolve any confusion; it freezes it in place. In those situations, rushing doesn't clarify. It narrows the decision feels decisive in the moment, but the cost shows up later, like regret or a sense of misalignment, or disharmony, relationships strained in ways that don't fully make sense, or judgment that starts to feel brittle under pressure—and this is the turning point that many high-achievers don't expect or anticipate.
The habits that help them succeed earlier begin to work against them at this next level. Speed stops being an advantage. Confidence stops being informative and premature closure starts getting punished instead of rewarded. That's when certainty stops being clarity and ends up becoming the problem itself. [10:54.8]
When certainty starts to fail, another move often takes its place. This move looks more thoughtful. It sounds more mature. It even feels responsible, but it creates the same problem in a subtler way. Okay, here's the pattern. I see it over and over again in people who are intelligent and sincerely want to do the right thing, and it starts with confusion—a situation doesn't line up or the options all carry costs, or the old answers stop working, and that confusion creates pressure, not just pressure from outside, but internal pressure, a tightening in the body, a sense of being on the hook, a feeling that time is running out, even when maybe, in fact, it isn't.
Then values talk enters the scene. Someone says, “I need to come back to my values,” or “This just isn't aligned,” or “At the end of the day, this is what matters most to me,” and for a moment, there's relief. The internal pressure drops. The tension eases. The debate inside their heads ends. There's a sense of being back on solid ground. But what follows that relief is rarely better judgment. More often it's narrower judgment. [12:07.8]
The situation gets simplified too much. Important trade-offs disappear from view. The decision hardens before it's truly, actually understood. This is the point where values stop guiding thought and start replacing it. Values, in this case, end up becoming slogans and principles end up becoming shields. There's a name for this move and it matters because it hides in plain sight all the time. It's called “forced knowing.”
Forced knowing is when someone acts like they know, not because they've seen clearly, but because not knowing feels too frightening or too humiliating to tolerate. The mind grabs a value and uses it to close the question. The value does the emotional work of ending discomfort, but doesn't do the epistemic work of clarifying reality. [13:01.3]
This is why values talk often feels hollow at exactly the moments it's supposed to matter most. The words sound right. They check all the boxes, but the decision feels flat or thin. The reasoning feels constrained. The person sounds grounded, but something essential seems missing. There's a simple way to tell whether values are helping or sedating. Ask this question, slowly and honestly. “Do these values help you see the trade-offs more clearly or do they mainly make the discomfort go away?”
If they sharpen your awareness of cost and consequence, then they're doing their job. If they provide relief without increasing clarity, then they're just functioning as a sedative, and once values are used that way, thinking does not deepen. Instead, it shuts down. Politely and with good intentions, but it shuts down and leaves the room. [13:55.8]
Once values stop working as a sedative, a different question comes into view. It's no longer about which value to choose. It's about capacity. The real skill here is simple to describe and hard to practice. It's staying present when nothing fits yet, letting the problem stay open, not rushing to make it coherent before you actually fully understand it. That skill has a name, and the name matters because it points to something trainable. It's about increasing the threshold for epistemic uncertainty. All that means is the amount of not knowing that you can tolerate without grabbing for certainty.
Most people assume that if you don't decide quickly, then you're being indecisive, but that's a mistake. Indecision is avoiding responsibility. But this is something else. This is the ability to keep the mind open when it actually wants to close, to let the question breathe without forcing an answer, just to relieve the pressure. [14:55.2]
When your threshold is low, your mind closes early. It reaches for a principle, a value, a confident stance, but when your threshold is higher or bigger, the mind can hold tension a lot longer. It can register more of what's actually happening before committing. [15:13.6]
Sometimes, the real problem isn't more effort or more motivation. It's knowing the right direction. A lot of people listening to this podcast are capable and driven. Things still look fine on paper, but life still feels strangely flat. When that happens, more advice usually isn't the answer. Clarity is.
I've put together a short assessment that takes about two minutes. It's simply a way to see which area deserves your attention most right now, whether that's relationships, decision-making, or how pressure is being handled day to day. Based on your responses, you'll be sent a short set of master classes related to that area.
If that sounds useful, you can find it at DTPhD.com/quiz. That’s “dtphd.com/quiz.”
Here's a concrete example. Someone is under a real pressure to make a call. The team is waiting. The market is moving. The decision carries long-term consequences that won't show up for years, so acting fast might feel decisive. It might also protect the person from sitting in doubt a moment longer.
The skill here isn't courage or bravery, or discipline. The skill here is staying open long enough to notice what's driving the rush. Maybe it's fear of looking incompetent. Maybe it's fear of disappointing someone important. Maybe it's fear of admitting that the problem is larger or messier than you expected. When the question stays open, those pressures become visible. They stop operating invisibly in the background, and once they're visible, they stop running the decision. [16:59.5]
That's the beginning of real thinking, not because the answer suddenly appears, but because your mind finally has access to the full shape of the problem. The skill here isn't bravery or willpower. It's staying open long enough to notice what's driving the rush. Maybe it's fear of looking weak. Maybe it's fear of disappointing someone. Maybe it's fear of admitting that the problem is bigger than it first appeared. When you don't rush, those pressures can become visible. You start to see what you're protecting by closing the question early, and that visibility is the beginning of true thinking.
Raising the threshold for epistemic uncertainty doesn't give you answers. It gives you access, access to the full shape of the problem, and without that access, any answer, no matter how principled it might sound, is actually built on just partial sight. This isn't about like waiting forever. It's about waiting long enough for the mind to do what it's really meant for. [18:04.5]
Once you can see how this works, another question naturally follows: “Why do so many accomplished intelligent people miss this skill entirely, even when they're brilliant?” The simplest answer is also the most charitable one—you weren't trained for it. You were trained to close ambiguity.
From early on, you learned that open questions are like liabilities, that hesitation looks like weakness, that confidence buys trust and respect, so you learned how to compress complexity into something manageable and presentable. When ambiguity showed up, you reached for substitutes. Frameworks helped you move faster. Mission statements helped you justify direction. Principles helped you sound consistent. Culture language helped decisions feel shared and moral, not just personal. [18:58.6]
None of that is inherently wrong. Much of it is helpful and works, especially in environments where speed matters more and alignment keeps the system running, but here's where the problem really starts—all of those substitutes can actually end up turning into interference. They don't just guide your thinking. They can sit between you and reality. They filter what you're willing to notice. They smooth over tension that might actually be important. They make certain questions feel inappropriate or already answered.
That's what epistemic interference looks like in practice. It's not confusion. It's structure doing too much work. It's language arriving before perception. It's explanation replacing real contact with what's actually happening in reality—and this is where a harder question becomes unavoidable. When a value statement ends the inquiry, what exactly is it doing? Is it a value or is it a veto? [20:00.6]
If saying, “This isn't aligned,” stops you from examining trade-offs, then, in fact, it isn't guiding judgment. It's blocking it. If invoking a principle shuts down your curiosity, it isn't clarifying reality. It's protecting you from discomfort. You don't need fewer values. You don't need better principles. You don't need a better or cleaner mission statement. You need to notice when the tools that once helped you think are now preventing you from seeing.
That noticing takes a specific kind of honesty, not moral honesty, but perceptual honesty, the willingness to ask whether the language you're using is helping you stay in contact with the problem or helping you escape it with your pride. That distinction is really easy to miss, and if you've spent your life being rewarded for clarity and confidence, then it can feel unsettling to even raise this question. [20:58.0]
Once you start to see that interference at work, another pattern becomes hard to ignore. There's a point in your life where the old strategy stops paying off. The stakes get bigger. More people are affected by your decisions. Feedback slows down. You don't find out in a week or even a quarter whether you were right. Sometimes you don't find out for years, and even when you do finally find out the signal is mixed up with politics or optics, or narratives that you don't fully control.
The decisions also start to carry some moral weight now, not in an abstract way, but in a personal one. People's livelihoods are at stake, public trust, the meaning of a brand or an institution. Your own personal reputation that you've built up over decades ends up now feeling exposed to a single misstep, and at this point, the pressure changes character. [21:51.3]
Earlier in your career, pressure pushed you to learn faster. Now it pushes you to close questions sooner, prematurely. The cost of being wrong feels higher, so the temptation to sound certain gets stronger, and this is where a crucial reversal happens. More insight starts to add pressure, not relief. The more angles you see, the heavier the decision feels, and more certainty doesn't improve your judgment. It actually makes it worse.
Think about situations like layoffs or public scrutiny, or board pressure or decisions that redefine what your company stands for. In those moments, every move carries symbolic weight. Whatever you decide will be read as a statement about who you are and what you value, whether you intend it or not. That symbolic weight makes uncertainty much harder to tolerate. You're not just deciding what to do. You're deciding what the decision says about you, so the pull toward a clean, defensible answer becomes almost irresistible. [22:52.4]
This is where many people misdiagnose the problem. They assume they need more information or better analysis, or a sharper framework or a clearer set of values, but at this level, the danger isn't ignorance. It's actually premature epistemic closure. It's closing the question too early, because holding it open feels too personally risky. It's mistaking defensiveness for responsibility. It's reaching for certainty to protect identity or reputation or authority, instead of to see the situation more clearly.
The tragedy here is that the very clarity that you're reaching for is what ends up distorting your judgment, because once the question is closed off prematurely, reality no longer has a way back in.
Once you see how premature closure distorts judgment, the next part tends to surprise people. Here’s the part most people don't expect. When uncertainty becomes survivable, you don't immediately get answers. What you get instead is visibility, vision. You can see. Contradictions stop being smoothed over. You can hold two competing truths in your mind without forcing them to reconcile too quickly. Trade-offs stop getting papered over with language that sounds responsible but actually hides the real cost. [24:12.8]
You can see in plain terms what each option demands from you. Something else becomes clearer as well. Desire starts to separate from obligation. You notice the difference between what you genuinely want to protect and what you feel pressured to defend because it looks good or it keeps the peace. That distinction matters more than most people realize.
As that separation becomes clearer, certain limits begin to assert themselves, not as rules that you invent, but as boundaries that you can recognize. There are lines you can see yourself crossing and lines you can't. There are costs you can accept and costs that feel intolerable once you actually look at them closely without rushing. [24:57.7]
This is where values begin to appear in a very different way. They don't arrive as statements you choose. They show up as refusals, as limits, as things you're unwilling to trade even when the upside looks tempting. They reveal themselves through what you're prepared to give up and what you aren't.
You don't have to argue yourself into these limits. You don't have to defend them. Once they're visible, they tend to feel obvious in a grounded, embodied way. You might even wonder how you missed them before. That's because they were actually always there. They were just buried under pressure, under obfuscating language, and the need to sound a certain or look a certain way.
This is why forcing values rarely works at higher levels of responsibility. Values that are chosen under pressure tend to function as justifications. Values that emerge after sustained contact with uncertainty tend to function as constraints. Real values constrain action. Fake values justify action. [26:01.4]
When values show up in this way, they don't simplify decisions. They make decisions heavier. They narrow your options in ways that cost you something real, and that's exactly how you know they're doing their real job. They don't end thinking. They anchor thinking.
Once you see values emerge in this way, it helps to know that this idea isn't new. My favorite Chinese philosopher, Wang Yangming from the 16th century, made a claim that still cuts through a lot of modern confusion. He said the problem with human judgment isn't a lack of knowing; it's interference.
In his language, that interference comes from what he calls siyu. You don't need any mysticism to understand this. He was talking about self-centeredness, status hunger, fear of loss, the need to look good in the eyes of others, the pressure to protect your identity or your reputation, or your advantage, and when those forces are active, your perception is distorted. It bends. You don't see the situation as it really is. You see it through what you're trying to defend or secure. Knowing doesn't disappear. It gets distorted. [27:10.8]
Wang called this capacity underneath that distortion liangzhi. A better translation isn't pure knowing or anything mystical like that. It's closer to this—when interference drops, clear knowing works on its own. You don't have to manufacture it. You don't have to argue yourself into it. This lines up closely with what Bion was pointing to centuries later.
Bion described how pressure pushes the mind to close prematurely. Wang described how self-centered concerns warp your perception. It's the same structure, different vocabulary. In both cases, clarity doesn't come from adding more concepts or more effort, or more explanation. It comes from removing what's in the way. [27:55.7]
When pressure and self-protection stop running the show, you don't become smarter. You become more accurate. You notice what you were previously filtering out. You feel the limits you can't cross without betraying something true. That's why this work can feel unsettling at first. You're not gaining certainty. You're losing distortion, and once that distortion drops, clarity doesn't need to be forced. It returns because nothing is blocking it anymore.
Once you see the same structure showing up across traditions, across centuries, across continents, across cultures, the practical lesson becomes a lot harder to ignore. The order matters here. If you try to clarify values before uncertainty is survivable for you, then values get used as anesthesia. If you reach for principles while pressure is still running the show for you, you end up with mere slogans instead of true judgment. If you demand clarity too early, the mind gives you mere certainty instead. [28:57.2]
So, the sequence has to run the other way. First, you make uncertainty survivable. You let yourself stay present when the answer doesn't arrive on schedule. You notice the urge to close the question prematurely, and you do not obey it immediately. Then you stop forced knowing. You catch the moments where sounding decisive feels safer than seeing clearly, and you resist the temptation to end the debate prematurely just to feel safe or steady again.
As you do that more and more, epistemic interference becomes a lot easier to spot. You notice when language or identity, or reputation or fear, starts filtering what you're willing to see. You don't argue with those forces. You just stop letting them decide for you, and from there, the threshold for epistemic uncertainty rises, increases. You can hold tension longer without collapsing into certainty. Contradictions stay visible. Trade-offs stay explicit. The problem gets heavier, but also more honest. [30:02.6]
Then something really important happens—values stop being something you choose under pressure and start showing up as real constraints, as lines you won't cross, as costs that you refuse to pay, even when the upside is attractive. They narrow your options in ways that feel real and true, and sometimes inconvenient or uncomfortable. That's how you know those values are truly yours. You don't announce them. You live inside them.
So, here’s a question to sit with after this episode, not to answer quickly, not to justify, just to notice and reflect on: “Where is certainty functioning like a sedative for you right now? Where does sounding sure feel better than seeing clearly?” These questions don't demand conclusions. Hopefully, they invite attention, and attention held long enough is what gives real thinking room to do its proper work. [31:01.8]
Thank you so much for listening. Please share this with anyone else you think would benefit from it. See you in the next episode. David Tian, signing out. [31:10.0]
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