> Second, as a person who is generally regarded as quick-witted and sharp, most of that sharpness comes from either having a few pre-known responses to ideas or

> Second, as a person who is generally regarded as quick-witted and sharp, most of that sharpness comes from either having a few pre-known responses to ideas or anxiously revising situations in my head ahead of time. This is, generally, a bad thing because it means I have made decisions on how I will respond to things without all of the information (as some will come over during conversation). I'd challenge that. I think that being both quick and sharp comes from having an accurate mental model of what kind of information is important for the decision. When new information comes in, you don't discount it, but you have an intuitive feel for how much it should affect your priors. For example, say that your team works on a minor page of a major tech product, say something that only gets 0.1% of traffic. Your TL reports back that a change they made to an ads widget on the page drops conversions by 20%. The change was done in service of a visual design consistency effort across the company. Normally a drop in conversions by 20% would be an immediate no-go, but knowing that the page only gets 0.1% of traffic, you can run the math and figure this is a 0.02% decrease in revenue, almost imperceptible. Now imagine that the news was that 3 other key products in the company are dropping the visual consistency effort. The right move here is probably to cancel the project, because if you go ahead with it but others don't, you actually make the consistency worse. You can't know that without knowing the context and reasoning behind the initial decision. Normally, when an unrelated product cancels a project, it doesn't matter to you.