Ask Ori Why You Keep Repeating the Same Mistake. The Answer Is Rarely What You Expect.
Asked why they keep repeating a particular mistake, most people reach for the most available explanation — not enough discipline, bad luck, the wrong circumstances lining up again. These explanations feel true because they're familiar, not because they've actually been checked against what's happening in the specific moments the mistake occurs.
Asking the question to an external system with an actual continuous record of those specific moments — rather than asking oneself, from inside the same closed loop that produced the mistake in the first place — tends to surface something more specific and less comfortable than the familiar explanation: a particular trigger, a particular selection rule, operating consistently across instances that felt unrelated at the time.
The answer is rarely what's expected precisely because the expected answer was generated by the same mechanism that's been failing to prevent the mistake — if the obvious explanation were actually correct and actionable, it likely would have already worked. Its persistent failure to help is itself evidence that it was missing something.
The real answer tends to be narrower, more specific, and less flattering than the story usually told — not a character flaw or bad luck, but a precise mechanism, doing exactly what it's built to do, that had simply never been asked about directly with an actual record to check against.
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Momar Lissa Ndiaye ("MLN") is the Founder & CEO of weyoga Inc., a Delaware company. — weyoga.ai · mln@weyoga.ai