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In today’s business culture, expertise is currency. We celebrate mastery, reward pattern recognition, and prize leaders who can quickly distinguish signal from noise. But in doing so, we’ve created an unexpected trap for ourselves: The more you become “somebody” in your chosen field (recognized, accomplished, authoritative), the more your thinking tends to calcify, limiting your flexibility and creativity. The management scholar Erik Dane has called this problem “cognitive entrenchment,” and the researchers Huy Phan and Bing Hiong Ngu have documented it widely across professions.