I used to give a talk to every new engineer at Facebook. I’d tell them that while joining a new company can feel overwhelming, they arrived with a rare gift: they could see everything with fresh eyes.

When they eventually landed on their teams, they were going to notice things that didn’t make sense — processes that seemed inefficient, tools that felt outdated, steps that looked like pure nonsense. And because we’re social creatures, their instinct would be to keep quiet and adapt. Blend in. Don’t rock the boat.

I’d beg them to fight that instinct. Ask the question.

Sometimes there’s a perfectly good reason for the thing that looks wrong. In that case, they learn something valuable. But often there isn’t a good reason. It’s just an artifact the team has gotten used to — water they no longer notice they’re swimming in.

It’s exactly like the David Foster Wallace story: two young fish swimming along when an older fish passes by and says, “Morning boys, how’s the water?” They look at each other and ask, “What the hell is water?”

Humans adapt just as quickly. Our senses tune out constant stimuli — otherwise we’d spend all day feeling our hair and smelling our breath. Our minds do the same with our environment.

And sometimes it’s worse than adaptation; it’s learned helplessness. The classic thought experiment is the five gorillas and the bananas. The first gorilla reaches for the bananas and everyone gets blasted with a fire hose. From that moment forward, none of the gorillas tries again. When a new gorilla joins and goes for the bananas, the others pull him down to avoid being punished. Eventually every original gorilla is replaced — yet none of the new ones will reach for the bananas. They don’t know why; they just know that “we don’t do that here.”

That’s why naïveté is such a gift. New people can see the absurdities a team has normalized, the opportunities they’ve stopped noticing, the improvements they no longer imagine. But it only works if they’re bold enough to speak up — and if the rest of us are humble enough to listen.

Fresh eyes don’t last long. Use them while you’ve got them.