Primary-source lookup

Go read the original record, study, contract, or dataset instead of a summary of it.

A colleague drops by your desk: "Legal reviewed the vendor contract, apparently we can cancel anytime with 30 days notice." You're about to build a whole negotiating strategy on that sentence, a secondhand summary of a paraphrase of a document that is sitting, fully readable, in a shared folder 40 seconds away.

Primary-source lookup is the contact move of going to the original record, study, contract, specification, or dataset instead of a summary of it. Every layer of summarization compresses, and compression favors the summarizer's attention, not yours. The cue is noticing that a load-bearing fact in your plan traces to "someone said," "the article said the study said," or "apparently." The operation: locate the original artifact, read the part that bears on your decision in its own words, and note what the summary dropped, here perhaps that the 30-day cancellation applies only after the initial 12-month term, with an early-exit fee. Quote the actual language in your notes, not your gloss of it. What changes is that your plan rests on what the document says rather than on the game of telephone. The lookup isn't worth it when the original is genuinely inaccessible or when the summarizer is more competent to read it than you are, like a radiologist reading your scan.