perspective – From the desk of Adam Thomas

We need more perspective

Don’t believe me?

Have you ever heard of the white gorilla test?

The white gorilla test is a sociological experiment where the participant is told to count sometimes a ball is being thrown around a basketball court in a video. In the middle of it, a white gorilla begins to dance on the screen and hop around.

And the end of the video, the researcher asks what did they see.

Most people don’t see the gorilla. They just tell the researcher how many basketballs passes they saw.

What do you know?

Remember this next time you are in a meeting. We don’t see the full picture.

Break the Filter

We don’t know our brains. After 10 thousand years of “civilization,” we still are only scratching the surface of the mind’s ability.

Our brain receives tons of messages every moment. The brain then filters them to the world we recognize.

This filtering system allows us to live life in a simpler way. However, I understand two things:

We each see the world differently.
To widen the amount of stuff we accept, we have to break the filter.

Luckily for us, the filter is fragile. To break it, all we have to do is try something new.

New experiences open us up to seeing the world differently. Even something as small as taking an alternate route to work will change your perspective because you take in new things.

In fact, that is today’s exercise.

Exercise:

Take note of the way you go to work.
Map out a different way, one that you haven’t taken before. Take that way for a week.
After a week, take the old way back to work.

Now, notice how different things look :-). Taking a new route exposed your brain to new things, breaking the filter. Think about this experience each time you go over something, and it feels “dull.” expand the filter, and see how much new comes from it.