Four strangers approach a house, each from a different side. As they get closer, they begin to express their opinions about it:
"What a beauty! Such a shame that the owner chose to paint the walls yellow!"
"What on earth are you talking about?" says another. "Can't you see that they're obviously blue?!" An argument follows between the two.
Suddenly, a third one bursts out laughing. Everyone becomes silent. "How the masses are always wrong!" he says, with a pumped-up chest and a full voice. "How can you be such fools to lay two pairs of eyes on the same house and miss the fact that its walls are clearly all black?" The arguing continues...
The fourth person remains silent after having heard all the others; he questions his sight.
"Hey! Why are you quiet? Tell us what you see!" All others ask him.
He remains silent. "Tell us what you see!" they repeat.
After careful consideration, confused and in doubt, staring at the red walls in front of him, he finally answers: "There are no walls on my side!"
This is the story of perspective in a nutshell. I read the original analogy in a book called "I'm Right, You're Wrong" by Edward de Bono the Maltese author and psychologist famous for his books "Lateral Thinking" and "The 6 Thinking Hats." He used the analogy to introduce the term "logic bubble," which in essence refers to your perceptual filters.
How you act in the world is strictly dependent on your perception of it. Your perception is influenced by the factors that make up your logic bubble: Information, Experience, Temperament, and Physique. Let’s go through them one by one.
Information: What you do or don't know influences the meaning of things. Your bedroom is not the same bedroom once you place a hungry lion in it. Or is it? Depends on what you know before you open the door.
Experience: If you’ve ever experienced a break-in by a burglar, you will react very differently to the strange noises that your fridge makes at night.
Temperament: You may be high in compassion or extremely orderly. Your temperament will predetermine many of your reactions and emotions, especially when you’re on autopilot. For more on this, see the Big Five Personality Traits.
Physique: Our anatomy plays a significant role in what we can or can’t do and therefore how we perceive things. You would not see that lion in your bedroom as a threat if you were made of steel. And that lion could never rub a piece of cashmere cloth between its paws as you would with your fingers to understand its qualities.
Effective learning is heavily dependent on our ability to fail and to deal with each failure constructively. How you perceive and define your failures, therefore, will be a determining factor in your ability to overcome them. A question often asked at motivational seminars is: What would you do in the next 12 months if you knew you couldn’t fail? The purpose of this question is to suspend individuals' limiting beliefs and to open them up to new possibilities. In essence, it's a perception hack.
Understand: your view of the world is as limited as your logic bubble. The size of this bubble only increases if you expand or improve the factors above.
To solve a problem, you must first understand it. To understand it, you must have the ability to see it from multiple angles. This is called broad thinking. It's not easy. It requires you to jump over the fences of your own perspective and see the other side of the house for yourself, something none of the four strangers in that story cared to do. While broad thinking does not mean that all points of view are equally valid at all times or the absence of an objective reality, it certainly does mean that a single view by definition, is incomplete. Master your perceptions and your actions will follow.
Practice: Challenge your perceptions by playing with context. If you perceive something as a failure, ask yourself in which context that same failure would be a miracioulous achievement.
Or do the opposite: what achievements can you turn into failures by simply changing context?
Whoever you are and wherever you're standing, remind yourself, you may be looking at only one side of the house.
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