Jon Strand writes:At nearly 40 years of age I have a couple of basic understandings of life. Pretty simple stuff really. They are as follows:
- Perception is reality, and people don’t always share the same perception
- Each of us has a distinct world view (or mental model) of how the world works that is built up, elaborated and refined over time. This is all based on our own experience of the world – it is rare that any two people share the exact same model
- He who thinks he knows, doesn’t know. He who knows he does not know, knows. (~ Lao Tsu)
- Most of us are blissfully unaware of why we do the things we do… we like to think were in charge, however, our subconscious is really running the show (and we don’t really have access to that – which is why I really like something Fouro shared with me a few years ago: “Self knowledge brings happiness”)
Although it could not be my own perspective that “perception is reality,” my informal co-counseled research over the past two years is partly centered on the construct “each of us has a distinct world view”.
As always, this posit is much more interesting for its ramifications and especially the counter-intuitive ones. Prominent among those would be the world view that supposes each of us is not distinctly different from each other. …the opposite of Jon’s insight. This second world view co-exists with the ‘other one’.
Think about whether you run into people with this second world view, ‘people are pretty much the same’. Do such people tend to understand everybody is a slightly different variation on the same basic model, and, as it sometimes happens, the person with this world view self-reports, remarkably, that they happen to be one of the more superior variations on the purportedly singular motif! You can sample and test this hypothesis out.
