Introduction to Perspective Changes

Why seeking out differing viewpoints is magic

Perspective - a particular attitude towards or way of regarding something; a point of view. (From the Oxford dictionary.)

I’ve always been into different viewpoints, paradigms and perspectives. They’re so enriching. With a little effort and imagination, we can all assume the position of someone else, be it a real person or a fictional one. Or even a hypothetical one, that we ourselves just conjured up. We can inhabit the brains of hundreds of other people. That’s magic!

Give me a topic, any topic, and I'll start to examine it from multiple angles. My younger brother once said this is my defining characteristic: my tendency to try and view different topics from alternating perspectives. And I took that as a huge compliment. Because I truly think the ability and willingness to change paradigms is a superpower.

Let me try to explain this with a visual metaphor.

What you see here are all representations of the same object: a pyramid. Shown from the bottom, the side, from above and a corner. These are all different perspectives from which one can view a pyramid. If you only had one perspective, You might not even know it was representing a pyramid. You might get into an argument with someone who claims the represented object is just a triangle or a square when you are sure it’s something else.

This problem of mistaking one viewpoint for the whole picture happens in life more than we would like to acknowledge. Especially in our relationships. Have you ever had an argument that resolved itself after you both got on the same page and discovered You had actually talked about two different things? Or perhaps on the contrary: you discover that actually, deep down, you both want the same thing, you just expressed yourselves differently?

I once spent 30 minutes arguing with my father over whether the internet had been a good or bad thing for music and in the end it turned out we were both framing the discussion differently. He approached our argument from the perspective of a listener: how can anyone possibly explore every release the internet has to offer? I approached it from a musician's perspective: the internet allows artists to reach audiences across the globe, helping them find their 1000 true fans. When we discovered this, the argument cleared itself up immediately.

But this perspective fixation exists not only in conversations, but within ourselves, all the time. We just don’t notice it that often, because there is no other person with their differing perspective to challenge us. We think we know something about some topic for certain, but we never consider whether we might have only seen one side of the pyramid.

One would only know that the above images referenced a pyramid when we had at least 2 or 3 different perspectives shown to us. Without a varied understanding, we might have just stopped at the first image and presumed we were looking at a square. To understand the bigger picture, we need other perspectives to fill in the whole picture. They’re usually most readily available in discussions, but reading books and even just looking at our perspectives critically can also provide us with a key to the larger picture. This applies to life in general, not only drawings of objects.

An example, concerning Star Wars and the CIA.
A former undercover CIA officer shared some of the perspective shifts she had had over the years while living in cultures different from her own. Perhaps the most eye-opening one for me was how the Middle-Eastern countries she had worked in also very much enjoyed and related to Star Wars, but for them, they were the Rebel Alliance and USA was the evil Galactic Empire. Everyone thinks they’re the good guys, after all. (Although Lucas has said that the Empire, which was mainly modelled after WW2 Germany, did take inspiration from certain eras in the US as well, so perhaps not that unexpected.)

Another example, this time from science (&) fiction.
Isaac Asimov was once scolded by a reader about Asimov’s joy concerning living in a time where we finally understood the Universe. The reader claimed every new generation proved the previous generation wrong and thus no faith should be put in our knowledge of the universe.
Asimov’s answer used the example of the world being flat or round. At first we thought it was flat. Then a disc. Then a sphere. And even then, we were slightly mistaken, because the world is actually wider at the equator, so it’s technically an oblate spheroid. But, most importantly, each new discovery did not debunk the previous one completely, it just improved on it and made our understanding more precise.
In the words of the master himself:

“When people thought the Earth was flat, they were wrong. When people thought the Earth was spherical, they were wrong. But if you think that thinking the Earth is spherical is just as wrong as thinking the Earth is flat, then your view is wronger than both of them put together.”

In sticking to only our tried and true perspectives, we risk stifling not only our understanding of the world, but also our personal growth and even business success. Imagine if Napster hadn’t decided to start selling music online are Uber hadn’t disrupted the taxi industry by making meeting strangers online and immediately getting into their cars not only acceptable, but the normal thing to do.

So it is in our best interest to seek out other perspectives, both in discussions with others and by ourselves. This helps us understand one another better, paving the road for empathy and also a greater understanding of ourselves and the world around us, creating a much more varied and colourful world for us to inhabit.

This newsletter is an attempt to do just that. There will be a lot of examples from around the world and throughout history about how perspective changes and paradigm shifts have ushered in breakthroughs both personal and societal. Also tips and tricks on how to seek out differing viewpoints.
Because I truly believe once You unlock the world of perspectives, you can live a thousand lives instead of just one.