The Hierarchy of Perspective

“The world is a tragedy to those who feel, but a comedy to those who think.”

― Horace Walpole

Introduction:

Recently my thoughts have been getting a little overwhelming. I’ve been sensing some form of internal conflict. It’s difficult to stay in the present moment & I’m lacking the sense of focus I used to have when I immersed myself in work. My overall perspective seemed off. 

This is pretty common in contemporary society, as we’re bombarded with more stimulus than we know what to do with. The sense of uneasiness kept getting worse, to the point where I had to take a break & just focus on regaining my composure. Before you can deal with the external world, you have to manage the internal self. I remembered hearing somewhere that the best way to resolve internal conflict was not by fighting the thoughts, but by simply observing them. 

So that’s what I did. I sat in my room & explored my mind, trying to expose the fabric underneath my layers of thoughts. I observed every negative thought I had, & let each thought marinate with time. 

Eventually, I was able to understand the problem & figure out why my perspective was falling apart. 

But, before I tell you what my problem was, I’d like to give you a deeper understanding of the 

“Hierarchy of Perspective.” 

Note: I questioned & dissected every part of my perspective, till I exposed the ultimate foundation. This process took a lot of research, so this post is quite long.

Hierarchy of Perspective:

Perspective is the framework your mind uses to communicate with reality. An optimistic person sees everything in a positive perspective. They have a lens that shows them a different world than the person with a pessimistic outlook would see. Where a pessimist would be looking for the “bad” in situations, an optimist would fight to uncover the positive.

Perspectives are the congregation of beliefs. Beliefs are concepts that you truly believe, they’re things that you will defend. They’re things that you were either taught, or chose to adopt in order to assist with situations presented by life. Whatever your beliefs are, (conscious & unconscious) they shape your perspective of life.

Beliefs are the repetition of thoughts. Each conscious thought you have, related to a topic, yields to an overall belief regarding the subject. Repeated thoughts are the building blocks of belief.

I used to believe that thoughts were the deepest point of the iceberg, but it gets much deeper. 

What is a thought? 

Thoughts are composed of memories. Without memories, you would not be able to think. The mind associates things together in order to assist with the process of identifying things. When you see an apple, you can identify it as being red, because you remember what the color “red” looks like from prior contexts. 

How do we form memories though? Memories are formed through knowledge, but there’s a twist. The mind can’t just store everything it’s presented with as knowledge.

Understand that the human body sends 11 million bits of information to the brain per second to process. Obviously, that’s an input overload & the brain can’t consciously process that amount of information, so it compresses the 11 million bits into a measly 50 bits. How does the brain filter the useless information from the useful information? Well, the answer is simple: Relevance. Your brain only processes information that is highly relevant to your current situation. This is why it feels so difficult to memorize things that don’t naturally gel with your current predicament. When you memorize things that aren’t relevant, your mind deems it as artificial knowledge & discards it once its lack of usage becomes obvious. 

Relevant information is determined by the influence a specific dataset of information has on your identity & existence. Your identity is conceived by your experiences. 

Direct experiences determine whether information is converted into knowledge, or if it gets discarded, like most of the information we were taught in school.

In other words, experiences are the foundation of perspective.

And that’s where my problem was. My experiences & perspective weren’t aligned anymore. 

My Story:

I used to believe that success was delivered to those who worked hard on the correct things. This got disproven when I was running my marketing agency a couple months back. I worked relentlessly for months, building & implementing a strategy for a client of mine. Long story short, I delivered on my promises, but the client failed to deliver on theirs. They used a few cunning tactics to get my team to complete the majority of the work for free & left afterwards, without compensating us. I was devastated, because I felt that I delivered the best quality of work, & the client was messaging me on a daily basis, telling me how impressed they were. After speaking to one of my partners, who was working with them more closely, I learned that they never had the intention of compensating us in the first place. They were freeloaders, who wanted to get results without spending any money. They had a habit of hopping from agency to agency, getting results, without spending any money. I was naive, definitely got scammed, & lost a lot of time. I should’ve been more receptive to the signs, but since I was new to the game, I wanted to overdeliver & make a positive impression with them. 

When you have the best intention towards someone & they don’t reciprocate it…

It definitely sucks. 

*That’s it for my sob-story.

Once I processed this information, I came to the realization that there’s more to success than simply working hard & smart. The other factors are innumerable & too difficult for an ordinary human to control. 

My previous “flop” was making it difficult for me to focus on this new project of mine. Growing my  newsletter & writing were actions that I looked forward to during my day. 

But a single question kept resurfacing: “What if I fail to build anything successful out of this?”

This question kept me paralyzed, & I wasn’t able to write for days. But I finally have an answer (All that meditation actually paid off:)

“I don’t care if this works out or not. For once, I want to forget about the external rewards & just focus on doing what I enjoy doing: writing.”

Closing:

My lesson from this experience was simple, but profound. Working hard on the correct things is all I can control. That’s what I spend my time on. However, it doesn’t guarantee success. The universe doesn’t owe me, you, or anyone else success. Results are always variable, but that shouldn’t stop us from trying, because that’s all we can do. Try again & again, hit wall after wall, until we’re finally at the destination we sought out in the first place. For every success, there may be 1000 failures. It took Edison 2,774 attempts to make his light-bulb a success. The failures are what make the success taste sweeter. 

Note: I apologize for the inconsistent upload durations, now that I’ve been able to put the ghost of my previous venture to rest, I can finally focus all my attention on this newsletter. I look forward to growing with you all.

Sincerely,

J.R.