Imagine you have solo-traveled to southeast Asia. There are a hundred reasons why this may come off as a bad experience. And there are other hundred that can make it a memorable one as well. That is perception. Perception is manifested. Each and every moment you live is a reflection of this manifestation. How you deal during situations reflect the type of energy you have at the moment. Energy is not physical. Energy is perceptual.
Lately, I’ve been relating everything that happens to me to my perception of it. I was thinking about this but didn’t know it as a thing. There is no good or bad without us, there is the event and there is the story we tell ourselves about it. That translates into the experiences we have.
Perception & Happiness
Why do you think a movie portrays a night walk on a rainy day under the moonlight as the epitome of being alive while in reality, you may have tried it multiple times but never felt the same? The movie portrays the perception of individuals during the moment. Not the setup. You translated it into a good feeling. You may think it’s about the setup but it’s not. Think again? Maybe the next time you come into the same setup, be more mindful. How do you feel? How can you turn this into an experience similar to the one the movie portrays?
Lately, I watched a movie where the hero, Emily, was very excited to move into a subpar apartment in an old building with no elevators in a new country far away from home. She was climbing the stairs with a wide cheerful smile on her face. Not that the old building had got its own charm that just kicks in, but it’s about her perception of this exact moment. It was a classic building with classic architecture. Emily was just happy.
It’s not about what you see, it’s about how you see.
Just like how you “see” can affect your mood, it can affect every aspect of your life. Your body’s limits are the limits you perceive. Your income limits are the limits you perceive. Your mind’s limits are the limits you perceive. It works with everything that has options.
Perception & Wealth
In his book “The Psychology of Money”, author Morgan Housel says:
“People from different generations, raised by different parents, who held different values, in different parts of the world, born into different economies, exposed to different job markets, with different incentives and different degrees of luck, learn very different lessons.Every one has his own unique experience of how the world works. So we go through life anchored to a set of views about how money works that vary wildly from person to person. Not that one of us is smarter than the other, it’s just that we’re shaped by different and equally persuasive experiences. Your personal experiences maybe shape about 0.0000001% of what happens in the world, but around 80% of how you think the world works.”
I have seen people embark on journeys that originated solely during moments of “perspective exchange”. Talking about the type of journeys that can change lives.
Real wealth comes from knowledge. Knowledge is mental wealth. Mental wealth is your perception of certain concepts like money, time, well-being & network.
Perception & the “Abundance Mindset”
When you remain at the same exact place in life, mentally, you are missing out on a new world of chances, possibilities, people & opportunities.
Thinking in terms of abundance widens your perception. Makes you project more from your mind onto reality.
In visualization, abundance would be a tree that has people & opportunities as its roots. The roots have many more nodes that are also people & opportunities. The linkage between a node and its child is your action.
So in more practical terms, the relationships you build with people and the processes you do in pursuit of opportunities are what exactly connect you to more of both.
Now the tree is your perception, and linkages are your life paths.So an abundance mindset will help you perceive more which in turn helps you do more and connect more.
The more you over-indulge under one node, the more your perception is narrowed down and you miss out on an infinite number of nodes. It leaves you with a very closed worldview. Since you’re so focused on the matter at hand, you never realize what’s truly possible.
Keeping a fresh zoomed-out view of the tree helps you not give up when you’re stuck under a node that is not working. Helps you keep a positive attitude and makes you want to step back and try some of the infinite other options.
And in case a node is working, the tree helps you build creatively upon that in a way that enhances your chosen path. It lets you stick around long enough to let the odds of benefiting from a lower probability node that exists far down the tree fall in your favor. That is what perception is capable of.
Perception & Perspective Formation
Everyone trying to create, represent an idea, deliver something to the world is in essence trying to make it wholesome. Because that’s literally what would be happening inside their brains while they’re creating. And I believe this is one of the few common things between science and art: bring wholesome ideas into existence.
If you kept mental models of all the things that you currently believe in, you would restructure & modify every few months. As time passes, new information comes in and new pieces of knowledge come together. Your perception is getting a little bit whole as your perspective is getting a little bit zoomed out and inclusive. Like a drone on top of a city going up slowly with step time intervals measured in months and years.
That’s what we are all constantly doing. Whichever the topic. You’re subconsciously enhancing and polishing your perception in more than one direction.
And it even applies to our own understanding of the world. We are sure that the world makes sense but we still don’t know how. And we may never know. The models we perceive about our world are different in everyone’s head. And those who claim they know what’s happening are in some sort mistaken. One perspective can NOT hold the truth. That’s an example of one thing we will almost never reason. But we can “perceive” it and communicate our findings.
When you think about it, you can not be 100% true in any given context. But we always do our best to understand things and formulate ideas. Perception is the bias lens through which we see the world/truth.
This is the reason traveling is considered one of the fastest ways to widen your perspective. You immerse in a totally different world within short periods of time. You realize that you’ve been dreaming too small. That there’s more to “being”.
Psychologists know that the question of who you are is the most difficult question one would encounter in their lifetime.
Hence the famously believed-in notion that you exist in different versions in everyone’s head. Everyone you know holds a distinct image about you that is based on how they perceive your personality.
So broadly speaking, if the number of people you deal with in your life is X, you exist in X+1 identities. One that is perceived by each person you know and then one that is formed by your perception of yourself.
“As humans, we initiate social contexts with other people and develop relationships based on our perceptions of ourselves, and we also learn about who we are and validate our self-perceptions by interacting with others.”
In the Netflix documentary “The Art of Design”, artist Olafur Eliasson says that a lot of his work is concerned with what weconsider truth. His work is based on the concept that we create reality as we go through space.
He describes one of his first projects as follows:
“It was an attempt to make a rainbow. I thought about how is the rainbow made, but there’s not much to it. It’s about the angle of the eye, the drop, and the light. The person next to you doesn’t see your rainbow because the angle would be different due to position of the eye. It’s totally dependent on you. When you leave the exhibition, there’s no eye, so there’s no angle. There is also no art. It’s not about the rainbow. It’s about do I trust my own perception?”
Perception & Visualization
Visualization is a practice where you channel your thoughts to imagine a certain outcome like a goal or a dream. During visualization, your perception bridges the gap between your current state and your desired state. The trick is to perceive yourself as someone who owns the end result. The brain has this amazing capability of merging reality and thoughts through visualization. But it should be followed by execution in order to work.
Research shows that visualization is the fastest way to get yourself into “flow”.
“Flow” is when you’re operating at a heightened state. During flow, time passes by faster, your performance is almost peaking and creative ideas seem to flick. It can be represented as time spurts during which you do your most important work.
My first time being introduced to the concept of visualization was in 2018. I was reading a blogpost during a trip to the desert. It struck me, I pinned it and visited it multiple times since then. I would say this blogpost helped me in multiple ways. Here are my favorite excerpts and a link:
“In particular, visualization stimulates an area of the brain called the Reticular Activating System, which, put simply, scans your environment looking for new opportunities. That’s why when you start thinking about getting a new job or wanting to land a new client, suddenly new opportunities come your way. Your brain is scanning for them. Then, you take action on the newly available options and creative solutions you’re able to see.”“Many successful people — like Oprah, Jim Carey, and Will Smith, among others — credit visualization as part of their success. In fact, it’s a tool many high-performers rely upon to reach epic heights. Elite athletes use techniques like guided imagery and scripting in their training to do everything from simulate practice, to overcome fear, and even recover from an injury.”
How to Improve Perception
First rule about perception is it is the only thing, besides time, that is non-hackable. Perception always exists towards the end of the knowledge gamut. So no working around it.
This is how it works, we get information from various resources: things we consume online, things we read and experiences we pass by throughout each day in our life. Based on this, we form complicated beliefs through thoughts about the world and then we build models in a non-linear way. Meaning that the observation you make today can influence an old belief/model of yours. These models are what is encapsulated as knowledge that form your perception due to several complicated mix-and-match processes. You feel some resonance around your built models that helps enhance them over time.
Basic logic cites that what enters the start of a pipeline will definitely affect its end. That also applies for the perception pipeline: information-thought-knowledge-perception. Time needed for the pipeline start-to-end vary for different topics and concepts. Some concepts can take part of the day and some can take several years.
So what you let in your mind whether consciously OR subconsciously will fall into the pipeline. It may stop at any step. But you seldom have control over that. So it’s easier to develop more control towards the information & thoughts you let in in the first place.
Though this is the only control you may have over your perception, it’s also so powerful that through only information & thoughts you can readjust your situation at any time. You can influence your attitude, your actions, your words, your thinking and your relationships. Compounded over time, this can improve the quality of your life.