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Welcome to Stuff I Learned Yesterday. My name is Darrell Darnell, this week we’ll be launching yet another new GSM podcast, and I believe that if you aren’t learning, you aren’t living. In today’s episode of Stuff I Learned Yesterday I share a story about vision.
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What I Learned Yesterday:
I don’t know if you heard or not, but my family and I just returned from a trip to Hawaii. Don’t worry, I won’t be talking about our time there again today. Instead, I want to tell you about something that happened as we were preparing to make the trip.
Before we get to that part of this story, let me give you a little backstory. I was born at a very young age. When I was 11 years old my 6th grade teacher noticed that I was having trouble seeing the chalkboard and told my parents that I should have my eyes checked.
The eye exam revealed that I not only needed glasses, but I needed them badly. I don’t know what my vision score is, but based on the thickness of my lenses, it’s bad. Without my glasses the whole world is a massive blur. One time when I was in 9th grade a kid pushed me down and my glasses came off my face. I was literally crawling around on my hands and knees fumbling around for them like you’ve seen on TV shows. Finally someone else came along and they were kind enough to find my glasses and give them to me.
So from the time I was 11 until today, I have worn glasses. The only exception to that is a good portion of my senior year of high school when I wore contact lenses.
My wife has vision even worse than mine. She refuses to ever be seen in public with her glasses. Instead, she always wears contacts.
Before we headed out for Hawaii, Kari got into this weird cleaning frenzy. She decided that she did not want to come home to a dirty house so she began cleaning everything. Every bit of laundry was done and put away (a small miracle for our house), every bathroom was cleaned, the kitchen was spotless, and the living room was cleaned and organized.
But she wasn’t done there.
A day or so later she came up to me with a cleaner bottle in her hand and said she was off to scrub our shower. Apparently she thought it was so dirty that she wasn’t sure she was getting clean when she was using it.
I then went back to work on my podcasting and she went off to clean the shower. I have no idea how long she was in there but when she was done she was quite proud of her work. As she would put it, cleaning the shower had turned her into a, “hot sweaty mess,” but it was worth it. She could now use the shower and not feel like she still needed to take a shower.
A couple of days later she asked me if I had noticed how much better the shower looked. I looked at her and said, “not really.” My wife then made a brilliant observation. She said, “that’s because you can’t see anything when you’re in there.”
She was right. When I take a shower I take off my glasses and I enter into a world of blurred oblivion. I had no idea how dirty the shower was because I quite literally couldn’t see it. On the other hand, she wears her contacts while she showers so she is able to see things that would probably give me nightmares. Gross.
Here’s what I learned:
It is all too easy for us to become oblivious to the things around us. There are a variety of reasons and things that cause it, but we are blinded to it nonetheless. We don’t see that bad habit any more. We don’t notice how much weight we’ve gained. We fail to see the things that we’ve let slowly creep into our lives.
Or let’s look at another side of this analogy.
We don’t see the things holding us back. We’re oblivious to the the best course of action. We’re unable to pull our perspective back far enough to see the full picture.
There is a tremendous value in bringing in the added perspective of a trusted advisor. They can help us see the dirt. They can help identify the right path. They can lend us the perspective that will show us the bigger picture around us.
Oh, Kari, I took a look at the shower with my glasses on. You missed a spot.
I’m Darrell Darnell and this has been stuff I learned yesterday.
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