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Welcome to Stuff I Learned Yesterday. My name is Darrell Darnell, my most quotable movie is The Princess Bride, and I believe that if you aren’t learning, you aren’t living. In today’s episode of Stuff I Learned Yesterday I share another lesson on perspective.
True story time. I’m sitting here wondering what to say today about Think Geek and I realize that I’m wearing my Zelda Triforce t-shirt. So I decide to see what Think Geek has for Zelda fans. Well, you have your pick of a Zelda shield t-shirt, a Crest of Hyrule t-shirt, , a Zelda Ocarina, a pixel heart heat changing mug that is every bit as cool as it sounds, a ¼ scale Ganondorf statue and even more. You don’t have to navigate the Lost Woods or defeat a room full of Dodongos. You simply need to visit www.goldenspiralmedia.com/thinkgeek today!
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What I Learned Yesterday:
I don’t know how many episodes I’ve done on perspective but it’s at least 3. I talk about it frequently because I believe that perspective is vital. Perspective changes everything and it’s almost always mental. I don’t know anyone who is successful in the things that matter that doesn’t have a positive perspective.
When I worked at my previous job I had about a 40 minute drive each way to work. If you’re like me, the drive just turns into a blur after a while. I’d pass by the same stuff every day and really not pay any attention to the things and buildings I drove by. Sure, I noticed a few things, but you miss a lot of stuff when you’re passing it by at 70 miles an hour and trying to keep your eyes on the road.
One thing that I had noticed was that there were a few American flags along the way. There was a flag at a school, a church, a car repair shop, and at the entrance to a housing addition. There was a small cemetery on the side of the road that I drove past every day. However, one day I noticed that one grave had a small fence around it and an American flag on a pole by the grave. I could tell that the flag pole had been there for a very long time, and the odds were that a flag had been on the pole every day and I had simply failed to notice it.
This got me to thinking. I wondered how many American flags were visible on my drive to and from work each day that I had overlooked. I think that I thought there might be as many as 10 American flags. So I started looking. The first day I really started looking I spotted over a dozen. The next day I saw even more and the day after that I noticed even more that I had missed. After a few days had passed I determined that I had probably spotted them all. Guess how many there were? There were about 50 American flags.
When I started looking for them I had only noticed 3 or 4 of them. I consider myself to be fairly perceptive, so that’s why I guessed that there might be as many as 10. Needless to say, I was way off.
Here’s another story. A friend of mine got a Jeep about 18 months ago. I was surprised when she got the Jeep because she’s always been a diehard Ford Mustang enthusiast. She and her dad worked on the Jeep and soon got it roadworthy. After she started driving it around, she noticed that other Jeep drivers would wave to her.
One day she told me that she was surprised by how many Jeeps there were on the road. She told me about the other Jeep owners waving at her and that it had caused her to take notice of other Jeeps. She said that she had discovered that there were more Jeeps on the road than there were Mustangs. I didn’t believe her.
I started keeping an eye out for Mustangs and Jeeps and my results were the same as hers. Anytime I counted Jeeps vs. Mustangs, Jeeps always one.
So what’s the point of these stories? Well, here’s what I learned.
What changed in each of these stories? Were more American flags suddenly hung along my travel route once I started looking for them? Did residents, businesses, schools, and churches suddenly start putting up flags because they knew that I was looking? No, of course not.
What about the second story. Did a whole bunch of Mustang owners trade in or garage their beloved cars because my friend was now driving a Jeep and they wanted to be like her? No. No way.
It’s obvious that the thing that changed is our awareness of the things that had been there the whole time. Our perspective changed. Our eyes were opened.
So what can we learn from this?
Well, perspective matters. Are you focusing on the right things? Are you missing the things that are right in front of your face simply because your attention is is elsewhere?
Where is your attention?
Are you focused on negativity? The chances are, things are not as bad as they may seem. Look around. What do you have to be thankful for? What are the good things that surround you? Focus on those things. Draw energy from those things.
Take some time every day over the next week and look for positive things happening all around you. I bet you will be surprised and energized by what you discover.
I’m Darrell Darnell and this has been stuff I learned yesterday.
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