There are so many things that shape perspective. Your knowledge, your experiences or your starting point to looking at a problem. As you gather more information, your perspective starts to change.
I love this illustration of perspective. Both characters are correct, and both characters are wrong. It all depends on your perspective. In one simple cartoon you can see the power of looking at things from another angle.
My biggest experience with perspective came from college. People will tell you that college is one of the best times of their lives. And it is.
I met terrific people and developed lifelong friendships. From the day I left Fenton, MO, college was one giant adventure. I got exposed to a new world of learning. It was so different from everything else I’d experienced. College opened my eyes to the world. I was learning every day, and I’m not talking about what I got from my classes.
I have often told people that I don’t use what I learned in college. What I’m referring to is my traditional education. Classes like thermodynamics, calculus and physics. I graduated as a mechanical engineer, but I never became one.
What college gave me was a new way of looking at the world. It gave me perspective. That change in perspective started with my surroundings.
SETTING
Growing up in a small suburb, my world always seemed to stay the same. We had so much family in town, that our gatherings were always the same aunts, uncles, cousins and grandparents. And they were great.
We didn’t have much money, so we didn’t travel that often. Before going to college, the only place I had really seen was Florida. And that’s OK.
Then, as a wide-eyed 18 year-old, I headed to Nashville, TN. This was a drastic change. I was living in a tiny room that was part of a 4-story dorm. There were about 40 other kids in the same position on my floor. The comfortable house I grew up in was gone. This was my new home.
The campus was huge, but my world felt small. I had no friends or family to rely on. For the first time, I could remember, I was alone. This forced me to meet a lot of new people. Everyone I met seemed so different from me. Vanderbilt had students from all fifty states and as many countries.
Nothing about my surroundings was the same. It was a shocking change and with the change in setting came a new perspective.
TIME
In college, you have a lot of time to yourself. I often found myself looking back on my life. Things that I took for granted, like a home cooked meal or hanging out with family, took on a new meaning.
When you are close to an experience, big or small, it’s hard to fully appreciate it. I found that as more time passed between those experiences, I gained a new perspective.
KNOWLEDGE
When you think of college, most people think about all the subjects you learn. To me, it isn’t about learning to solve a math problem, it is about seeing the world in a new way.
In my senior year (1998), I got to work on a project that was part of DARPA (The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency). They were working to deploy SmartDust on the battlefield.
SmartDust was no bigger than a spec, but was actually a min-computer of sorts. We could drop millions of these particles on enemy forces and they would send information back about troop location and movement.
This dust blew my mind! But, not in the way you think. It changed the way I thought about what’s possible with technology. It helped me see the world in a new way.
EXPERIENCE
College was full of firsts. I had so many experiences that changed my perspective forever.
Because I couldn’t afford college, I had to start my own business. This experience showed me the joys of entrepreneurship vs. just working a job.
The day after we graduated, I travelled with five friends to Australia, New Zealand and Fiji. I never would have had the audacity to take a trip like this if it wasn’t for college. My friendships and four years of experiences made me look at the trip in a new light.
GAINING A NEW PERSPECTIVE
Looking back, I didn’t realize what was happening at the time. College changed who I was. I see things differently thanks to college. I went from swearing it was a 6, to seeing it was a 9.
Perspective doesn’t come easy. I had one teacher who told us that 80% of us in the class would go into sales. I thought he was crazy. How could he know that? Why would a bunch of engineers go into sales?
Guess what my first job out of college was? Sales. Guess what most of my friends did from that class? You guessed it. Sales.
His experience gave him a unique perspective on what would happen to us. I couldn’t see that at the time. What I should have asked was why. Why do you think that will happen? Tell me more. Help me see it through your eyes. I fail at this more times than I would like to admit.
No one can give you perspective. You have to be open to it.
I plan to keep putting you in new situations, sharing knowledge and creating new experiences. I don’t want you to see the world through my eyes, but rather through the eyes of possibility.
This post is part of a series of letters to my kids. My goal is to reflect on and capture as many life lessons as possible. Here is the current list I am working from.
