Shifting Perspectives
Five ways my thinking has changed these last few months
Do you ever have one of those days where nothing seems to go right? That was me last Wednesday. We can blame Mercury for being retrograde, but it was also an opportunity for me to exercise that old adage that you can’t control what happens to you but can control how you react to it.
Take, for example, one of the things that happened when I fell for an online scammer. I thought I was communicating with a small business owner with whom I had purchased something. And even though all the suspicious signs were there, such as the person’s broken English and insisting on being paid in various ways - including Bitcoin - I was doing too many things at once and didn’t listen to my gut. I’m only out $25, but I was still frustrated with myself. But then, I realized this was a great learning opportunity and something I could use as an example to forewarn others. New perspective.
I also recently had a conversation with my designer where I was complaining about how the wallpaper in my bathroom was fading. Looking at it, she realized it was just a part of the pattern. New perspective.
These things and the others below gave me the idea to discuss how important it is to be open to new perspectives, to see things from new angles, or to try something new.
Here are a few examples that I’ve noticed recently:
Many people are choosing joy/optimism. I feel like we’ve been seeing this all over recently. The Olympics. Taylor Swift fans singing in the streets of Vienna when her concerts were canceled due to a planned terrorist attack. In the tech democracy world, I have seen this on two fronts. One was at TrustCon, where the energy level amongst the 1,300 attendees was very high. For people who deal with the worst of the worst of the internet they were excited and optimistic about their work and how they could continue to improve. Moreover, at a recent event around AI and elections, many people around the table were worried about the negative aspects of AI. Still, many also implored the group to look at how AI could help them do their work (and these weren’t tech people; this was civil society.) I feel like the pendulum might be swinging back to where we not only talk about mitigating the bad aspects of technology but amplifying the good.
Side note on the Olympics. This was easily my favorite Olympics. The only other games I have a memory of are the 1992 Winter games in Albertville (also in France, interesting) - maybe because I did a report in 5th grade on them, and I’ll never forget my teacher - Mr. Perala - gave me copies of USA Today to help me. He said never to forget that he did that for me, and I haven’t. Anyways, I didn’t come here to reminisce, I came to make the point that there’s a lot to take away from how these games were executed. In his Monday newsletter, Ben Thompson covers this brilliantly, “In a world defined by content abundance, which increasingly manifests itself in personally tailored experiences, the desire for a monocultural experience seems to be both massive and accelerating.” I think we’ll see this with the election too.
Don’t take someone’s advice. Experiment. I was listening to executive coach Joe Hudson on Lenny Rachitsky’s podcast when Hudson said something that made me turn my head. Lenny kept asking Hudson about his advice for folks, and then Hudson said, “You keep using the word advice, and I just want to, so for anybody who's listening, do not take my advice. Do not, do not, do not. Test it. Experiment. Set up an experiment, try it out. See if it's true for you. It's one, I just made this shit up. Somebody else could make up something different.” I love this. I’ve been trying all sorts of experiments myself to see what does or does not work for me. Try advice, but don’t feel bad if it doesn’t work.
Look for help in unexpected places. In the last few years, I’ve realized there are coaches for everything. I’ve worked with
to help me with my Substack. I’ve talked to people about my podcast. Recently, I had two conversations where the person not only wasn’t someone I would normally seek out for help but also said something that shifted my perspective on things. One was a conversation with an astrocartographer who shifted my perspective on money by saying she thought there would never be a number for me where I had “enough.” The minute she said it, I realized she was right. I had been struggling as most of the advice I had seen was to figure out your number, and I couldn’t seem to land on one. Instead, I now know this about myself, and it’s something I don’t need to put pressure on myself for. I also recently saw this Instagram post about needing to sometimes go into debt to invest in yourself to then make money. It reminds me of some tech companies' recent earnings calls about investing in AI over profits. But it reminded me that investing in myself in the long term is okay.
The second was with , who has a new book coming out about Tarot for Creativity. She offered people a 30-minute call to explore a card as part of her pre-order package. I chose the Explorer of Swords (or Knight of Swords) because it keeps coming up for me in readings. As we discussed it and my struggles with writing my book, she asked me how to write this newsletter. As I told her about my process, she asked why I was trying to write the book differently. She said I can write long-form content just like I do short-form. It sounds simple to say out loud now, but a lightbulb went off for me.
Explorer of Swords card from the Spacious Tarot deck.
These two experiences have encouraged me to continue experimenting and looking for help in unexpected places and from people I wouldn’t normally ask.Be careful of the labels we use. Another perspective-changing moment at that AI and elections event was when Jaynie Parrish, the Executive Director of Arizona Native Vote, implored us to stop saying that people being in tribes or tribalism in politics is bad. I’m going to paraphrase, but she said that tribes are strong communities that should be celebrated, and making them negative is also offensive to the Native American community. I hadn’t thought about that before and will keep that in mind going forward.
Don’t be afraid to do things differently. Ever since I saw Eric Church’s unique performance at Stagecoach, I’ve wanted to write about how gutsy and amazing it is to watch artists like him, Beyonce with Cowboy Carter, Post Malone, Taylor Swift, and countless others reinvent themselves. They aren’t afraid to try things differently and refuse to be put in a box. When they do this, some people howl, but they are blazing new trails, and it inspires me to do the same.
The world and our lives constantly shift, and we constantly need to try different ways of living. Keep your eyes, ears, and heart open to new ways of looking at things in even the unlikeliest places. You never know what you might learn.
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