Knowing how to keep things in perspective will largely determine how your life turns out.

A few years back, I took a T.V. production class.  The instructor told us that media production is the business of controlling people’s minds through smoke and mirrors.

He illustrated this by showing us footage that he captured. This was a commercial to help s church attract new membership.  At the day of his filming, the church didn’t have enough people in the seats to look like an attractive place of worship for younger crowds. To remedy this, he masterfully inserted dozens of people into the footage from previous church filming.  

One of the students who actually attended that church stood up and said: “Wait a minute!  That’s my church and I was there that day.  All of those people weren’t there.”  The classroom instructor replied: ”So, what about it?” The student replied, “You can’t do that, that’s not even real.” The instructor quickly redirected the student’s focus to the point that he had made earlier. “The footage says that they were there, so they were there.  There weren’t enough members in seats so I put them in seats.  I make people see what I want them to see.” 

Keep Things In Perspective: The Power of Imagery

People are constantly digesting edited images that shape their point of view. Celebrities and public figures work their magic by carefully crafting well-timed actions in photos and videos and well-timed rehearsed responses in interviews to portray an image that they want people to buy into.  

How To Think to Live

Your ability to keep things in perspective is incredibly powerful because it can shape your quality of life.

One morning after my night shift at work, I walked out to my car to find that it had been broken into. The steering column was broken and so was the back window. Ironically there was a pizza box left behind and the only thing that was missing was my briefcase. My mind immediately went into problem solving mode.

My car got towed and the repairs were made over the next few days. I had reported the crime and about a week later the police came to my house to let me know that they found the car thief. When they caught them, he had been carrying my briefcase around. How odd.

I mentioned this incident to my father. He was bothered by this matter much more than I was. “How do you feel after having somebody violating your stuff like that?” is what he asked me.  Much to his surprise and perhaps even to my own I told him that I didn’t feel violated at all.  My father was concerned thinking that I was being too passive about the situation however the thing was that my concentration was not on feeling violated: it was on the bizarreness of the incident.

Controlling Your Inner Narrative

The other thing that helped me to keep things in perspective was that there was nothing personal about this situation to me. 

Have you ever found yourself daydreaming about something while someone was trying to get your attention?  They’re waving you down maybe even calling your name and it appears that you see them, but you don’t. Though physically you’re present, your mind is in another place. 

That was how I viewed the state of mind of this car thief.  To me this was a thief doing what a thief does. He has a limited consciousness around taking something that doesn’t belong to him. Their focus was on successfully stealing a car. My car happened to be the lucky one for the night.

It would be great if we all learned to transfer our skills in one area of life to another area. When it came to this car incident, I was able to mostly brush it off and accept the loss. This is because of how I viewed the situation along with my assumptions about the thief’s state of mind. The only thing that really bothered me about this was being inconvenienced and having to spend money on damage that someone else caused to my property. 

Controlling Your Attention

I also spent most of my attention being very curious about this whole situation. There were two unusual things on my mind: the empty pizza box left behind and my missing briefcase of no real valuables.  I really wondered if the thief was so comfortable stealing in the middle of the night that they thought that they could enjoy a midnight snack.

When the police brought officer brought back my briefcase, everything was still there. I wondered if the thief found a chapter that caught their attention.  

It would have been very easy to let anger and frustration dominate my emotions but instead curiosity and eventually humor were my greatest allies in this matter.  

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A Few Helpful Tips

To keep things in perspective, don’t allow a situation to occupy more negative space in your mind than needed. 

This doesn’t mean being a pushover. It means don’t let situations that are out of your control get the best of you any more than they have to if they even have to at all. To do this, it’s important to collect data about yourself. Become a stellar student of YOU over time and know what makes you tick and why.

Another good habit to get into to keep things in perspective is to look at all experiences as teaching tools. Subsequently, you’ll reduce your fear of welcoming all experiences.  Make a connection with your experiences being an opportunity to save other people a lot of trouble in life with your knowledge, resiliency and philosophy built around those experiences.

The perspective has to be trained and if it is not, life will be something that keeps happening to you instead of something that you can leverage in your favor. It’s a good idea to start training it with the small tings.

Basic Training to Keep Things In Perspective

One day, I parked my vehicle at a free parking station to catch a train to save money on downtown parking.  The train had a delay so I called an Uber.  This defeated my entire purpose of avoiding the parking costs but I didn’t want to be late.  When the Uber driver showed up he could tell that I was a bit frustrated about something. Nonetheless, we struck up a conversation. They mentioned that they were seeking some information on a certain business but had little success in doing so. It turned out that I had a ton of information on this business already.  He was all ears as I gave him everything that I knew. 

During this conversation, I adjusted my outlook about how my day had been before this ride. 

I decided that me and this guy were supposed to meet.  I also decided that instead of being frustrated with spending more than I wanted to spend, I should be grateful that services like Uber exist.  It also struck me that I should be glad to put money in another Black man’s pocket who’s being entrepreneurial. 

As I arrived at my destination just minutes before the train would’ve got me there, we shook hands and I thanked him for the ride.  He said: “I don’t want to charge you.  I know I’ll make money later.” He erased the trip as if he never picked me up.  He said that all he wanted was for me to give him was a high rating.  I told him that I was going to give him a high rating already but I still have to pay him.  He insisted no and said: “Brother, you blessed me, now let me bless you.”  

Keep Your Perspective: Don’t Allow Other People to Create Smoke & Mirrors

For nearly everything a person says, there is another vantage point that can be considered beyond the default view.

When a person hears that a man has been married for 20 or more years they will usually make the assumption that this man is successfully married. But what if he is a hands off father who allows his children to run amuck? Would you consider him successful if he has put his wife’s life on the line by bringing home STI’s and STD’s? What if he has put the family’s economy in jeopardy because of his gambling addiction more times that can be counted? If he sexually abused his children is he still successful?

Being married for a long time is a status. Being successfully married requires scrutiny.

Everyday there is a battle for our attention and emotions. Don’t allow yourself to be dominated by the opinions, ideas and convictions of other people and beware of your own self-destructive thoughts as well.

Written By: Waymon Brown. Creator of theesquireproject.com. Email info@theesquireproject.com