362 — Mindset (III)

For the sake of experiment, read the next sentence once, while counting the number of “f”s that you see.

“Five-winged flies are the result of years of scientific study combined with the experience of many years.”

Most likely, you counted an “f” in each of the more vibrant words of the sentence: “five,” “flies” and “scientific.” Most people only see these three “f”s, when in fact there are six. The other “f”s are hidden in the unassuming preposition “of”. Your mind probably skipped over each “of” because it processed these words without absorbing the raw information of the letters that composed them. Source

The crazy ones is a video featuring game changers who dared to follow their dreams and vision to move humanity forward (at least in some fields and as far as human rights are concerned in some countries). What were these persons’ perceptions about themselves and the world to follow their effort despite the challenges and status quo?

“The eye sees only what the mind is prepared to comprehend.”

The Cave

• Imagine a cave, in which there are three prisoners. The prisoners are tied to some rocks, their arms and legs are bound and their head is tied so that they cannot look at anything but the stonewall in front of them.
• These prisoners have been here since birth and have never seen outside of the cave.
• Behind the prisoners is a fire, and between them is a raised walkway.
• People outside the cave walk along this walkway carrying things on their head including; animals, plants, wood and stone.

The Shadows

• So, imagine that you are one of the prisoners. You cannot look at anything behind or to the side of you — you must look at the wall in front of you.
• When people walk along the walkway, you can see shadows of the objects they are carrying cast on to the wall.
• If you had never seen the real objects ever before, you would believe that the shadows of objects were ‘real.’

The Game

• Plato suggests that the prisoners would begin a ‘game’ of guessing which shadow would appear next.
• If one of the prisoners were to correctly guess, the others would praise him as clever and say that he were a master of nature.

The Escape

• One of the prisoners then escapes from their bindings and leaves the cave.
• He is shocked at the world he discovers outside the cave and does not believe it can be real.
• As he becomes used to his new surroundings, he realizes that his former view of reality was wrong.
• He begins to understand his new world, and sees that the Sun is the source of life and goes on an intellectual journey where he discovers beauty and meaning
• He see’s that his former life, and the guessing game they played is useless.

The Return

• The prisoner returns to the cave, to inform the other prisoners of his findings.
• They do not believe him and threaten to kill him if he tries to set them free.

Vision without timing can be suicidal but an idea without vision, and the willingness to make it happen, will always stay conceptual. Forcing something into a market, can be as bad as continuing with the problem that you have identified. The markets are always right.

Last year in San Mateo, I had the chance to listen to Joon Yun. Yun is an accomplished physicist, investor and hedge fund manager. He explained two main concepts I want to share with you and you can learn more about compound thinking in this link and Hidden in Plain Sight (HIPS) in this article.

10X thinking. As an entrepreneur, scientist or anything, dream and think big. If you are in the education industry, don’t limit yourself to impacting 10,000 children. Imagine solutions that can impact 1 billion children. Simple yet scalable. Scalable yet adaptable. Adaptable yet customizable.

HIPS 0r Hidden In Plain Sight. Our vision can render us blind. In that race of compound growth or compound impact, remember how our brains can trick us, leading us to take paths that are far more complicated.

Magic tricks also provide lessons on the human mind and attention. Neuroscientists have conducted experiments with “the vanishing ball illusion.” This trick begins with a magician tossing a ball a few times and easily catching it. On the final toss, the magician only pretends to throw the ball, continuing to follow the imagined trajectory of the ball. However, he has palmed the ball. Nonetheless, most observers perceive that the ball has ascended and vanished into thin air. Scientists determined that the magician’s head and eye movements redirected the spectators’ attention to the predicted position of the ball. (Kuhn and Tatler, 2005).

A year later, scientists discovered that the spectators’ gaze did not point to where they said that the ball vanished. (Kuhn and Land, 2006). The finding suggested the illusion did not trick the brain. Rather, the magician’s head and eye movements were critical to the illusion, because they redirected the observer’s focus, not their gaze, to the predicted position of the ball. The neurons that responded to the implied motion of the ball suggested by the magician’s head and eye movements are found in the same visual areas of the brain as neurons that are sensitive to real motion. Implied and real motion activated similar neural circuits. An observer perceives that the moving object is further along its path than its actual final position. Perhaps, rather than looking at the real destination of the ball, our brain takes a shortcut and extrapolates the likely outcome based on the motion that went before, rather than by looking at the ball itself. (Kuhn and Land, 2006).

Reframe your world while shocking your mind and body out of complacency. Becoming more sensitive may lead you to seeing more.