The Limits of Your World Are Just the Limits of Your Perception

How to See Through Your Apparent Boundaries

Nate Johnson
5 min readApr 24, 2020
When Neo finally sees the Matrix for what it is

The Law of the Instrument

The Law of the Instrument is a cognitive bias we all have whereby we overly rely on a familiar tool.

Known lessons around this bias stretch as far back as the writings of Buddha, but it’s Abraham Maslow and Abraham Kaplan who are given most of the credit for conceptualizing the idea, which can be summed up by the statement:

To one with only a hammer, everything looks like a nail.

What this means is that everything we see (only nails) is based on the boundaries of our perception (having only a hammer).

And the boundaries of our perception are only limited by what we accept as the boundaries of our perception.

HAVING Limits is Different Than KNOWING Limits

“Every man takes the limits of his own field of vision for the limits of the world.”― Arthur Schopenhauer

Most people believe their reality IS reality.

They believe that if they can’t perceive something as true, then it must not be true. What they perceive as true, must be the only truth.

They only have a hammer and they think a hammer is all there is, therefore they treat everything as a nail.

But you’re not like that. You start imagining solutions and possibilities for your life even if you don’t yet have or know of the tools.

See, we’re all playing with a limited set of tools — of knowledge. But the way you start to see the truth — the way you open yourself to possibilities and to realize perceived limits may not be actual limits — is to be open to the possibility that other tools exist and then to start to look for and acquire them.

How to See Beyond the Limits of Your Perception

  1. You must first be self-aware and notice the limits of your perception
  2. Then you must question if they are actual limits (“Is this true?”)
  3. Then make yourself open to the possibility that they are not

You may in fact, have already been exposed to truths through books you’ve read, advice you’ve been given, etc. But you just weren’t ready or hadn’t had the life experience you needed in order to to notice them.

It’s like when you read a book 10 years apart and it means something completely different to you when you’re older. You finally get it because you have a new perspective.

Reality hadn’t changed. You changed.

As Robertson Davies put it in his novel, Tempest-Tost:

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

Your mind is a receiver, and it will only pick up what it’s programmed to pick up. So program it to pick up more.

Examples of Seeing Beyond Perception

Educational Perceptions

Until the past 10 years or so, getting a college eduction was seen as the only way to succeed in life.

But with insane tuition costs, decreasing barriers to start businesses with low overhead, and the rise of startup culture, people are realizing that a college education is not the gatekeeper it once was perceived to be.

Psychiatric Perceptions

In Maslow’s time, there were only a couple anti-psychotic medications, so other mental illnesses were treated as psychoses.

But now we know that not all mental illnesses are psychoses and we’re more open to a broader range of possibilities and nuances for how to diagnose and treat mental illness.

Physical Perceptions

Our senses of sight, sound, smell, touch and taste are pretty measly compared to other creatures in the animal kingdom.

Therefore, it would be foolish to think that whatever we can’t do cannot be done at all.

That’s why when we exhaust our physical limits, we invent instruments to augment how we perceive the world and those instruments completely change our reality and make new things possible.

Mental Perceptions

Even our mind and imaginations have limitations.

For example, while the human brain can conceive of other dimensions, because we live in a 3D world we can’t actually imagine anything with more dimensions.

But does that limitation stop us from representing what we can’t imagine? As Carl Sagan shows us, the answer is No.

Analogy Perceptions

I’ll let Elon explain.

Positional Perceptions

“What you see and what you hear depends a great deal on where you are standing. It also depends on what sort of person you are.”― C.S. Lewis

This might be the hardest of the perceptions to challenge because it deals directly with the ego. I would say it is the foundation of all perception.

If you were to stand on one side of a box and neither you nor the box ever moved, your reality of the box would just be the side you see, but it would not be the reality of all that the box is.

If the person just a few feet away, looking at the conjoining side of the box also never moved, then they would have their own reality of the box, which is different than yours, but you’d both assume that each of your realities was the same.

Same box, same reality.

But if you started to move, you would begin to see angles, you’d see it’s not one dimensional but actually has sides, perhaps their side has a different pattern or color than your side.

The point is, everyone sees the same things (physical things, thoughts, concepts, life) from different points of view and your perception is not an absolute reality, it’s your reality. And you can change your reality each time you change your angle.

Just Think

In order to expand your world and expand what’s possible for you, you must just think.

Think for yourself.

If you perceive something as hard, think WHY you think it’s hard.

Is it because that’s what people always say? Have you tried before and failed? Because you failed, does that mean it’s objectively hard or was your method simply wrong? Have other people defied convention and achieved what you want to achieve with relative ease? How did they do it?

If you perceive yourself a certain type of person, think if that’s actually true or if you’re just applying a label to yourself for a feeling you sometimes have.

For example, “I’m an anxious person.” Is that true? So you’ve had a panic attack, maybe. Does that mean you always have panic attacks? Are there times when you’re completely calm, relaxed and confident? Then you labeling yourself as anxious is false. Sometimes you have anxiety. But if you don’t have it all the time, then you can’t label yourself as anxious.

Reality is what you perceive as real and only a minute fraction of the things you’ll encounter are actually nails. So if you want to change your reality, expand your tools, and expand how you perceive it.

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This article is Day 12 of the 30-Day Fishbowl Series

You can start the series by clicking HERE.

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Nate Johnson

“The Zen philosopher, Basho, once wrote, ‘A flute with no holes, is not a flute. A donut with no hole, is a Danish. He was a funny guy.” — Ty Webb, ‘Caddyshack’