Sometimes, Perceptions Matter More Than Reality
“Perception is more important than reality. If someone perceives something to be true, it is more important than if it is in fact true. This doesn’t mean you should be duplicitous or deceitful, but don’t go out of your way to correct a false assumption if it plays to your advantage,” Ivanka Trump once wrote.
The quote from Ivanka Trump is often ridiculed, but there’s some truth to her perspective.
There’s a documentary that I watched on Netflix a while ago, “Take Your Pills,” that sparked a question about the role of Adderall and amphetamines on mental performance: they don’t really make you more able to perform complex cognitive tasks, they make you think you can.
Likewise, in Season 5 of “The Wire,” Chris and Snoop teach Michael a valuable lesson about street reputation: it doesn’t matter what someone did or didn’t do. It matters that people think they did it. They walk into a house and kill a rival drug dealer and his whole family because they heard he called their boss, Marlo, a homophobic slur.
“You heard? You ain’t sure?” Michael says.
“People say he said it,” Snoop responds.
“Doesn’t matter if he said it or not. People think he said it. You can’t let that shit go,” Chris says.
