THE GUARANTEED PATH TO PERSPECTIVE

James Meadows • June 8, 2016

David Linde is the CEO of Participant Media. He articulates a life lesson about why experiences are vital to our personal and professional growth (“How Did I Get Here?: David Linde” Bloomberg Businessweek , 5/23/16–5/29/16, p. 72):

“ Build perspective through experiences. ”

Although I agree with Linde’s statement, I see two implicit presuppositions:

We embrace situations that create new experiences.
We embrace the learning opportunities from those experiences.

I think that some people are better at this than others are. Our goal should be to force ourselves into new experiences that push us beyond our comfort zones. After having those new experiences, we should reflect deeply so that we extract the fullest possible learning value.

This means that we must be open-minded. If we do all that successfully, then we will gain perspective. That refined perspective is something that no one can ever take away from us.

Pursue perspective. Pursue experiences.

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