Having ¨missed¨ some valuable opportunities throughout my life, and suffered the long term regret that comes with it which innevitably forces you to over-indulge in some self pitty further damaging your self-esteem, there´s a couple of things I´ve learned in this process.

In order to have a healthy relationship with yourself and whatever may come, you need to change your perspective about ¨opportunities¨.

We´ve been led to believe that opportunities are as rare as a decent politician, and if you manage to miss one, then you´ll be stuck with your bad choice for years until the next one comes.

Though reality is entirely different.

We live surroudned by an abundance of opportunities, whether that may be for business, romantic relationships, friendships, and much more. Yet, we lack the skils to identify them as such.

Which, in my opinion, is a far more reasonable philosophy to live by since the ¨ball is in our court¨ rather than hoping the universe doesn´t ghost us for the next 10 years until another opportunity comes knocking.

But first you must understand one primordial concept:

PERSPECTIVE IS EVERYTHING

I like to think of perspective as some sort of “glasses”, kinda what author Stephen Covey refers to when talking about values in his books 7 Habits of HIghly Effective People.

This glasses are constantly changing the way you see the world.

We all have eyes.

Yet, each one of our glasses is different, and something so small like a slight change of shade, may change entirely your perspective compared to mine.

Hence, the importance of understanding our perception.

And here lies the beauty about absolute truth, or in this case, the lack off.

The Point of View Paradox

An experiment was done at Harvard Business School in which they wanted to prove the power of perception and how two people can see the same thing, disagree, yet both be right.

To quote Stephen:

The experiment was pretty simple.

Look at the image below:

What you perceive may vary based on a wide array of reasons, but the exercise is as simple as it is efficient.

If you look from left to right, you’ll probably see a young woman on all three pictures.

But! If you start from right to left, then you’ll probably see an elder woman in all three pictures as well.

Magic?

Not entirely.

The beauty about perception is that it’ll always be subjective, meaning there’s no absolute truth, everything we see, listen, read and more, is biased.

And we better get that into our heads as soon as possible.

Quoting an incredibly wise man.

We must pay close attention to our perception, and do so intentionally.

Perception always precedes action. And adequate actions require adequate perceptions.

So here’s a question to ask yourself more often:

Is our perspective truly giving us perspective or is it what’s actually causing the problem?