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Passages Of The Day |
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| Perception (ii) |
Age can provide richer experience, but not necessarily so. Professor John Edwards is fond of saying that a teacher with twenty years' experience may indeed have twenty years' experience or may have twenty times a one-year experience. If you always look at things in the same way then more experience only provides more books on the same shelf.
Age permits you to have more experience but only if you permit yourself to be open to new experiences. If you never change your mind, why have one? Have a sign on your desk which says: 'Same thinking as yesterday, last year or ten years ago.'
You are in a plane that is coming in to land at Heathrow airport in London. The plane passes over several car parks. You say to yourself: 'I am going to notice all the cars coloured red.' You look at the car park and all the cars coloured red jump out to you. Red is a fairly common colour. So you choose 'bright blue'. This colour is much more rare and your eye scans over the cars. Suddenly a bright blue car jumps out of the mass.
There are two important points about this simple experiment. The first point is that you are giving instructions to your own brain. The second is that you are 'sensitizing' the brain to certain types of input.
A suspicious wife notices that when her husband comes home late in the evening his tie is a different length from when he left in the morning. Her suspicious mind immediately jumps to the conclusion that perhaps he has a mistress. The emotion of jealousy has sensitized perception in the same way as the attention-directing instruction. In fact the poor fellow has just played a game of squash |
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Passage taken from: "Edward de Bono's Textbook of Wisdom," by Edward de Bono, ISBN 0-14-025838-8 Copyright © McQuaig Group Inc., 1996
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