Jack Uldrich
Show navigation Hide navigation

Unlearn Your View of Colors … and People

Posted in Business, Creativity, Culture, Design, Education, Games, General, Innovation, Marketing, Philosophy, Science, Unlearn Strategy, Unlearning 101 Episodes

Take a look at the picture to the right. Do you see the green and the blue spirals? Amazingly, they are both the same color. (For a detailed explanation read this Colors article in Discover Magazine.)

This optical illusion, which shows how our mind uses neighboring colors to make inferences about other colors, is a wonderful metaphor for how many of us — myself included — often mistakenly make inferences about people based on associations rather than people's true characteristics.

For example, in a recent exercise, Joshua Bell, one of the world's greatest classical concert violinists, dressed in blue jeans and played in the tunnel of a Metro (i.e. subway) station in Washington, D.C. Not surprisingly, not a single person stopped to listen to him. That same evening, however, thousands of people were willing to spend hundreds of dollars to hear him play.

My point is that all too often we fail to see or appreciate true beauty — or truth, if you will — because we are blinded by our environment. It is something we will all need to unlearn if we wish to see the world not as we see it — but as it really is.

Related Posts



One thought on “Unlearn Your View of Colors … and People”

Comments are closed.

Categories

Interested in having Jack speak at your next event?
Invite Jack to Speak

Subscribe

Subscribe to the Exponential Executive Newsletter now!


Get the foresight to flourish

Sign up our Friday Future 15 Newsletter and start taking time to think about tomorrow.