Widen Your Lens

People love to give advice.

(Yes, I realize that the whole point of this newsletter is to give advice, so I guess I am also a pretentious advice giver.)

Your mom loves to give you advice.

Your dad loves to give you advice.

Your teacher, your neighbor, your grandma, your grandma's friend, your coworker, your friend, your friend's mom, your aunt, etc.

The point is, everyone and their mother wants to give you advice.

But how often have you taken a piece of advice from these people (because you felt obligated to), and then that advice sucked?

They told you to get a degree in accounting because you said you liked math as an 11th grader.

They told you to go to a college that wasn't too expensive but just expensive enough to put you in tens of thousands of dollars of debt.

They told you to keep going with the degree when you thought you wanted to switch majors because being an accountant is a very stable job.

They told you to get a job in your home town because the commute would be easy.

They told you to buy a car, put money in your 401k, and stay at the job that you're at because people have had great success there.

Now, here you are, 26, sitting in a one-bedroom apartment you can barely afford with an expensive car to impress others, debt you'll be paying off for 20 years, a career you hate.

Oh, and also surrounded by people you pretty much hate.

But this is just how life is supposed to be.

Everyone told you this was going to be great.

Then, when you try to complain to them since that's all they do, they tell you to be grateful for what you have.

They discourage you if you bring up the idea of change and belittle you for thinking that anything can exist outside the only jobs they know exist.

The straw

So, this is when you might realize that the people you have been taking advice from don't have a life you like.

I like to call these people the people who are looking at life through a straw.

These people picked up a straw one day when people told them to and started to look at the world through it.

They disregarded anything outside of the point of view of the straw.

They have one idea of what life should be and will question your sanity if you start talking outside of the view of their straw.

Don't take advice from the straw people.

You want to learn how to look at life through the point of view of a nice 35mm wide-angle lens.

(I only had a small stint of trying to be a photographer, but I believe 35mm is a nice wide lens to attach to your camera.)

How do you become a wide-angle lens person?

This is not an easy thing to do.

You will be met with a lot of resistance from all the straw people.

But you must remind yourself that they genuinely can't look outside their straw, so their opinion doesn't matter.

They have only lived one life, they only speak to people with the same point of view, they are afraid of change, and often don't have experience outside of the small bubble they have always comfortably lived in.

They will probably not be able to stop talking about why you are trying to do something different.

They will try and pull you back down to their level of consciousness.

One of my favorite quotes perfectly describes the point I am trying to get across.

Steps to Creating the wide- angle lens life

1. Get a job outside your hometown and in an area with different cultures.

• Let’s be honest: people will tell you to stay in your safe hometown because everyone is similar.

• But you learn nothing new from these people. All you do is keep discussing the same things repeatedly, in different ways.

• Different cultures = expose you to varying points of view = widen your lens

2. Get a job in which you have to serve others

• Food services, healthcare, hospitality, insert any other job that centers around serving people.

• I have worked in healthcare since I was 19. I have spent about six years serving other people. I have learned more about psychology and different personalities than I have learned about medicine.

• Serving other people = exposure to different personalities = widens your lens.

3. Go to a bookstore and pick out books with a main character with a different point of view than you.

• Reading fiction, biographies, and historical books will teach you a lot about people's inner thoughts.

• A study performed in 2013 by Bal and Veltkamp suggested that people who read fiction fired off Mirror Neurons in their brains.

• Mirror Neurons are neurons that discharge when an individual sees another individual performing the same or similar act.

• Essentially, they allow humans to understand and feel what another person is going through simply by observing.

• The firing of these mirror neurons suggests that when humans read a book, they feel they are experiencing the same thing as the characters, thus increasing their ability to empathize.

4. Analyze your biases

• What point of view do you currently have? Why? Where did it come from? Do you still agree with it?

• What religion do you believe in?

• Write down all of your possible biases, their root, and what about those biases that make you stand behind them?

• What point of view do you NOT believe in? Why not? Is there any part of these points of view that you could agree with or understand?

• Remember, EVERYONE has bias.

5. Learn how to have conversations about ideas, NOT events or people.

• This sounds super easy, right?

• BUT, if you have ever been in the habit of gossiping and tried to stop, you know how hard this is.

• Learn how to ask people questions about their lives without making them uncomfortable or the conversation feel like an interview.

• There is a lot to learn from people (especially if you are working in the service industry).

• Working as a nurse, I love speaking to my patients about their lives and providing them a safe space to open up about their feelings.

• You can learn an immense amount about life just by creating a space for people to speak about their innermost thoughts, regrets, life experiences, and deepest troubles.

That's how you widen your lens.

It's a lifelong process of opening up your mind to the possibilities of life.

As you open your mind and your possibilities, you will start to open up opportunities to live a more meaningful life.

You will come across different passions you didn't even know could exist.

You can live a full life but won't get there by looking through a straw.

Widen your lens. Create a better life.

Hope this was valuable.

Have a great week :)

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