Changing Perspective

 It was a small presentation which presented unexpected insights. Looking from the replay of the presentation, I found out that I am failing in the very thing I thought I was proud of. Of course, I know that I am out of touch with presentation since my semester has been extremely slack thus far; my presentation skills are far from top notch. But the epiphany is not on the presentation skills, it represented something bigger: the difference in perspective. My character was wrong. Comparing my performance with Anthony’s performance, I realize that the difference is not in ability, but in perspective. I realize the need to give your best in doing things. I have been slacking too much this semester that I have dismissed every single thing as small and insignificant. While the carefree nature is what I have held in pride for a long time, I have been re-presented with its problems: the ambiguous line between carefree and reckless. From the presentation replay, I believe the word best describe my performance is ‘frivolous’. While I hold my freedom and flexibility in pride, I realize that it conveys the image of being unprofessional and unserious, the lack of respect. I thought that I was portraying the image of a cool and unrestrained, but know what he’s doing person, but I am really just flying all over the charts. Anthony’s well composed posture and charisma stuck me deeply, I realized that it is the image I wanted.

The problem of this boils down to something deeper. It’s not a matter of ability/competency, the stark difference is of perspective. Anthony’s (and Dennis’) attitude has been to give all the best to whatever they do, while I have a more heck care attitude. This difference in perspective leads to the difference in how we see things and how we handle them. This in turn leads to the difference of experience and lessons learned from identical events, and the experience loop back to affect the perspective, often reinforcing it. In other words, if you care about the things you do, you keep caring, and vice versa.

Further thought brought me back to an older theory I had on character (and perspective). It often seem that attributes of a person’s character are only contrasting: carefree versus serious, extrovert versus introvert, emotional versus pragmatic, etc. But that is not true, these attributes are not mutually exclusive, you can lean towards a certain attribute more, but it’s hardly an absolute true or false. Adding on to the fact that there can be infinitely many possible perspective/attributes, all these points together form a sphere, and the character is a certain point in the sphere. Of course, philosophically it may not be a sphere, it may be boundary-less, that is possible as well, but that’s not the scope of what I’m trying to say. I started this post by naming it “changing perspective”, but it is not exactly ‘changing’, it’s more like ‘injecting’. Being carefree and flexible is cool, but I drifted too far to that it’s becoming reckless/heck-care, and benefits are diminishing. I need to inject some seriousness and professionalism to bring some balance.

To end this post off, I have two points on expectations which have been hovering in my mind for some time:
1. You can’t expect to act like A and think that people will view you as B. it’s impossible. You are how you behave.
2. You can’t expect others to fulfill your expectations, while you yourself constantly fall short of others’ expectations.

Just a quick note to record my thoughts, I might write a post on this if I can think of something to write.