Photo by Saketh Garuda on Unsplash

As a law student, I discovered that, when I sat in the back of a large room, I had trouble reading my professors’ chalkboard scrawlings. It happened gradually enough for me to write it off. Perhaps the chalk was too light, or the lighting in the room made it difficult to see. Maybe it was a trick my professors were playing to make life more complicated, a sadistic tweak to the already brutal Socratic method employed at Michigan Law.

Eventually I accepted what should have been the obvious reality: I had become near-sighted, and I needed glasses. Once I finally took that step, the difference was astonishing. It turns out grass exists in blades, rather than a blurred mass of green, and road signs become legible long before I am driving past them. People’s faces develop expressions much more complicated and beautiful than the contours of their mouths create by themselves. Life bursts out from everywhere.

Trying to understand the world from our own myopic point of view brings similar limitations. We come up with all manner of deflections and excuses for our own limited abilities, to reach the mundane, constant conclusion that other people and circumstances are the problem. For all the effort, though, we not only delay inevitable realizations, but we tend to suffer for it. If we accept the boundaries of what we can see and understand on our own, we can instead move to opportunities to grasp, experience, and accomplish more.

Accept your limitations

In the Indian parable of the blind men and the elephant, six blind men develop ideas, based on stories they have heard, about what an elephant must be like. After arguing among themselves, they agree to go to feel a real elephant and discover for themselves what it is really like. But each feels a part of the elephant, and unable to see the whole, only confirms the beliefs he already had, none of which quite agree with each other. It is only when they understand that each experienced just part of the whole elephant that they can start to discuss and come to a greater understanding.

Whoever you are, and however smart you may be, you cannot see the entirety of the world, or even your corner of it. There is too much knowledge, too much information — and perhaps more than ever, too much misinformation to grasp it all. When you reach out to feel your way, based only on your pre-formed understanding and bolstered by what your mind is ready to understand, you will only have part of the picture you need.

Recognize others are myopic too

As you learn to recognize your own fallibility, we sometimes follow the pendulum and swing all the way to relying on others’ judgment to help us understand. It’s a version of the kind of binary thinking to which most of us are so susceptible: someone or something is right or wrong, yes or no, all or nothing. I’ve often assumed that others understood something better than I, whether because I was too uncertain of my own knowledge or because I accepted too credulously their portrayal of their own. This may well be true, but the next step of assuming their understanding to be perfect seldom proves out.

In The Nichomachean Ethics, Aristotle described pride as a virtue that lies on the golden mean. In this formulation, pride sits between the flaws of false humility (thinking yourself less worthy of greatness than you are) and hubris (thinking yourself more worthy than you are). Like most steps toward larger understanding, this kind of pride requires us to see outside of ourselves; we can only situate our understanding in the world by looking to see more of it.

Myopia distorts everyone’s ability to see ourselves situated in this way. We see through the lens of our own perspectives and experiences, rather than in an absolute sense. But by considering multiple perspectives — including our own — we give ourselves a better chance at reaching a stronger decision and conclusion.

Listen, share, and learn

When organizations tout the value of diversity, this is what they mean. People who share common experiences and perspectives still come with differences of thought and opinion, of course, but homogeneous groups tend to hit their limits much sooner than more diverse ones. The more complex the problem, and the more human-focused, the more diversity becomes a strength to the group addressing it.

Diversity of thought and experience only gets you so far, though. If people aren’t listening to each other, the parts blend into mere cacophony. If we look at most political disputes today, for example, we find voices shouting past each other, running in parallel but seldom connecting. Only by listening, sharing, and seeking out both common ground and guiding differences, can we begin to move together to achieve more.

This exercise continues indefinitely. As our understanding grows, we do not ever reach that asymptote of complete understanding. But this does not excuse giving up the effort. Accepting our perspective as limited and imperfect, we should still strive for more. When you lead a group or an organization, this becomes your job: not to always know the right answer, or even to know the best answer, but to bring in the voices and perspectives available to move together in the best direction.

This isn’t easy; while all perspectives are valid, not all ideas are. We still have to discern to grow. But we cannot discern without listening and learning. We must fight our myopic tendencies to give ourselves and those we lead the best chances to reach what we define as success.