Big-Picture Thinking
“Where success is concerned, people are not measured in inches, or pounds, or college degrees, or family background; they are measured by the size of their thinking.”—DAVID SCHWARTZ
Big-picture thinking brings wholeness and maturity to a person’s thinking. It brings perspective. It’s like making the frame of a picture bigger, in the process expanding not only what you can see, but what you are able to do.
CULTIVATE BIG-PICTURE THINKING BY ELEVATING YOUR PERSPECTIVE
It is in the animal part of you to be most impressed by what you can see and hear in the present—the latest news reports and trends, the opinions and actions of the people around you, whatever seems the most dramatic. This is what makes you fall for alluring schemes that promise quick results and easy money. This is also what makes you overreact to present circumstances—
becoming overly exhilarated or panicky as events turn one direction -or the other. Learn to measure people by the narrowness or breadth of their vision; avoid entangling yourself with those who cannot see the consequences of their actions, who are in a continual reactive mode. They will infect you with this energy. Your eyes must be on the bigger picture, and trends that govern events, on that which is not immediately visible. Never lose sight of your long-term goals. With an elevated perspective, you will have the patience and clarity to reach almost any objective.
We tend to live in the moment. We respond first and foremost to what we see and hear, to what is most dramatic in an event. But our reality as human beings encompasses the past—every event is connected to something that happened before in an endless chain of historical causation. Any present problem has deep roots in the past. It also encompasses the future. Whatever we do has consequences that stretch far into the years to come.
When we limit our thinking to what our senses provide, to what is immediate, our reasoning powers are neutralized. We are no longer aware of why or how things come about. We imagine that some successful scheme that has lasted a few months can only get better. We no longer give thought to the possible consequences of anything we set in motion. We react to what is given in the moment, based on only a small piece of the puzzle. Naturally our actions then lead to unintended consequences, or even to disasters.
To complicate matters, we are surrounded by others who are continually reacting, drawing us deeper into the present. Salesmen and demagogues play on this human weakness to con us with the prospect of easy gains and instant gratification. Our only antidote is to train ourselves to continually detach from the immediate rush of events and elevate our perspective. Instead of merely reacting, we step back and look at the wider context. We consider the various possible ramifications of any action we take. We keep in mind our long-term goals. Often, in raising our perspective, we will decide that it is better to do nothing, to not react, and to let time go by and see
what it reveals. Such sanity and balance do not come naturally. They are powers we acquire through great effort.
Almost all of us have experienced something similar to the following scenarios: Someone we need or depend on is not paying us proper attention, not returning our calls. Feeling frustrated, weexpress our feelings to him or double our efforts to get a response. Or we encounter a problem, a project that is not going well, and so we decide upon a strategy and take appropriate action. Or a new person appears in our life, and captivated by her fresh energy and charm, we become friends.
Then weeks go by and we are forced to reassess what had happened and how we had reacted. New information comes to light. That person who was not responding to us was himself overwhelmed with work. If only we had just waited and not been so impatient, we could have avoided pushing away a valuable partner. That problem we tried to solve was not really so urgent, and we made it worse by rushing an outcome. We needed to know more before acting. And that new friend ends up not being so charming; in fact, time reveals her to be a destructive sociopath whose friendship takes us years to heal from. A little more distance could have let us see the red flags before it was too late. Looking back on our life, we see that we have a tendency to be impatient and to overreact; we notice patterns of behaviour over long periods of time that elude us in the moment but become clearer to us later on.
Elevate Your Perspective for More Mental Clarity
What this means is that in the present moment we lack perspective. With the passage of time, we gain more information and see more of the truth; what was invisible to us in the present now becomes visible in retrospect. Time is the greatest teacher of them all, the revealer of reality.
We can compare this to the following visual phenomenon: At the base of a mountain, in a thick forest, we have no ability to get our bearings or to map out our surroundings. We see only what is before our eyes. If we begin to move up the side of the mountain, we can see more of our surroundings and how they relate to other parts of the landscape. The higher we go, the more we realize that what we thought further below was not quite accurate, was based on a slightly distorted perspective. At the top of the mountain we have a clear panoramic view of the scene and perfect clarity as to the lay of the land. For us, locked in the present moment, it as if we are living at the
base of the mountain. What is most apparent to our eyes—the other people around us, the surrounding forest—gives us a limited, skewed vision of reality. The passage of time is like a slow ascent up the mountain. The emotions we felt in the present are no longer so strong; we can detach
ourselves and see things more clearly. The further we ascend with the passage of time, the more information we add to the picture. What we saw three months after the fact is not quite as accurate as what we come to know a year later.
It would seem, then, that wisdom tends to come to us when it is too late, mostly in hindsight. But there is in fact a way for us to manufacture the effect of time, to give ourselves an expanded view in the present moment. We can call this the farsighted perspective, and it requires the following
process.
First, facing a problem, conflict, or some exciting opportunity, we train ourselves to detach from the heat of the moment. We work to calm down our excitement or our fear. We get some distance.
Next, we start to deepen and widen our perspective. In considering the nature of the problem we are confronting, we don’t just grab for an immediate explanation, but instead we dig deeper and consider other possibilities, other possible motivations for the people involved. We force ourselvesto look at the overall context of the event, not just what immediately grabs our attention. We imagine as best we can the negative consequences of the various strategies we are contemplating. We consider how the problem or the apparent opportunity might play itself out over time, how other problems or issues not apparent in the moment might suddenly loom larger than what we are immediately dealing with. We focus on our long-term goals and realign our priorities in the present according to them.
In other words, this process involves distance from the present, a deeper look at the source of problems, a wider perspective on the overall context of the situation, and a look further into the future—including the consequences of our actions and our own long-term priorities.
As we go through this process, certain options and explanations will begin to seem more logical and realistic than others that grabbed us in the moment. We add to this the lessons we have learned over the years about our own patterns of behaviour. In this way, though we cannot re-create the full effect that time has on our thinking, we can approximate it. Most often the passing months give us even more information and reveal better options for us to have taken. We are manufacturing this effect in the present by widening what we consider and opening our minds. We are moving up the mountain. Such an elevated perspective can calm us down and make it easier for us to maintain our presence of mind as events unfold.
Although this stands as an ideal, we must admit that such a perspective is rare among us. It seems to require an effort that is almost beyond us. The reason for this is simple: short-term thinking is hardwired into our system; we are built to respond to what is immediate and to seek out instant
gratification. For our early ancestors, it paid to notice what was potentially dangerous in the environment or what offered an opportunity for food. The human brain as it evolved was designed not to examine the full picture and context of an event but to home in on the most dramatic features. This worked well in a relatively simple environment and amid the simple social organization of the tribe. But it is not suited to the complex world we now live in. It makes us take notice mostly of what stimulates our senses and emotions, and miss much of the bigger picture.
This has a decided impact on how we view the potential pleasure or pain involved in a situation. Our brains are designed to make us notice what could immediately harm us in our surroundings but not to pay great attention to other dangers looming in the future that are more abstract. This is why we tend to give much more attention to something like terrorism (immediate pain), which certainly deserves our scrutiny, than to global warming (distant pain), which in fact represents the greater danger since it puts the very survival of the planet at risk. But such a danger seems abstract in the present. By the time it becomes not abstract at all, it might be too late. We tend also to grab for things that offer immediate pleasure, even if we know about the negative long-term consequences. That is why people continue to smoke, drink, do drugs, or engage in any self-destructive behaviour in which the destruction is not immediate and dramatic.
In a world that is complex, with myriad dangers that loom in the future, our short-term tendencies pose a continual threat to our well-being. And as our attention spans decrease because of technology, the threat is even greater. In many ways we are defined by our relationship to time. When we simply react to what we see and hear, when we swing from excitement and exuberance to fear and panic at each new piece of dramatic news, when we gear our actions toward gaining as much pleasure as possible in the moment without a thought for future consequences, we can say that we are giving in to what is most primitive and potentially destructive in our neurological
makeup.
When we strive to go against this grain, to consider more deeply the consequences of what we do and the nature of our long-term priorities, we are straining to realize our full potential as a big picture thinker. And just as short-term thinking can be contagious, one individual who embodies the wisdom of the farsighted perspective can have an immensely positive effect on the people around him or her. Such individuals make us aware of the bigger picture and reveal a mind-set that we recognize as superior. We want to imitate them.
Throughout history there have been various icons of this wisdom to inspire and guide us: Joseph in the Old Testament, who could see into the hearts of men and foresee the future; Socrates of ancient Greece, who taught us how to be less foolish and more consequential in our thinking; the brilliant strategist Zhuge Liang of ancient China, who could predict every movement of the enemy; leaders such as Queen Elizabeth I and Abraham Lincoln, renowned for the success of their long-term strategizing; the very patient and prescient scientist Charles Darwin, who finally exposed the effects of deep time on the evolution of all living things; and Warren Buffett, the most successful investor in history, whose power is based on his farsighted perspective.
If possible, avoid deep contact with those whose time frame is narrow, who are in continual react mode, and strive to associate with those with an expanded awareness of time.
In our next article we shall look at the signs of short-sightedness (short-term thinking) and how we can overcome them.