Forest – ElPropósito3 min de lectura

A shift in perspective

What so often keeps us from seeing the forest as well as the tree? I know all too well what it’s like to worry so much about a single problem that I lose perspective on the rest of my life. That tendency to see only the problem and miss the opportunity, to pour all our attention into one issue, is the main cause of inaction and, to some extent, of anxiety. In Stoic philosophy, one of Marcus Aurelius’s meditations captures this shift in perspective beautifully: if only we could look at ourselves from the outside, from space down toward the Earth. With that view we can be wise enough to see how small the problem really is. So what do we gain by seeing the forest and the tree?

In my analogy, seeing the forest means remembering every victory, joy, satisfaction, finished project and so much more that we’ve achieved in our lives, even if we feel we’ve lived very little. In fact, a life with purpose carries a unique ingredient that becomes a source of satisfaction the moment we look back at the path of our decisions and how our results have evolved. A company whose strategic plan is closely aligned with its corporate purpose has an added advantage: it knows it’s creating value for many stakeholders in a unique, special and responsible way. By the same token, a company that keeps circling one problem and fails to act in line with its values, ethics and purpose slowly comes to see only the tree. It fixes its gaze on a single problem and grows practically nearsighted, unable to see the broader picture of everything else through which it creates value for society. Fixating on one problem blinds us to every chance to improve, to correct course and to grow from each lesson so we don’t repeat the same mistakes.

Fortunate indeed is the person who lives with a view of the whole while knowing its parts: their thoughts, decisions, worries, joys and sorrows. In short, they keep the right balance between the good and the not so good, positive and negative, future, present and past, anxiety and calm, stress and patience. When we fixate on one problem, we lose all of that, and that’s when we’re prone to fall into a negative spiral that leads straight to failure. As we say in aviation, it’s like an airplane that stalls and goes into a spin, which is very hard to recover from. Seeing the tree isn’t bad, and neither is seeing the problem. The trouble is getting stuck there without the awareness to put things in perspective.

For someone caught in a negative spiral, it can be very hard to imagine a way out. I see this constantly in business too: owners who were successful for years and now don’t know how to handle the change in front of them. It may sound paradoxical, even counterintuitive, that with so many tools and so much technology at hand, doing business is more complex today. Now more than ever we can see that past success is no guarantee of future success. Values like discipline and hard work, though, are as relevant as ever. We certainly need answers, yet I believe what we lack most are the right questions.

What am I missing, or failing to see, because I’m focused only on this problem?

Warm regards and all the best,

Rodrigo Baccaro

Author: Rodrigo Baccaro

Linkedin