Picture this, hypothetical exercise. Picture a multi-dimensional space. In each axes/dimension there is a quality about a person. It could be the year in which someone was born (and therefore the generation they belong to). It could be what type of socioeconomic class they come from. It could be what part of the world they came from (which could be represented quantitatively by the population of their home city, the average GDP of their city, etc.). Just imagine this for now.
With all these quantitative values describing a person, they can be represented (approximated) as a dot somewhere in this multi-dimensionality space. Someone that you grew up alongside in the same neighborhood with similar factors might be in close proximity to your dot. Someone on a different side of the world from a different generation and background would have a dot further away from yours.
Now I know what you might be thinking. “You can’t classify people this easily into categories and map them to just some numbers. People are much more complicated than that. While this is true, consider:
- You can get pretty close. People in close proximity that form a group of points would be inclined to think similarly to each other and behave in similar ways. Although this is not a perfect representation, merely an approximation
- Consider the case where the number of dimensions approaches infinity (only theoretically). In this case, you could describe everything you would ever want about a person, and with an infinite amount of metrics, one could argue that you could represent that person exactly.
So in this second case, you would now be represented as a point in an infinite-dimensional space, and each point represents someone in the world. The points are spread. You are in close proximity to some and could be further from others.
Think about things in life. Family, events, careers, etc. Think of these things as objects placed somewhere in the infinite-dimensionality space.
Your dot will see this object from a different perspective than someone else. In real life, someone who grew up differently than you (another part of the world, different socioeconomic background) would have a different perspective of this thing than you will.
The object is placed in the middle, but we can only see a projection of it from our certain perspective. In other words, we can’t see the entire object, but merely see it from a certain angle or perspective. Another person will see it from a different angle than you. According to this theory, these different perspectives are not good or bad, but you might assign different values to them. The object is what it is, your perspective will not change what it is. But it’s difficult to get an entire view of the object from only your perspective.
So what?
What if we suddenly had the power to change the position of this dot in this multi-dimensional space. What if you had the ability to change the position of your dot at any given time?
Then you’d be able to actually see things differently, from a different perspective, this would help you get more of the entire picture.
If you learn how other people live and see the world, you could choose to shift your perspective about a certain thing. You could “put yourself in their shoes” and think about what this thing would be like from their perspective.
Learning:
I believe this is one of the best outcomes of meeting new, different people and learning from them. You could have the power to change the location of your dot and see things from another perspective. You basically want to move along an axes in these dimensions and look for people there. This could mean speaking to people which are older than you, richer, poorer, from a different place, etc.
Here are, what I think, some great ways to do this. I believe there’s many more
- Traveling: Travel to different parts of the world where people’s dots cluster much further away from yours.
- Shifting classes: Observing how people within a certain city (your hometown for example) live in the lower, middle, and upper classes
- Reading: One of the best ways is to read books and get inside somebody else’s head, see what their viewpoint in life is like.
Anything else?
If you have any interesting thoughts on this weird idea I’d love to hear them! Or any other ways you can think of expanding your perspective.