Every person is carrying a representation of the world inside their mind.
It's made up of everything we've experienced so far, including our education, the stories we've been told, the books we've read, relationships we've had, the conversations we've had, etc. etc.
It is defined by the location of where we live, the aggregate interactions that occur over time between us, other people, our environment, and society.
What is "the world"?
Truthfully each of us can only know their own world, in their own head.
The best that most people can hope for is a reasonably accurate representation of reality in their minds. But with so many elements to track, so much information coming in at any one moment, it is a juggling act to fit it all together.
“The map is not the territory … The only usefulness of a map depends on similarity of structure between the empirical world and the map...”
— Alfred Korzybski, Science and Sanity, 1933
The map is you.
We use that map to navigate our way through life.
The map is our best guess of what the territory looks like, but it's just a description of the real world, and as such, it's incomplete.
The map is never finished. It's always out of date.
We are constructing a world to fit inside our heads by constantly tweaking and altering our subjective understanding of events and things.
Our personal worldview is an ongoing reconstruction of the past and a fabrication of the future.
We're constantly spinning our individual narratives about the world in our heads.
It's what we're using to trick ourselves into thinking we understand the world — and for the most part — we don't. We think we know how the world works, or what makes people tick, or what to do with our careers or the things that we need to ask questions about, but actually, we don't.
If we're smart, we dare to admit it; we're happy to admit that we're guilty of guessing how everything is, but guessing isn't the same thing as knowing.
Don't assume that what you know now is all that there is to know.
We're likely to fool ourselves into thinking we know far more than we do (we're all susceptible to this) and therefore we may miss opportunities or fail to see risks.
It’s not that our perception of the world is entirely false or inaccurate, but rather that it is incomplete. Our representations are flawed, selective, and subject to cognitive biases. Our constructed reality is created by filtering what comes in and interprets reality for fitting into our preexisting schemas, biases, and expectations.
Our mental map is projected through the lens of our reality tunnel, which, in its turn, is shaped by the mental map.
Each mental representation is an understanding of the world that we create based on our own internal model and the way we perceive the world and organize and categorize and filter and make progress through information.
We fool ourselves because we can't even see the frames within our own minds.
We format reality into our individual representation that we then use to make decisions about how to act. Just as maps are simplified representations of the actual terrain, so are the decisions we make based on our mental map.
All of our decisions and actions are most directly influenced by what we believe about how the world works and this implicit knowledge is what frames our expectations.
The people who are skilled at making things happen in the world are the ones who are able to change their map.
If you want to keep your map accurate, you have to keep exploring, experiencing and testing the world.
Reality check
What questions do you need to ask yourself to uncover bad assumptions you have about reality?
Are you aware of your map of the territory and how something could look very different?
Are there areas where you're just making up the explanations and stories and they're not really accurate?
Pause and reflect on the world the way it may really be and how you should be conducting yourself.
Your mind should be a platform to ask and answer questions and learn and grow and evolve and avoid the pitfalls and sticking points.
"You can't use an old map to explore a new world."
— attributed to Albert Einstein (unconfirmed)
If we cling to the map and believe we can't venture out and explore and grow and learn and evolve and use all this information, we never get to the "territory" — we'll never discover what's really there. If you're only relying on the map, how will you ever really know what really is there?
So ask yourself, what is true today?
Stay tuned for Part 3.
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