Changing Perspective Changes Everything

Live to play, not perform, and what matters becomes obvious

Plaza Mayor in Salamanca, Spain, the central gathering point for locals, tourists, visitors, travelers, and students. Photo: Per Håkansson.

A simple shift in perspective can change everything. Just think about life and work. It’s common to perceive them as a performance, like seeing a play at the theater. If you do well you get applause, if you don’t, people might throw rotten tomatoes.

We have been trained to perform since childhood, to receive love and attention. And of course this continues thorough out life in education, work, and relationships. If people like what we do we get celebrated, if they don’t we get nothing or are shamed.

But constantly performing for others is exhausting and it’s better to shift perspective and focus on practice. Focusing on performance can easily invite procrastination, overthinking, and fear while practice just needs inner purpose and passion.

"We act as though comfort and luxury were the chief requirements of life, when all that we need to make us happy is something to be enthusiastic about." – Charles Kingsley

Performance is pretending for the masses, practice is playing for ourselves. Once I discovered this little secret, I became free to focus my own time, attention, and creative energy on things that matters to me and maybe no-one else.

Philosophy professor Dr. Jordan B Peterson wisely says: “People think that the purpose of memory is to remember the past. That's not the purpose of memory. The purpose of memory is to extract out, from the past, lessons to structure the future.”