You See What You Look For – Earl Nightingale – Change Your Life

 

Among the writings of Henry David Thoreau, I came across this statement, Many an object is not seen, though it falls within the range of our visual ray, because it does not come within the range of our intellectual ray.

In other words, there are many things that exist in our world that we don t see because we are not looking for them or perhaps even aren t capable of looking for them. So in the largest sense, the world we see is only the world we look for.

Show two people the same picture, and each will see a different scene; each will extract from what he sees that which he happens to be predisposed to look for. Different people looking out of a train window as they pass through the outskirts of a city will see the same thing from entirely different viewpoints. One will see a depressing, run-down neighborhood. Another will see an ideal plant site. Still another might see a marvelous opportunity for real-estate development. The passing scene might give someone else the idea for a story or a song or a poem. Another, his face buried in a magazine, will see nothing.

The world presents to each of us, every day, that which we seek. There is not a neighborhood or area that does not offer abundant opportunity to every person there. That opportunity is limited only by the viewpoint of the inhabitant.

Some years ago, a Wisconsin farmer was stricken with polio and left paralyzed in an iron lung. Flat on his back, unable to farm his land, he was forced to push back his intellectual horizon. He was forced to think creatively, to take mental inventory of his assets and liabilities. Without moving from his bed, he built one of the country s largest and most successful meat-packing companies. Unable to use his hands and feet, he was forced to use his most precious, his most priceless possession his mind and he found his farm contained all the riches he and his family would ever need.

Where before there was only a farm, now there are great packing plants employing thousands.

I am sure that when his friends and neighbors learned of his affliction, they wondered how he would manage to operate his farm and care for his family.

He simply looked at the farm with new eyes; he saw what he had failed to see before, even though nothing had changed except his own mobility.

Every one of us lives in a kind of iron lung of his own fashioning. Each one of us has opportunities just as great as that Wisconsin farmer s. But few of us are forced to reach so far into the deep reservoirs of ability within us. And fewer still know the joy and excitement and never-ending interest that can be found in our daily lives when we learn to look at our world as Thoreau looked at his. Surrounded by miracles and limitless opportunity, some people manage to find only boredom and insecurity.

As Thoreau said, we find only the world we look for.

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