God (and Jobs) is in the details

God is in the details and the devil should pay heed. While Steve Jobs is NOT God, he has been as meticulous about the details and was a god to many who have been converted by his incredible vision.

I count myself as one of those converts. Which is why I chose to reproduce a blog post from the Cult of Mac site that had a short anecdote to the kind of man Apple had at its helm.

Click here to read the original post, or keep reading to see it here:

How to peel that banana?

Who'd have known that “peeling the banana” ain't just no euphemism but an actual art that could be mastered?

It all started with my image search for yesterday's blog post (in which I used “peeling a banana” as potential euphemism for something more sinister. Click here to read the blog post) when I came across an image on google on peeling a banana.

I clicked on the image that I liked and found it embedded a post in another blog (entitled “Watch people jump”). The post was on how to peel a banana efficiently. The post even had a youtube clip (see below) that explained how to do it.

But before you click on the video below, ask yourself one question. Who would you associate most with a stereotypical love for bananas? If you answered apes or monkeys you be right on the button (however, if you didn't answer that way, what's wrong with you?!).

Perception error: Just because the brain says so

One of the first senses we learn to trust completely as a child is 'sight' – the most duplicitous of the five senses, because it is the one that we find the hardest to discount.

After all, when we 'see' something right in front of us how can we discount it as not true?

What we see vs. what is
(Image from blog: Tao News)

Yet sight, unlike all the other senses, is strongly driven by one's perceptions and so can be biased by what one wants to see – physically and meta-physically speaking.

We are all conditioned by our environment and our internal coding – and it is this coding that triggers our reactions to the stimuli in question. How we see something is already embedded in our circuitry – programmed by our environment and/or our influences.

A baby is not born racist for example, but is conditioned through experiences and, often, encouragement of sweeping generalisations. Blind faith in what's true for the goose must be true for the gander will make (and has made) philistines of us all...

But only if we let it.

I will be the first to admit that I can be weak (yes, it is true) but it only through realisation of where one's weakness lies can the inadequacy be addressed and strengthened. The trick is to be honest to yourself and recognise the weakness as just that... a weakness, something that can be and needs to be addressed.

We all wallow in some form of denial or other at some point of our lives. Some wallow in it for so long that they start to believe their own prejudices. This happens when we least expect it – conformity sets in within a collective and a false sense of comfort is nurtured.

Thankfully every collective has a proverbial pebble in the shoe – some pick out the pebble and leave it behind (i.e. address it) while others painfully suffer the angst, hoping that it will go away; it doesn't. What it eventually does though, given time, is convince the collective that all shoes pinch.

Just like everything is taken at face value, again nothing is ever what it seems. It is imperative that we realise it sooner than later. And while generalisations could be a good guide for the first steps on this unsteady journey, it should never ever be allowed to be a thumb rule that governs our lives anymore.

The journey to recapture the truth (to finally 'see' things as they are) and recalibrate one's perception errors is fraught with difficult attitudinal adjustments. There are are great rewards at the end but so too are there discomforts on the way. Having said that, man is a creature of comfort and what can be more comfortable than conformity and just taking things as they come.

Perhaps 'seeing' is too over-rated to need correction for, and life is better lived through the rose-coloured tints of collective conformity. Maybe after all this, it's not “us” who have a attitude problem, but “them” who have a perception problem.