What matters?

The big picture

Did you ever ask that question to yourself? I am not a psychologist and I do not pretend to be one, but luckily, thinking about these deep questions and finding their answers made me learn and realize so many aspects that could improve my life, making me a happier person and keeping me motivated on a daily basis. Now, just as God or the gods are the most credible psychologists in religious terms, I think I have become the most credible psychologist for myself and hopefully for those that I love and are a direct part of my life.

There is this wonderful TED talk called “How to tame your wandering mind” whose title is not so delightful as the content of it is. Unfortunately, not everyone might end up mindblown with the talk as I did. Yet, I highly recommend it to everyone. In this post, I want to share with you my vision on what matters and how not keeping track of that may challenge your quality of life.

From my understanding, I see two ways of looking at our daily lives: From the details, or from the big picture. When I had the capacity to look at my daily activities positioned in the big picture instead of looking at them from below and from the details, I realized that making changes in the details was never going to change the functionality of my life as a whole. This is exactly what the TED talk discusses about: where is our attention? Is it on the details? or is it on the big picture? Generally, when we pay attention to the details, we drown into our own furious sea, but if we pay attention to the big picture, we will always be able to control the details from the surface of the sea.

What is the big picture, and what are the details? Imagine you come home sad because your work didn’t come out well during the day, or you get stressed because your x plan did not turn out to be as effective as you thought. Even worse, your mind gets you into a moment of thinking and suddenly you feel that what you have been doing in the past couple of years is just going in circles around nothing? Those are the details. “I’m not learning anything with this”, “I’m not working with nice people”, “My plan is always crushing and I hate this feeling”, “I’m not making an impact with the job that I’m having now”, “I hate the people were I live”, “I ended up in a country that is shit and I hate their culture”, etc. All of those are the details.

We want to feel happier and more meaningful. Yet, we are now as a car without a motor and we are trying to make this machine work by putting fuel, changing the oil, syncronizing it … it’ll never start, will it?. If we have a car with a functional motor, tuning all the other details will get the car to work properly, NOT the other way around. If the car does not work properly even if we work out all of the details, that means that the motor needs assistance. We end up in those situations of frustration and sadness and we change a little thing here and there and yet we are not happy. Uhmmmm, why are we not happy? we wonder.

What does it matter to each of us? I gave it very thorough thinking. I took a notebook and pencil and started writing down ideas and depicting different scenarios until I got there. I wrote this other post in Spanish on that answer, which contains all the open-questions words in Spanish for those on their way with Spanish grammar. When I realized what mattered to me, and I could see my life from above instead of looking at it from below, I could get into tuning the other details, and now the whole engine of my car is just getting better and better.

What is your big picture?

Thanks for reading!

These words are dedicated to the person I love who is also part of my big picture and not my details. I am sitting right now in my office with a ton of work ahead of me, but I wanted to write this to give him also some inspiration for this week.