Where the head goes, the body follows. Perception precedes action. Right action follows the right perspective.

Perspective has two definitions. Context: a sense of the larger picture of the world, not just what is immediately in front of us Framing: an individual’s unique way of looking at the world, a way that interprets its events

What we’re forgetting in that instance, as billionaire serial entrepreneur Richard Branson likes to say, is that “business opportunities are like buses; there’s always another coming around.” One meeting is nothing in a lifetime of meetings, one deal is just one deal. In fact, we may have actually dodged a bullet. The next opportunity might be

The right perspective has a strange way of cutting obstacles—and adversity—down to size.

The Greeks understood that we often choose the ominous explanation over the simple one, to our detriment. That we are scared of obstacles because our perspective is wrong—that a simple shift in perspective can change our reaction entirely. The task, as Pericles showed, is not to ignore fear but to explain it away. Take what you’re afraid of—when

Perspective is everything.

Epictetus told his students, when they’d quote some great thinker, to picture themselves observing the person having sex. It’s funny, you should try it the next time someone intimidates you or makes you feel insecure. See them in your mind, grunting, groaning, and awkward in their private life—just like the rest of us.

Perceptions are the problem. They give us the “information” that we don’t need, exactly at the moment when it would be far better to focus on what is immediately in front of us: the thrust of a sword, a crucial business negotiation, an opportunity, a flash of insight or anything else, for that matter. Everything about our animalistic brains tries

In our own lives, how many problems seem to come from applying judgments to things we don’t control, as though there were a way they were supposed to be? How often do we see what we think is there or should be there, instead of what actually is there? Having steadied ourselves and held back our emotions, we can see things as they really are. We can