So said Obi Wan Kenobi to Luke Skywalker when Luke is having his first lightsaber lesson in Episode IV- A New Hope. 

Thing is, it’s not so much your eyes that can deceive you, it’s your mind! Our minds are programmed to look for meaningful patterns in a world full of randomness and to weave them into stories. The stories we tell ourselves are created from our memories. These stories shape our thoughts, behaviours and actions. Only problem is our memories though aren’t that reliable – they don’t provide us with picture-perfect records we think they do. We tend to forget both fine details and major life events, and craft stories to fill in what’s missing. This means that our stories may not always tally that well with the reality of what actually happened. 

The reality we experience is just a story that our brain tells us. Think about when as a child in your bedroom at night, you might mistake a teddy for a monster, and only when the light is turned on do you see it was a teddy all along. Or as an adult you mistake a bush for a shadowy human figure while walking alone at night. There are evolutionary biology reasons for this tendency as a means to keep us safe on the odd occasion it is actually dangerous.

Our brain also seeks to create a linear plot in our lives, ordering our memories into cause and effect sequences even when there was little / no relationship between the events. How many stories that we read about successful businesses or people seem like there was a clear, linear progress in their success, yet the reality was probably more a series of steps, forwards, backwards, sideways, adaptation to change, mistakes, learnings, which when we look backwards seem to fit into a tidy story.  

I love this quote from Steve Jobs, “You can’t connect the dots looking forward – you can only connect them looking backward. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.” 

Stories are how we connect those dots looking backwards. However, those same stories can be what hold us back, particularly when rigidly held. Building on Steve Jobs’s mantra of having trust, belief that the dots will somehow connect in the future is, we also have to loosen the hold of the stories of our past have on us so we can move forward.