The Eyes of the Other

Spoke recently at Harvard, ostensibly about marketing and brand strategy. Mid-presentation it dawned on me. That all the lessons of life, about everything from how to forge long lasting relationships to how to create a viable new product could be captured in one simple truth: you will accomplish more, faster if you look at the task through the eyes of the other. Sounds simple but our fragile psyches often blur that view and our subconscious desire to be right, to not be wrong, to protect ourselves, to just get our agenda done takes over. We look not through the eyes of our loved one, our child, our partner, our employee, our customer, our prospect, our friend, our enemy, but through our own. And the result is funnily enough what we would expect, not what we want.

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