What you know determines what you see

A man takes his car in to a mechanic because of engine trouble. When the man looks at the engine, all he sees is a mass of metal, tubes and wires which don't really make a lot of sense. But the mechanic sees the distributor, carburettor, air filter and so on and also what role each of these plays and how they interact.

The difference is knowledge.

An amateur artist goes to draw something but what they end up drawing looks nothing like the subject. An experienced artist sees the differences in the play of light over the subject, the overlap of contours, and variations of size with distance, and as a result, in drawing what she knows to look for, she captures a much more accurate likeness of the subject.

The difference is knowledge.

Anything you learn will open your eyes to new distinctions and differences that you weren't aware of before. It is as if ignorance is a form of blindness.

When you are learning a new skill, it may at times seem like you are getting worse rather than better, you begin to notice more and more errors and if you aren't careful you may end up becoming discouraged. But the fact is that the errors were already there. It is only with the benefit of increased knowledge that you have gained the ability to detect them, and with that increased knowledge, the ability to correct them.

And this increased knowledge may also open your eyes to new possibilities that were previously beyond your conception and also lead you to aspire to more.

In Body Mind Mastery, Dan Millman tells the following story:

As my freshman on the Stanford gymnastics team became more aware of their errors, they would tell me in frustration how they "used to be better in high school" and were "going downhill." This concerned me -  until I saw films of them the year before, when it became obvious that they had improved radically. Now aware of their errors, they had raised their standards.

Sometimes we tend to think that learning is just putting information into our brains.

But it does so much more:

• it changes what we see,
• it changes our sensitivity to error,
• it changes our standards and
• it changes our sense of the possible and what we can aspire to.

Looked at in this way, learning the right thing in the right way can be life-changing.