What color is that dress Check your perception.

What color is that dress Check your perception. The Blue-Black / White-Gold Debate There is a debate  raging across the internet about the color of the dress in the photo to the right. Is it blue and black? Or white and gold? I read about this debate and was skeptical. Was this some big scam? When I look at the picture I see blue and black and cant imagine it would be anything else. I decided to test this proposition my self. I was surrounded by people this past weekend at a family event, so carried around my laptop asking my relatives what color they thought the dress was. Reality Check? Of my first three subjects, my mom  saw blue and black. So did my cousin  Michael. But my cousin Carol saw white and gold. The more people I asked, the more I realized that this  is for real. People see the colors in this dress differently and each person is completely convinced about the rightness of his or her view. My cousin Michael was an interesting case. I showed him the picture a second time in different lighting, and he saw it as white and gold. But a minute later, he was saying it was back to black and blue. He still insisted he was right and I was playing tricks on him with the lighting on my computer. Wow. Being Right Do you think you know things like what color that dress is? I know I do.  My brain does not even want to consider that someone else really and truly sees it as a different color. That  dress is  black and blue! But many people I know and trust were right there  saying  with complete conviction, White and gold. This reminds me of another exercise where one person is looking at a mug from the handle side, and another is looking from the non-handle side. To one person, there is no handle. To the other, its clearly a handled mug. Heres the rub:  Both people are right!! And they are both stuck in a perspective. The Gift of Perspective If we could get this about other issues religion, the cleanliness of our kitchens, what it means  to leave on time, [insert your  issue here], imagine how much better our relationships could be. Imagine how much less we would fight over the not-important things.  We could be curious instead of right. We could truly be over there with the people in our lives, listening to them  accurately. How does this principle apply to writing? Whatever we write, whether it’s a blog article, an e-mail message, a book, or a resume, one person might read it one way and another person might read it completely differently. The same resume can be loved by one hiring manager and hated by another. I notice it with my e-book too: People rate How to Write a KILLER LinkedIn Profile everywhere from 5 stars to 1. It’s rare to find any topic on which people agree 100%. If we can take that as a gift instead of as a point of contention, we can all grow and expand as we explore each other’s perspectives. I challenge you to try this at home. Make someone right today who you are totally convinced is wrong. Who knows what might emerge from there?