External Perspective Quotes

Men are always optimists when they look inwards, and pessimists when they look round them.

O, wad some Power the giftie gie us To see oursels as others see us! It wad frae monie a blunder free us, An' foolish notion.

When I started in WWE, I was a 24-year-old kid and it was all kind of a whirlwind. I never had the chance to step back and look at it from the outside and assess things from a different level.

It's important to have people around who love themselves, are true to themselves, who have their own hobbies and their world doesn't revolve around Hollywood. I can always go to my family with any doubts or questions I may have.

What other people think is their problem.

It's an odd experience reading interviews with yourself. Interesting, though. Of course, you know that the journalist will have edited, rephrased or even rewritten what you actually said, but you can't help feeling that there's a special kind of truth in the way someone else paints you, however subjective they might be.

I even found it difficult to watch myself playing on TV because I couldn't identify with the person on the screen. I couldn't get to grips with it. It was as if it was all happening to someone else.

People had a habit of looking at me as if I were some kind of mirror instead of a person.

You have the management team, coaching staff, film staff, analytics team, training staff and playing team, and you're trying to manage all that and it's overwhelming. And then you have the media responsibilities. I don't know that I help at all, but I would think my value would be to help provide more of a clear-headed view from the outside. It's not like I have huge opinions, but I do have my point of view and perspective.

Another effective [debugging] technique is to explain your code to someone else. This will often cause you to explain the bug to yourself. Sometimes it takes no more than a few sentences, followed by an embarrassed "Never mind, I see what's wrong. Sorry to bother you." This works remarkably well; you can even use non-programmers as listeners. One university computer center kept a teddy bear near the help desk. Students with mysterious bugs were required to explain them to the bear before they could speak to a human counselor.

There are always more smart people outside your company than within it.

Traveling is one of few zones of experience where you are not directly plugged into the world around you. You're not part of the society you're passing through.

Boredom is just the reverse side of fascination: both depend on being outside rather than inside a situation, and one leads to the other.

Since it is the Other within us who is old, it is natural that the revelation of our age should come to us from outside --from others. We do not accept it willingly.

The judgments our enemies make about us come nearer to the truth than those we make about ourselves.

I like what a third man brings. A kind of oblique vision, seeing something in the material that you didn't know was there. As a comedian, I'm always listening to the audience. And in movies, sometimes the only audience you have is the producer and the director. I like having someone else's opinion, especially if you're on the same wavelength.

The best time to tell your story is when you have to tell your story. When it's not really a choice. But then, when you get that first, messy, complicated version down, you have to read it over and be very tough on yourself and ask, 'Well what's the story here?' If you're lucky enough to have someone you trust looking over your shoulder, he or she can help you if [you] lack perspective on your own story.

Working with some outside consultants or people that really can bring you an external perspective or a benchmarking to identify opportunities is a really good way to work.

Maybe other people's ideas of us are truer than our own.

Anyone who attempts to relate his life loses himself in the immediate. One can only speak of another.

I don't love the word "quirky." I think it's a word that's a catchall. It's a word that doesn't stand in empathy with the person, it stands in judgment of them. It's a very externalized word.

Actors are not always the best judges. We have a peculiar idea of what we think we are, and sometimes it's best left to others to decide what we play.

It's part of improving every day, being willing to be receptive of the people who know and see things from the outside that you might not notice in the inside.

It's way easier to write for other people. Yourself isn't in it. When you write for yourself, you overthink, and you become paranoid. When you write for others, it isn't about you.