I’ve heard this sentence used many times, especially in art classes. Draw what you see, not what you know. If you ask most people to draw an eye they’ll draw a rugby ball shape with a circle in it – a conceptual model of an eye. However, if you look closely at an eye you’ll realise that the idea people hold of an eye is a simplified model of what an eye actually looks like. To draw what you see, not what you know reminds an artist to forget the oversimplified conception of what an object looks like and to really look at what is in front of them.
‘The map is not the territory’
A phrase coined by philosopher and engineer, Alfred Korzybski basically means the same thing. It reminds us that the concepts we hold in our heads are poor reproductions of the reality around us. I’ve heard and read these sentences many times, but it recently struck me what this really means. It means our brains are unreliable, subversive and lazy.
Our brains will always push us to what is easy, to the concept, the shortcut, the heuristic and our brans do so without us realising it. It takes effort to be in the moment, to see what is in front of us and to deal with the reality of what we face. Our minds will try to convince us that what we know is a proxy for what we’re dealing with force us to implement old concepts and solutions to new situations.
You never step in the same river twice (thank you Heraclitus), which means nothing you’ve done before is exactly the same as what you face now. Everything is new, we are all novices from one moment to the next. Stay humble, make the effort to learn anew. Just because something worked once doesn’t mean it will work again.