The Same Story Can Mean Different Things to Different People
While reading Inside the Box today, I came across the story of Mendelev and how he discovered the periodic table. David talks about how, in a book about sleep, the author mentioned that when he slept, his unconscious mind made sense of all the facts and gave him the solution. Then, David says that’s not it. Mendelev had a book contract and he had to write about around 53 elements in a single volume, so he was trying to find a way to group the elements.
Of course, this in a book about constraints.
The realisation I had, while reading this, was life is like that elephant story, where a bunch of blind men are guessing that it’s a wall or the ears are like fans, and so on. Only the non-blind person can see that it is in-fact an elephant.
The same story or event can be interpreted in as many ways as you like. Whatever lesson you want to draw from it, you can.
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The concepts in this book, the stories, I have read them elsewhere, in different books. So you could say that there were not that many surprising stories. What kept happening, time and again is depending on context, the same story can mean different things to different people. There were many such stories, and many such thinkers and philosophers introduced throughout the book. Books and media that I have since added to my queue.