What does it mean to be wrong? Specifically, what does it mean when our opinions are wrong? In today's episode, we're talking about the principle of perception. This is related to the previous episode of Developer Tea. I revealed to you all that I and many other people in my family and my close friends, we deal with anxiety issues. This has led me down a path to understanding cognitive behavioral therapy and similar subjects around mental health, but it also has helped me to understand what happens when I am wrong. Why is it that my perception and your perception can disagree? That's what we're talking about. On today's episode of Developer Tea, my name is Jonathan Cottrell. Thank you so much for listening to today's episode. I'm really excited to talk about this subject because, you know, perception is such a huge part of how we live our lives. If you take a random sampling of 100 people and you ask them how they see a particular event, a public event, you might get similar answers, but everyone's perception will be slightly different. Everyone's experience is slightly different. Even if they simply have a different physical location from another person, that changes their experience. So how does this affect our day-to-day work? How does a difference in perception, how can that affect our day-to-day work? And more importantly, how can we change so drastically our opinions from another person? How can they be so different from each other? We're going to talk about that in just a moment, right after we talk about today's incredible sponsor, the Dental. Linode. Linode has been sponsoring Developer Tea for quite a long time now, and we're so thankful that Linode has continued into 2018 to sponsor Developer Tea. You know, they're going to be a regular sponsor, and, you know, it takes time to get through all of the things that Linode provides because they really have such a long list of things they do. They are most well known for their Linux cloud service. You get Linux in the cloud. You get a Linux server and you can get one starting at $5 a month. That's a gigabyte of RAM for $5 a month. They have 10 data centers, so there's high availability. And they have hourly billing with a monthly cap on all of their plans and all of their add-on services, their backups, node balancers, and long view. And they have 24-7 friendly support. They even have phone support available. So if you want to actually talk directly to a human, you can do that. 24-7 support is kind of unheard of, right? Because having someone who can help you in the middle of the night on the weekend, that's a huge value add. They have native SSD storage, 40 gigabit internal networks, Intel E5 processors, and a lot more. And we've only scratched the surface on what Linode is providing. By the way, they're hiring. If you want to go and check out what it looks like to work at Linode, you can go to linode.com slash careers. But if you just want to become a Linode customer, or even if you just want to check Linode out, go and check it out by going to linode.com slash developer T. You'll get a $20 credit when you use the promo code developer T 2018. That's developer T 2018, all one word, at checkout. That's $20 worth of credit. That's four months of free service on that five gigabyte plan. You also get seven days money back guaranteed. Again, linode.com slash. Developer T. So we're talking about the differences in perception, the differences between one person and another, how that can affect perception. And there's a lot of theory that drives this discussion. And I'm going to present my personal understanding of a conglomeration of theories. And hopefully it'll be helpful to you. Of course, you should take the time to look into this yourself if you're interested. But there's a lot of things that affect perception. Perception is based on multiple factors. As we said in the previous episode, our perception is something that we create. We kind of build the world around us. And to kind of prove this idea, if you are looking at your computer screen, or maybe you're looking at your phone, or maybe you're in the gym and you're looking at the mirror, do you know what's around you? Could you explain everything that's around you? It's difficult. It's difficult to say exactly what is around us, especially when we're not paying detailed attention. And however, we do know the general shape of the room that we're in, for example, without having to look at it again. Part of the reason for this is because our perception is not limited to a single factor like vision. It's also limited to, or it's expounded on by, our memory. Our memory allows us to build up a picture of the world around us. Our memory. Our memories. Our experiences. And the fact that our memories are actually modified by memories before those. So our experiences continue to build on top of each other. And this is why we can have such varied perceptions. Our perceptions of the world around us. Our beliefs. Our thoughts. All of this is mixed together into a continuously evolving version of yourself. When you access the world around you, you're able to build on top of each other. When you access a memory, or when you create a new memory, it's built on top of all of those previous memories that you have. So this is why we have such different perceptions. This is why we have different tastes. Why we have widely varying ways of viewing the world around us. Widely varying beliefs. It all comes back to this very simple fact that each of us has an individual experience. And it's important for us to note this for a lot of reasons. The first reason is, because it helps us understand our own perceptions better. In other words, we can start looking at our own experiences and recognizing why, for example, we may have a particular thought. How we came about having a particular belief. Why we view somebody in a particular light. Why we avoid certain memories. Why we gravitate towards certain other memories. All of this we can, kind of begin to analyze from a distant perspective. And instead of saying that, you know, our taste is the gold standard, or our perception is the gold standard, we can start viewing our perception as one of many. And this allows us also to work better with other people. This is going to be incredibly important as you continue working as a developer, because the people around you are all going to have different perceptions. And it's important to know that, it's important that you recognize that your perception won't necessarily align with theirs. Thank you so much for listening to today's episode of Developer Tea. I'm very excited to have shared this episode with you. I'm looking forward to your comments and your discussion around this topic of perception. You know, the principle of perception is very simple. If we had to state it in a single sentence, it is, remember that your perception is not necessarily the same as someone else's. Remember, your perception is not necessarily the same as someone else's. Very simple. Thank you so much for listening. Thank you again to Linode for sponsoring today's episode of Developer Tea. With Linode, you can get started with $5 a month. You get four months for free, $20 worth of credit. Head over to linode.com slash developer tea. Use the code developertea2018 at checkout for that $20 worth of credit. Thank you so much for listening. And until next time, enjoy your tea. Thank you.