It ain’t what you don’t know that will hurt you. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.

Do the details guide you in distinguishing reality versus perception … or a difference in perception? Should they?

Let’s define each term to be sure we are on the same page. Perception is how you see things. Reality is how things really are.

An important difference to you? To us, the answer is yes.

A short story to illustrate:

A heart surgeon took his car to his local garage for a regular service, where he usually exchanged a little friendly banter with the owner, a very skilled but not especially wealthy mechanic.

“So tell me,” says the mechanic, “I’ve been wondering about what we both do for a living, and how much more you get paid than me…”

“Yes?” says the surgeon.

“Well look at this,” says the mechanic, as he worked on a big complicated BMW engine, “I check how it’s running, open it up, fix the valves, and put it all back together so it works good as new. We basically do the same job, don’t we? And yet you are paid ten times what I am — how do you explain that?”

The surgeon thought for a moment, and smiling gently, replied quietly to the mechanic,

“Try it with the engine running.”

A very subtle but significant difference between perception and reality in this story, no?

Related: A Story About Living as Told by a Six Year Old Boy About His Dog