What a telescope taught me about perspective
When I was nine, I got a small red telescope for Christmas. I wanted to track Halley’s Comet. What I got instead was my first lesson in how badly perspective can lie.
Through that telescope, Saturn stopped being a bright dot and became a ringed planet. The moon dominated the sky—brightest, biggest, undeniable. Except it wasn’t. The moon has no light of its own. It only looks larger and brighter because it’s closer. The dimmest star is millions of times more powerful; distance just fools the eye.
I learned early: size, brightness, and importance are often tricks of proximity.
Thirty years later, I was a struggling freelance copywriter, staring at the same moon at midnight, convinced my problems were too big to solve. I made endless lists of strengths, client wins, and possible topics. Nothing clicked. The next day I walked by the river and stopped thinking about the problem. When I came home and flipped through those lists, three words jumped out from different pages: lawyer, lead magnet, premium.
In that moment I saw the strategy that would carry me for a decade—specializing in lead magnets for lawyers. The answer had been sitting there the whole time. I just couldn’t see it while I was pressed up against the glass.
Another decade later, AI had scrambled everything again. Revenue down. Imposter syndrome loud. I remembered the moon. This time I didn’t make lists. I stepped away completely for two weeks—bare-minimum work, zero problem-solving. On the twelfth day the answer arrived: my systems were built for freelancing, not for being an author and poet-cartoonist. The pieces already existed. They just weren’t arranged right.
Same pattern. Same lesson.
Get too close, and the problem fills the entire field of view. Back up—walk, rest, do nothing useful for a while—and the real scale appears. The moon isn’t bigger than the stars. Your problem isn’t bigger than your capacity.
I’m fifty now. I own a better telescope. I still look up and remember how easy it is to be fooled by nearness. Halley’s Comet returns in thirty-five years. This time I’ll be ready.
Sometimes the smartest move is to stop staring at the problem and change the distance.