On an oppressively hot day about seventeen years ago, Annetta (my best friend), Scoutt (my now husband), and I squished our sweaty bodies into the back of a tuk-tuk and dumped down a dirt road to see yet another old temple somewhere outside of Siem Reap.
The air was thick with the kind of humidity that makes you beg for rain. No amount of folding ourselves into funny shapes kept all three of us in the shade of the tuk-tuk, away from the brutal sun. It was day two of a four-day tour, an exploration of the temples of Angkor Wat and the surrounding complexes. All three of us with a love for cultures. Annetta and I exceedingly nerdy, with a penchant for old things, temples, and civilizations that have slipped away from time.
And still, on day two, seeing temple after temple, listening to our diligent guide Mr. Tong spout facts, years, and names of kings, we were done. We did not want to see another old temple.
This wasn’t the first time we’d had this experience. Traveling in Europe together, the three of us had gotten to the point where vetoing the next cathedral in favor of a glass of wine at a street-side cafe was popular. But it wasn’t likely we were coming back to Cambodia. This was, in our minds, a once-in-a-lifetime trip, and we’d signed up for four days. Halfway through, we wanted no more of it.
That night we got back to our hotel and immediately plunged into the pool. On a lounger, we found a book. A manuscript, in fact, its margins filled with hand written edits we could only assume were the author’s.
The book was about this temple complex. Not facts and figures, not dates, but the real human stories behind the rather remarkable fact that a thousand years after these temples had been built and lived in, we could still see them. The human and political stories of how they still remain. We sat reading it, passing the book around as we cooled down, drank cocktails, and had dinner.
That night we set our alarms for 4am. We were excited to see the sunrise over some of the less restored temples miles outside the city.
When we got there, we were filled with renewed vigor. We could see where the faces of sculptures had been scraped off, and we knew the immense amount of work that had gone into saving these temples from looters during the Cambodian Civil War. The pride of the Cambodian people who kept them intact under extremely hard circumstances. We knew about the multi-country efforts to save these temples, to bring them back from the brink after the war was over.
Because of that book, we saw them differently.
We had always known that context mattered, when traveling, when looking at old buildings and odd things. But this trip to Cambodia solidified something: a very specific lens, a deep context in one direction or another, could fundamentally change how we saw something. How we experienced it. How slow we were willing to go. How much heat and humidity and long bumpy dirt roads we were willing to brave.
It changed the way we thought about context. Annetta and I began to think about what we needed to share in order to get people to engage deeply with history. We began to call it “the lens”.
It’s something I still use seventeen years later in my work. I talk about the lens when you’re giving a talk. I have my clients make sure they’re sharing a very specific lens, that makes their audience perk up, because it’s a new way of thinking about something. A new perspective. A different take. A detailed orientation. Something out of the ordinary. A new way to focus.
The lens is your unignorable perspective. It’s the angle only you could bring, built out of something you obsessed over, or failed at, or noticed the room walking straight past. Everyone in that room can see the same problem. The lens is what you see inside it that they don’t. It’s the reason your solution stops sounding like a pitch and starts sounding inevitable.
You don’t build a lens by brainstorming a tagline or mimicking a meme. You build it by going back to the moment that forever changed how you saw something, then asking what shifted and why it’s unique. If someone leaves your talk thinking, “I’ve never seen it that way, but now I can’t unsee it,” the lens is doing its job. If they nod along and forget it by lunch, it was never a lens. It was just another POV LinkedIn post, dressed up to look like one.
The lens is specific to you.
It’s going to change the way your audience experiences your talk, your technology, your company.
That lens is critical.