Whenever I see a phrase that resonates with me, I look for its source. My curiosity gets the best of me, and I’ll often buy a book because I saw a really great line attributed to it. 

“A change of perspective is worth 80 IQ points,” is one of these lines, and it’s attributed to Alan Kay. (Alan is best known for working on one of the first user interfaces—the one at Xerox PARC, which inspired Apple’s and eventually Microsoft’s desktop interfaces.)

When I dug in to find out what Alan might’ve meant when he said it, I came across this post on Quora—from Alan himself. He writes this introduction that resonated just as much:

Proverbs are very short stories, and as such they are much more memorable than careful descriptive and expositional paragraphs.

A proverb at its best is actually a commercial for quite a bit more pondering. Many of them — including this one — can include themselves as subjects.

I’m glad that he wrote it, because I can’t say I fully grokked the rest of his explanation. It did all serve as very fertile ground for more pondering though.

A good proverb is just like good art. It asks you, “What do you see?”