Seeing The Broader Picture

Jeff
Former UN Sectretary-General Kofi Annan recalled that when he was in school in Ghana, the headmaster Francis Bartels had once “put a broad sheet of white paper on the wall, with a little black dot in the right-hand corner, and asked, ‘Boys, what do you see?’” The boys shouted in unison, “A black dot.”

Bartels then admonished them, “So not a single one of you saw the broad white sheet of paper. You only saw the black dot. This is the awful thing about human nature. People never see the goodness of things and the broader picture. Don’t go through life with that attitude.”


.
Jeff Stevenson
.