The Lens You're Looking Through: Your Myopic Little Mind Is Running Your Business

Your Myopic Little Mind Is Running Your Business… and perhaps your life

Did you know I photographed weddings for over a decade before I launched TBS? True story. I actually traveled the world and have photographed weddings in over 15 different countries, maybe 1000+ weddings and maybe three times that number of human stories I've told.

And before you picture some soft guy in a vest whispering "beautiful" at people holding hands near a fountain, let me be clear… it was one of the most demanding, read-the-room-or-someone-cries-and-it-is-your-fault experiences of my professional life.

High stakes/no retakes, brides with [too many] opinions, grooms sweating through jackets after too much whiskey, and mothers of brides who... ahem... also have too many opinions… and much more that I won't even get into.

I loved it… mostly.

But there is something about photography that nobody tells you when you are first starting out... standing in an open field at golden hour with eleven minutes of good light and a family of seven who cannot agree on where to look... the lens you reach for changes everything.

"Wide angle gives you the world. Telephoto gives you the moment. The mistake is thinking you only need one." ~Deevo

A wide angle lens captures context… think terrain, where the subject sits inside everything surrounding it, the full story of a moment, not just the centerpiece of it.

A telephoto pulls the subject toward you, fills the frame, sharpens the detail. Both are telling the truth. They are just telling completely different stories from the exact same focal point.

The mistake most photographers make early on, and I made it too, is defaulting to the telephoto for everything. Because it feels intentional, it feels like discipline, it feels like you know what you are doing, and for many shots it works, until you look back at an entire day of shooting and realize you captured a thousand beautiful details and almost none of the actual story.

What I did not fully understand then is that the telephoto does not just change what you see… it just makes you, well more myopic… literally. The longer you shoot that way, the more natural it feels, until pulling back starts to feel like the wrong move instead of the obvious one.

I think about this constantly now, when I am sitting across from the founders I work with, because what I keep seeing is myopia wearing a strategy costume... oohh that's a good one for my tees biz.

"The frame fills up with the urgent thing. The immediate thing. The metric that is up or down, the offer that is or is not working, the quarter, the campaign, the conversation that went sideways last Tuesday."

Someone who has been zoomed all the way in for so long that everything in the frame looks enormous, and everything feels like the whole story. Every tactical decision carries the weight of an existential one, and from inside that frame, the idea of pulling back feels like losing focus.

So they zoom in further...

And our minds do this naturally. We are wired for the immediate, the urgent, the thing right in front of us. Myopia is the default setting. Wide angle thinking is always a choice. It has to be practiced deliberately, because nothing about building something pushes you toward it on its own.

Here is what staying in the telephoto actually costs you over time. Your decisions get smaller. Your strategy gets reactive. You start solving the problem directly in front of you instead of the one that actually matters. And the business quietly drifts in a direction you never consciously chose, because you were too close to the frame to notice it moving.

Myopia is quiet like that, and it tends to compound.

The founders who build well over time are rarely the most talented or the most resourced. They are the ones who learned to switch lenses deliberately. To zoom out when every instinct is pushing them to zoom in. To hold the wide shot long enough to actually understand what they are looking at before they start making moves.

That is a discipline, and it is learnable.

"Almost every time, the thing someone asks me to fix is a symptom. The real conversation is one frame wider than where we started." ~Deevo

The wide angle is where the actual business lives. The positioning. The direction. The question of whether what you are building still fits who you are becoming. Most founders visit that frame twice a year, usually on a long flight or a slow Sunday with the game on in the background.

The work I do, more often than anything else, is hand someone a different lens and ask them to look at the same thing from further back.

Most of the time what they see surprises them.

Because the answer was there the whole time, they just needed a wider frame to find it.

If you are reading this and something in it feels familiar, reply and tell me what is filling your frame right now. That is almost always exactly where we start.

About Deevo

Deevo is a brand strategist, identity architect, and professional interrogator of other people's thinking. He founded The Brand Storyteller to help founders, executives, and ambitious builders figure out what they are actually building, articulate it clearly, and make the decisions that move it forward. He works privately with a small number of people at a time, which is either very exclusive or very antisocial depending on who you ask. He does not call himself a coach. If you have read this far you already know why.

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