In civilizational issues you don't look at the tiny details as the debate. You have to look at the big picture!
I'll put it to you this way: I never, ever think about the things that I get involved with on a macro means-to-an-ends scale.
I never think about myself as an artist working in this time. I think about it in macro.
When we pull back and get, for a moment, the 'bird's eye' view of life, it reveals meanings that are ungraspable by the narrow focus of our usual worm's eye view
You know, when people look at a tree, they look at the leaves; they don't look at the spaces between the leaves. They're focused on the tree. I think there's an awareness of spaces or it wouldn't look like a tree to them.
I think at times, too many people focus on just little things and not focus on what the whole question and the whole answer is.
Unfortunately, historians have become so absorbed in detailed research that they have tended to neglect the job of building larger-scale maps of the past.
The way most people approach business - and the way they mostly teach in business school - involves the analytical mind. It divides it up and looks at parts in isolation.
We think in generalities, but we live in detail.
People don't look at the broader picture a lot of the time.
I'm looking to see what the bigger picture is.
That our world is so massive that it is completely out of our control, that we cannot possibly be as large as we feel.
I look at everything from 100,000 feet.
For some reason, I have a very strange conception of time. I am constantly hovering at some overview, more macro.
A lot of journalists help us to better understand the world by zooming out and sometimes zooming in on a really important case but sort of helping us to get a grasp of what are the structural forces that govern our lives and our societies and that is incredibly important.
Big History studies the history of everything, offering a way of making sense of our world and our role within it.
The proper way to understand any social system was to view it from above.
