People tend to create anchors to quickly understand and explain concepts. And we use reference points and patterns to easily relate things to one another.
If you look a little bit like Paul Rudd, they may describe you as…
“Oh you know Jack. Kind of short, looks like Paul Rudd?”
This is true for any axis. If you’re known as dishonest…
“Oh you know Jack. Kind of short, totally fully of shit?”
Or if you’re an expert in blockchain technology…
“Oh you know Jack, kind of short, knows everything about Bitcoin?”
Whether you like it or not, you are being defined by small boxes that you may not agree with. It’s just short hand for us to use the technology of language to communicate faster.
The opportunity is in creating your own box. We don’t necessarily like using the creativity necessary to define a box ourselves, but we’ll do it if we are missing it upon memory recall.
If you create your own box, and you share that box with other people to put into their recall banks, they will more than likely use the box YOU defined.