What do you think?
Opinion: I think this shade of blue best fits our brand.
Agreement: We’ve all decided to go with this shade of blue.
Fact: This is one of many shades of blue.
Objectivity is not nearly as common as we’d like to believe. If you really analyzed your day-to-day experience, you might notice how many opinions are thrown around under the guise of truth.
This is both the benefit and drawback of creative work. On the one hand you cannot be objectively right, and on the other hand you cannot be objectively wrong.
What do you see, and how does it make you feel?
When you create something for someone, what matters is how it makes them feel. What matters is whether or not they like it. What does not matter is whether or not it is factually correct as that is not an option.
This is easy to see when giving weight to a single individual’s opinion. Where things get tricky is when you have multiple people’s opinions in agreement. The greater the number of people in agreement about some thing, the more substantial that opinion feels. If everyone agrees, it must be true. It is presumably given more weight.
It is important to note nothing is necessarily any more true simply because more people agreed in their opinion.
Is this good?
What if I told you it’s a Picasso?
What if I told you it’s someone trying to paint in Picasso’s cubist style?
Does it change your opinion of the piece? Would it change the agreement among art critics? Can you make a factual statement about its quality?
How about this?
What does she see, and how does it make her feel?
Opinions, Agreements, and Facts
More often than not, we conflate our opinions with facts. We do this even more often when others agree with it.
It’s a trap of the human mind.
There’s nothing wrong with having opinions. There’s nothing wrong with seeking out agreement to move forward.
…just don’t pretend it’s fact.
