“Take your boots off now, you’re 80 yards away,” I speak into the radio.

Josh is on the other side of a canyon trying to get within bow range of a bedded Coues deer. Killing one with his bow is the only dream I know he has. And now, he’s 80 yards away from making that dream a memory.

Josh kneels behind a stump, removes his boots and starts pointing his bow in different directions so I can help him get his bearings as to where the buck is located.

“I’m going to wait right here,” he says.

I’m watching this through my spotting scope, guiding him in. I know looking through a scope compresses everything, making my perception of his reality different from his experience of it. I say 80 yards because I know about and compensate for the compression.

A few moments later, the wind shifts on Josh. It’s now at his back. The buck winds him and blows out. Another failed stalk.

He gets on the radio to let me know that my “80 yards” was more like 40. He was within range the entire time after all. My instructions were incorrect, and the misinformation cost him an opportunity.

I periodically read through a book series called The Great Mental Models. It takes scientific principles and creates metaphors that apply to other aspects of life.

I relate to this. Right after college, I went on a date with a girl named Melanie. I took her to watch Macbeth at a theater in Phoenix. During the show, I leaned over to whisper something to her. As I did, she turned toward me and our lips almost touched. It made me nervous, and I felt something in the air between us. It was like an energy moving between her lips and mine. I called it electricity—because that energy in the air was like the flow of electrons. Of course it was all metaphorical, but the model was there. I’ve since used principles like quantum entanglement and others to create additional metaphors.

The first mental model in this book is about relativity. Einstein’s theory of relativity changed our understanding of space and time. Here’s how.

Imagine a train moving at constant speed along a straight track. Two lightning bolts strike the track – one at the front and one at the back of the train. Two people see the lightning strikes, one in the middle of the moving train, and another standing on a platform as the train races by.

From the platform, the observer sees the lightning bolts strike at the same time. The light from each strike travels the same distance to reach him, so he concludes the strikes were simultaneous events. But the passenger on the train is moving toward the light from the front strike and away from the light of the rear strike. Since light travels at a constant speed regardless of the observer’s motion, the passenger sees the light from the front strike before seeing the light from the rear strike. He concludes the strikes were not simultaneous—the front strike happened first.

Both observers were correct.

Clearly, with Josh’s stalk, I was not correct. The deer was not 80 yards away. My experience with the flattening effect of telescopic optics made me overcompensate. The important thing here is to understand both your perception of reality and how that reality differs from an observer who may be guiding you in on a stalk.

This difference needs to be accounted for and is something you can practice and develop communication tools with your hunting buddies to address. Josh pointing the bow in different directions is one such tool. Another we could have used is to gauge the distance between him and the deer using another landmark that we could both see. He could range that landmark and communicate its distance. That information would have provided me data for better estimating the distance between him and the deer.

This model has broader implications for life. As humans, we rarely agree on exact specifics. Coming to an understanding with others involves knowing that our disagreements are often mere differences in perspectives, and sometimes those differences aren’t important. Wisdom is knowing when to insist on your perspective and when to allow someone to keep theirs.