It’s not often that former astronauts will use cinematographic terms to describe their philosophies.

But that’s just what Ron Garan did in this Big Think video. Titled, “I went to space and discovered an enormous lie,” in it Ron describes the “Overview Effect” — the transformative cognitive shift reported by some while viewing the Earth from space.

He then reveals his philosophy and how living a dolly zoomed life helps him achieve it:

“One of the tools that we can use is a term that I borrowed from cinematography called a dolly zoom. And what a dolly zoom is, is where the camera is rolled back, or dollied back, at the same rate as the lens is zoomed in, and it was used in “Jaws” and “Vertigo” and many other films. And what the filmmakers use that technique for is to give altitude to a scene, and as the foreground stays the same and the background stretches. But we could also apply that term to the challenges that we face. If we dolly zoom a situation, that means that we zoom out to the widest geographical area we possibly can, ideally the entire planet, but as we zoom out to that big picture, we don’t lose focus on the worms-eye details on the ground. We don’t zoom out to the point where people become numbers on a spreadsheet or a workforce or a voting block or a consumer block. They maintain their value as valued members of our human society. There’s also a temporal aspect to this. We need to zoom out to the longest time frame possible, ideally multi-generational, but in the process, we can’t lose sight of the short term. The last part of a dolly zoom is to see things from different perspectives, and so we understand the depth of our problem, and that makes our solutions that much more lasting and that much more effective…. What I try and do is to live a constant dolly-zoomed life. I wake up every morning in my bed, but I also wake up on a planet.“

My take: As we start a new year, I love this perspective: Think Globally, Act Locally.