(*information obtained from the book “A More Beautiful Question”)

Deja Vu | is the feeling that one has lived through the present situation before. This is a French phrase that translates literally as “already seen”. 

Vuja De | is when you look at something familiar and suddenly see it fresh, like you never saw it before.

Bob Sutton, A Stanford University professor, argued that if we train ourselves to look at the world around us through a vuja de lens, it can open up a range of new possibilities; which brings up fresh questions to ask, ideas to pursue, challenges to tackle which were all previously unnoticed because they were camouflaged in overly familiar surroundings.

This way of thinking isn’t easy. It means thinking of things that are usually assumed to be negative as positive, and vice versa. It can mean reversing assumptions about cause and effect, or what matters most versus least. It means not traveling through life on auto-pilot.