When I hear the claim “perception is reality” I shudder. In one sense it’s, true but it can mislead us as well. When we begin our awareness of “reality” we begin with our senses like sight, touch etc. The problem is our senses are not how we know the difference between what is real and what is not real. Our recurring experiences and our recurring intentions teach us what we “know” about reality. What this means is that people that can produce their intentions recurrently and on demand are said to be “knowledgeable”. People that fail recurrently have knowledge gaps of what is real, or what is necessary to effectively cope with reality. 
So back to our senses fooling us… When we see something, we are simply translating what our eyes are perturbed with (light) and what our existing knowledge tells us this “reflecting light” is. If we are ignorant of the object we are seeing, then we can only report to be seeing a “thing.”
If we are driving down the road at a high rate of speed and something appears in the road (reflecting light again) we need to take action to avoid hitting this thing. Our knowledge of what exactly it is, may not be necessary to avoid the pain it presents. But what if the “thing” is actually just a thermal mirage created by the rising heat from the asphalt rather than a “real” thing? If we know what this is specifically then we are able to ignore it because it poses no threat. However, if we are ignorant of mirages we may swerve or slam on our breaks. These are then considered wasted actions caused by lack of knowledge.
In business, the more knowledge we have, the more effectively, strategically and competitively we can cope with reality. This article was intended to mobilize you into producing ethics of continuous learning. We at JENCO have regular workshops aimed at business professionals that want to cope with reality effectively for their career and businesses. We are looking for more people to engage in our continuous learning culture. If you are a vendor, subcontractor or customer of JENCO we’d love for you to let us know if you’d like to be invited to our workshops. Please reach out to myself or Jen Meacham to express your interest.