bite-sized ways to inspire your curiosity without requiring a huge time investment.
How to Be Observant
A few years ago I was invited to a formal dinner at an event in New York. The venue was a beautiful restaurant and after our meal the waiter came around to take our dessert orders from one of two set menu options. Less than 10 minutes later, a team of six people not including our waiter came and delivered all the desserts to our large table of 30 people, getting each order perfectly right without saying a word to anyone.
As they delivered the desserts, I started to wonder how that one waiter who took our orders had managed to relay all those choices perfectly to a team of six in such as short time?
By observing, I quickly figured out the simple trick our head waiter had used. If you had picked dessert option one, he had placed a dessert spoon above your plate. And if you picked option two, he had placed the spoon to the right of your plate.
So when that team of food runners came to the table, all they needed was the “code” to decipher the spoon positioning and they would be able to deliver the desserts perfectly. That little story of food delivery is a perfect example of why observation matters.
Being more observant means training yourself to see the details that most others often miss.
Perhaps you already knew that little spoon trick, but imagine you didn’t. Simply observing it could teach you something fascinating about the little processes that we rarely pay attention to that keep the world moving along. Of course understanding how dessert is delivered will hardly change your life, but imagine that moment multiplied by a hundred or a thousand.
Learning to be more observant isn’t just about seeing the big things. Instead, it is about training yourself to pay more attention to the little things too.
By simply choosing to observe, what can you see about a situation that no one else notices?
What can that teach you about people, processes and companies that you didn’t know before?
This is the power of making observation a habit.
REAL LIFE ADVICE (3 WAYS TO BE MORE OBSERVANT TODAY)
1 Explain the World to Children – If you are lucky enough to have children in your life, one of the best ways to train yourself to use observation more frequently is to get better about explaining the world around you to children. When my kids asked me recently why construction vehicles and traffic signs are orange but cars aren’t, it forced me to think about something I would otherwise have easily ignored, even if I didn’t have the perfect answer to the question.* * In case you were wondering, they are orange because testing shows that is the color most visible from the greatest distance. And cars aren’t because people care more about picking a color they like than optimizing their car for safety by making it orange.
2 Watch Processes in Action – Every situation is filled with processes, from how school buses drop off children at their stops to how coffee shops take and make orders every morning. When you look at these interactions, you’ll notice that very little happens by accident. Pay attention and ask yourself what does a typical interaction look like? How does it differ when it involves a “regular” versus a “newbie”? Seeing these patterns in regular everyday life can help you train yourself to use this observational skill in other situations as well.
3 Don’t Be Observationally Lazy – It is easy to go through the mundane moments of life glued to your smartphone. Aside from being really good at capturing our attention, they also keep us from seeing the world around us. Rather than switching to auto-pilot to navigate daily tasks like commuting or buying groceries, train yourself to put your phone down and choose to be observant instead.
WHAT TO READ
What Every Body Is Saying by Joe Navarro – If you need to learn the art of interpreting body language or detecting lies, a former FBI agent like Joe Navarro is probably the ideal teacher. In this best-selling book from 2008, Navarro shares some of his best lessons on how to spot “tells” in body language and use them to interpret human behavior. His work on situational awareness and teaching people how to be more observant to assess people and situations for danger and comfort is a book that should be on your reading list no matter what you do. It also happens to be a perfect supporting book to teach you how to be more observant.
How to Be Fickle
Being fickle may seem like a bad thing, but that isn’t always true.
When we hear the word, we tend to think of all the negative situations where we abandon people or ideas too quickly, but there is an upside to learning how to be purposefully fickle.
Being fickle means capturing ideas without needing to fully understand or analyze them in that same moment.
On the surface, this may seem counterintuitive. After all, when you find a great idea why wouldn’t you take the time to analyze it and develop a point of view? There are certainly many situations when you do this already.
But you probably never do the opposite. A part of becoming an idea curator is saving ideas for later digestion. Of course you can always think about them when you find them, but you don’t always need to.
For example, here are three interesting stories which I recently saw and saved:
Coca-Cola decided to disconnect voicemail for all employees at its corporate headquarters in Atlanta.
Richard Branson allows Virgin staff to take as much holiday as they want.
A Trader Joe’s employee gave a gift of flowers to a flustered mom of adopted kids who was leaving the store after an embarrassing toddler meltdown because the employee herself had been adopted and she just wanted to say thanks.
When I saved each of the stories above, I didn’t make the broader connection to tie them together. Only when I reviewed them at the end of the year while researching trends did I realize that each of these stories says something unique about the state of employee relationships with their employers and empowerment.
There was a theme, but it was only by setting those stories aside and choosing to analyze them later that I had enough perspective to see that connection. Being fickle isn’t about avoiding thought—it is about freeing yourself from the pressure to recognize connections immediately and make it easier to save an idea for later analysis.
REAL LIFE ADVICE (3 WAYS TO BE MORE FICKLE TODAY)
1 Save Ideas Offline – Thanks to wonderful productivity apps like Evernote and other smart technology solutions, there are many ways to save information digitally, but they can sometimes be lost in collections you never return to and the connections between them are hard to visualize. Instead, I routinely print articles, rip stories out of magazines and put them into a single trend folder which sits on my desk. Saving ideas offline allows me to physically spread them out later to analyze more easily.
2 Use a Timer – If given the chance, most of us will naturally take the time to analyze something that we see or find in a moment. Being fickle is partially about intentionally delaying that process and using a timer can help. The
