The people who change the world are masters of this underrated virtue

The people who change the world are masters of this underrated virtueThe people who change the world are masters of this underrated virtueWhen Mark Miodownik welches a young man in 1985, he was stabbed with a razor by a mugger in the London tube.As he later filled out paperwork at the police station, he couldnt help staring at the razor blade on the policemans desk, and couldnt help noticing that it was made out of the same materie as the staple on the form he was signing.When he went home and ate dinner, he couldnt help noticing that the spoon in his mouth was made from the same stuff as well.Follow Ladders on FlipboardFollow Ladders magazines on Flipboard covering Happiness, Productivity, Job Satisfaction, Neuroscience, and moreHe asked, Why? Why can this stuff be so dangerous and yet benign?Why doesnt it taste like anything?And why doesnt the average person know anything about where it comes from?Miodowniks ability to obsess over tiny details, like the composition of the razor bla de that cut him, led him to become a renowned materials scientist and develop things like newjet engine alloys.He is what literary great Saul Bellow (and a host of psychologists and pundits after him) called a first-class noticer.Someone with a Holmesian ability to consciously observe details that others let pass by.And though its clich to point out that details often make the difference, in a geschftliches miteinander climate as hypercompetitive as urs, it doesnt hurt to remind ourselves how easy it is to underinvest in the small, but crucial.DFW put it wellwhen he saidThe most obvious, ubiquitous, important realities are often the ones that are the hardest to see and talk about. Stated as an English sentence, of course, this is just a banal platitude?- ?but the fact is that, in the day-to-day trenches of adult existence, banal platitudes can have life-or-death importance.When experts talk about first-class noticing, theyre talking about learning by observation, rather than instruc tion. As I write about inthis postabout Ben Franklins neurotic method for improving his writing, first-class noticers have historically experienced huge acceleration in skill mastery and industry conquest.As Ive been studying people who study details, I have found that great noticers are often systematic about making everyday observations more profitable.Here are a few ways they do itExpand YourFocusOne of the most interesting interviews Ive ever conducted was with a man named James Tanabe. When you hear Tanabes list of skills, he sounds like a savant business, badminton, guitar, theater, gymnastics, comedy writing, flute, etc.But his simple secret is he learns quickly hes really good at shining his mental punktlicht on non-obvious things that help his training.For example, when Tanabe was training to become a circus performer, he would spend hours practicing one-armed kralle balancing.This skill, he explained to me, normally takes about a year to master (to be able to balance for l ong periods without struggle).While his classmates repeated their hand balancing exercises over and over, James paid attention to what the expert balancers didI would notice that the people who really excelled tended to have an extremely calm disposition and almost seem to be somewhere else, Tanabe said. It was a meditative state, whereas the people who never really seemed to progress always had this kind of anxious energy, and they were treating it like it was a strength. Therein was the keyWhile novice students struggled to fight gravity, Tanabe observed the tiny differences between them and those whod mastered the skill.Learning a one-armed handstand has nothing to do with supporting your weight or balancing on your hand, he concluded. It is about finding body alignment and breathing.Tanabe imitated these experts and ended up mastering his hand balancing in less than half the time of his peers. The difference was that he expanded his focus beyond just the obvious, muscular skill of the activity he studied and noticed the tiny details that master hand balancers didoutsideof the main activity. He observed how they lived and breathed, not just how they balanced.Question The IncongruentMax Bazerman, in his bookThe Power of leidicing, points out that we humans are very good at ignoring important details that would make our lives inconvenient.Often this is more than rebellious teenager syndrome its subconscious.Madoff would have been caught many years earlier if those who should have noticed had acted on what they saw, Bazerman points out in a recent interview withFortune. But, too often, people do not see information that would cause short-term negative effects.Werehard-wired to be credulous. Thatswhy stories are so powerful, but its alsowhy skepticism is so important.The simple habit that can prevent us from being duped by Ponzi schemes and our own subconscious biases? Asking more (and better) questions?- ?especially about new or incongruent information.In his book, Bazerman tells the story of the time he and his wife and friends arrived at the Manchester airport and planned to take a taxi to the train station, and the train to London.He noticed a group of taxi drivers at the airport huddled together conversing.When Bazerman approached, a cabbie informed him that the trains were on strike, and offered to drive them all the way to London for 300 pounds.Bazermans companions prepared to accept the financial hit. But Bazerman was suspicious, so he ran back into the airport and asked the information booth if there was indeed a train strike.There was not.The cabbies were running a scam. That simple question saved Bazermans group a lot of money.The positive side of this coin is that those who notice the counter-intuitive are often able to seize an advantage. Entrepreneurs in every industry and era have noticed peculiarities and incongruences in markets and built businesses because they asked the questions that others didnt bother to follow up on .Notice Whats NotThereIn Sir Arthur Conan DoylesSilver Blaze, detective Sherlock Holmes unravels the mystery of horse-race sabotage and murder plot by noticing what other investigators did not what didnt happen.The victim, a horse trainer named John Straker, was found dead with a head wound in the stables, holding a bookies cravat, near the location of some recently injured sheep.Holmes noticed that nobody had heard the stable dog bark the night of the murder?- ?when allegedly the bookie had snuck in and murdered the man. Holmes determined from this that the dog must have known the late-night visitor well, which led him to discover that Straker had snuck in to sabotage a horse that was due to race and had been practicing by cutting sheep.In our work, simply asking the question, Whats missing? can help us focus our searchlights on crucial information.Noticing that the woods are quiet, or that someone who should be upset is not, etc., is a useful habit.Catalogue TheDetailsAs Iblogged a while ago about Ben Franklin, the painstaking deconstruction and reconstruction of master craftspeoples work can help us accelerate our learning.Indeed, it seems that the act of not just observing, but writing down all observations big and small, often leads to aha moments and the mastery of difference-making details.Ive become known among some of my friends for my neurotic spreadsheets. When Im working on a problem, or improving a skill, or writing a story, Ive made a habit of dumping qualitative observations of experts work into Excel columns and sifting and ranking them.This process of forced categorization helps me get beyond the obvious and pay attention to the little things that I might otherwise overlook. Ive used it to write better speeches, analyze book marketing campaigns, and so on.For example The other day, when I was concerned about some weird faces Id made in the photo line at a recent event, I made a neurotic spreadsheet of people who seemed to always look great in photos, and catalogued how they posed in their pictures, from eyebrows to head tilt to what they do with the corners of their mouths as theyre photographed umpteen times.(For the record, Ian Somerhalder has thisdown.)Its a frivolous example, but as much as nobody likes an accidental snaggletooth in a photo?- ?or a razor wound in the back?- ?Im convinced that its the habit that matters more than anything.Noticing the little things in life can help us conquer the big ones.If you liked this post, youll love my new book,Dream Teams. Why not say thank you by pre-ordering a copy???Ill send youthis giant pile of free extrasif you doShane Snow is the bestselling author of Dream Teams and a global keynote speaker on innovation, teamwork, and human behavior.You might also enjoyNew neuroscience reveals 4 rituals that will make you happyStrangers know your social class in the first seven words you say, study finds10 lessons from Benjamin Franklins daily schedule that will double your productivi tyThe worst mistakes you can make in an interview, according to 12 CEOs10 habits of mentally strong people