Developing a Noticing Habit

We take in a lot of information about the world around us, but we don’t pay much attention to any of it. The things we perceive have a way of passing through the background of our minds, just beneath the threshold of our awareness. I’m sure there’s a good reason for us to have this filter. It’s not hard to imagine that it would be overwhelming to notice and react to everything we sense in the world around us, so we have to get good at picking and choosing the things that really deserve our attention. It’s probably a matter of survival.

I do think there’s an advantage to teaching oneself to notice more, though. In the book Team of Rivals, Doris Kearns Goodwin describes a letter that Salmon P. Chase, Lincoln’s Secretary of the Treasury and future Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, wrote to his daughter. In the letter, Chase encourages his daughter to develop a "noticing habit" to improve her writing and conversational skill, and this idea stuck with me. It was the first time I’d considered that a sort of curiosity about the world could be developed, and even deliberately practiced.

The idea is that you can get better at noticing things about the world around you, and doing so will make you a better writer and conversationalist. Something about this seems intuitive true. If you look at comedy, it does seem like something that makes good comedy stand out is the ability of the comedian to make clever observations about ordinary things that most people have overlooked. If you can train yourself to notice more of these things, you’ll have more interesting things to talk and write about. Your perspective will be fresher.

I was thinking that a good way to practice your own "noticing habit" would be to write about the world around you. For example, you could pick out any object in the room with you and try to write a couple paragraphs about it. If you really force yourself to find things to write about, you’ll start to notice things about the object that usually pass beneath your threshold of awareness. And you don’t have to stop at making detailed observations. You can start to draw connections to other objects and ideas in the world too. What does this particular characteristic of this particular object remind you of in the world? What else is like this object, and what is not like it at all? Is there anything unusual about it?

This sort of exercise can help you develop unique perspectives, but it can also help you think more critically about the world around you. If you adopt a curious line of questioning about any article you read, or news story you watch, you can start to uncover things about it that help you place it in the proper context. You can think about who the author is, what they believe in, and how and why they’re slanting the writing in a particular way.

I feel like it’s common to gatekeep curiosity by describing it as something a person is blessed with. You’re either born that way or you’re not. That kind of attitude is unhelpful because curiosity, and noticing, are things that any person can practice and get better at, and it’s worth doing so. Start paying more attention to the world around you and drawing connections between things, and you’ll be on the path to developing your own noticing habit.