#541： The Art of Noticing
Episode Stats
Summary
Rob Walker argues that tuning into things normally overlooked not only provides fodder for art and business, but can make life seem more vibrant and engaging. In this episode of the Art of Manliness podcast, my guest today wrote a book that aims to help us recapture the keen use of our senses. His name is Rob Walker, and he s the author of the book, The Art of Noticening.
Transcript
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brett mckay here and welcome to another edition of the art of manliness podcast quick
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name the president who's on the dime or think about the letters and numbers on your license
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plate were you stumped for a moment that's the strange thing about the powers of observation
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we can look at something a thousand times and never really notice it our struggle to notice
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what's around us is even worse in our smartphone age where we often have tunnel vision that limits
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itself to a little handheld screen my guest today wrote a book that aims to help us recapture the
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keen use of our senses his name is rob walker and he's the author of the art of noticing and he argues
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that tuning into things normally overlooked not only provides fodder for art and business but can
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make life seem more vibrant and engaging rob and i begin our conversation discussing what it means
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to notice and the benefits that come from noticing we then spend the rest of the conversation walking
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through several exercises you can start doing today to strengthen your noticing muscles including
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creating observational scavenger hunts and collections rob also suggests several ways to notice overlooked
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things at museums and while looking at the world like there's a dramatic heist about to go down
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cause you to notice more in your environment lots of great insights in the show after it's over
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check out our show notes at aom.is noticing rob joins me now via clearcast.io
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rob walker welcome to the show thanks so much for having me brad so you just published a book
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called the art of noticing 131 ways to spark creativity find inspiration and discover joy in
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every day so what got you noticing noticing well i guess a couple of things one of which is going to
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be pretty obvious i probably don't have to spend a lot of time discussing the idea that we're living
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in this you know information shoving economy of ideas where everyone's trying to get your attention
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we're in time of distraction and it's partly down to our phones and stuff like that but it's also just
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the nature of society now like everybody wants your attention all day long and it's hard to focus and
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to zone in on the things that you want to zone in on instead of other things so i felt that frustration
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too like a lot of people do i think but then related to that i teach a class a short class once a year
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at the school of visual arts a design class and one of my big themes is getting students to pay
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attention to things that other people have overlooked i think it's an important part of
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of the design process but of many processes right that's kind of the beginning of innovation and
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progress or whatever it's like noticing what others have overlooked and what i had noticed in students
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is that they often felt because of this kind of attention economy that we're in right now they would
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sometimes feel that like well if they were interested in something but no one else like it wasn't trending
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it wasn't hot it wasn't a topic of discussion that maybe it wasn't important you know and i thought that's
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a disastrous outcome like this is like you can't go through life just paying attention to what everyone else
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pays attention to and so i thought about this as a subject of a book and what happened was for a long time
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the idea was going to be a book that would kind of spend a lot of time explaining the problem and then have
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this section at the back with like here are some things you can do in your life add to your life to try
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to get your attention back try to get your you know focus back and i gradually finally realized that i was
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not really interested in explaining the problem because everybody already knew it i was just interested
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in the tips so the tips ended up sort of taking over the book so now it's a short introduction
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saying here's the problem and then as you said there's 131 my publisher doesn't like me to call them
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assignments but they're prompts or exercises or games or provocations to get you things you can add
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to your life and add to your kind of daily practice that will get you back to controlling your own
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attention at least from time to time you know just devoting a bit of your day or your week to these
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things and making them fun and getting some control back so okay but we won't talk about the problem
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because everyone knows there's a problem yeah but let's talk about like the benefits that come
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whenever you you experience that focus and that attention or when you notice things that people
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overlook i mean what what are the opportunities there and like how does noticing things that
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will get overlooked make us feel more human right so there's kind of a range of answers to that there's
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the and there's and different kinds of people respond to different ways of approaching this so
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on a very practical i think level there's almost no like there's a lot of artists in the book because
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artists are really good at noticing things and at drawing our attention to stuff that we had missed
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but it's also if you think about it that's what an entrepreneur does and that's what an inventor does and
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that's what a good manager does is notice things that other people overlooked and whether that's a problem
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that needs to be solved or whether that's something great that's overlooked that needs to be celebrated
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or whether it's something puzzling that needs to be explained and you know i mentioned design earlier
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that's what a designer does i remember meeting in the course of my work as a journalist interviewing
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johnny ive years and years ago the apple guy and the way he
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critiqued this was so long ago that i was using an analog tape recorder and the way that he sort of his
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comments about the way that that object was designed it was like this guy just sees the world
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in a different way like he picks up on details that the rest of us miss so there are these really
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practical reasons to work on these skills to sort of build the attention muscles but then at the other
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end of the spectrum i think just as important are this kind of softer side of it of you know just
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maintaining focus and maintaining a kind of control over your own engagement with the world being
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present sounds a little like meditation mindfulness stuff it kind of is and there's a reason that that
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mindfulness idea is so popular right now at the same time that we're trying to fend off
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all of these distractions is that it's a it's a it's a way of reconnecting with yourself of being
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really present with other people just very very practical day-to-day stuff that i feel like we
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all whether you're a manager or whether you're a parent sometimes we just need to be able to pull
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back disconnect from other people's attempts to control our attention and pay attention to what
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matters to us and kind of identify what matters to us so that we're paying attention to the right
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things and that feels good when you identify and you actually pay attention to the things you want
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to pay attention to like it just feels good or whenever you get that insight you figured out
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on your own without having to go to the internet to figure out like it just it's empowering it just
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feels awesome yeah i think so and i mean you know and it's it's obvious in some of the big ways but then
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there are at least small victories that you can have along this of just like i mean the most work
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a day things like just when you're walking the dog right i see people walking the dog and checking
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their phone and it's like why are you doing you know like don't you don't need to know what's
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trending on twitter right now be present in the world that you and your dog are occupying and maybe
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you'll notice i don't know pay attention i like to sort of try to figure out what my dog is paying
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attention to and he'll make me notice things like oh there's a bird over there that i wasn't tuned
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into and you know it just makes you feel like oh i'm here i'm not somewhere else i'm actually here
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so let's walk through some of these prompts you talk about in the book because as you said i think
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a lot of people this muscle of noticing is atrophied because we've had other we've had
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these external sources tell us what to pay attention to so it's it's helpful to have you
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know sort of a prompt to guide this as we you know strengthen that noticing muscle the first one you
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talk about is creating you know scavenger hunts for yourself what does that look like and how do you
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decide what to look for yeah this was my it's the first exercise in the book because it was
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sort of the gateway drug for me personally to think about this now it came from the example that i
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share in the book is that i was making a business trip to san francisco a city i've been to a number
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of times beautiful city but like i'd been there enough times that i you know i don't want to say
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i was over it but you know i was past that sort of crush phase that you have in a city that's that
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beautiful and i was going to be really busy i was going to be running around i did not have time to
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do any proper sightseeing so i wanted to give myself an assignment of something to look for
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everywhere i went and my only criteria and this is kind of important is that it had to be something
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that nobody else particularly wanted me to look at you know what i mean it wasn't like
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i wasn't responding to somebody else's prompt it was my prompt and so the thing i chose was security
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cameras which was a little bit arbitrary i wasn't like working on a project related to that or
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anything i just like security cameras and everywhere i went it really it really was an eye
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opener to see how pervasive they are and to see how they're treated differently there are some that are
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kind of flashy like they want to be noticed and then there are some that are kind of stealthily hidden
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that don't want to be noticed but it also shifts your gaze when you're looking at for something
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specific like that so you're kind of just looking around in a different way and you're kind of looking
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past the street advertisements and the people trying to get your attention and it was so much
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fun and i did end up writing about this later but it was so much fun that i i still to this day i look
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at security cameras everywhere i go but at the end of that trip i got to the airport and you know called
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my wife to say hey i'm planes on time whatever and like hey she knew i was doing this and then i was
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taking pictures and i said hey and you would not believe the security camera situation at the
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airport it's bananas and she said uh she said rob just please do me a favor and don't walk all
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around the airport taking pictures of all the security cameras which was good advice right no
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i've done the security camera i've done that too like i'll go into a store and just see how many
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security cameras i can find which is fun another one you know you suggest looking for abandoned pay
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phones which i've done as well and those are harder and harder to find well i think that that
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here's the interesting thing about that is that if they're hard to it's sort of it tells you
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something about the neighborhood you're in in some ways if there are a lot of abandoned pay phones
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around i like to look another one i like to look for is no loitering signs that's another tell as to
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if you're like there are certain neighborhoods where there will be a lot of no loitering signs and
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there are some neighborhoods where there won't be any so and i'd like to look for in the past i've looked
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for um neighborhood watch signs you know you know the neighborhood watch right with the sort of uh
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shady criminal guy right side eye and and uh when we live in savannah i used to protect georgia savannah
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georgia i used to particularly i got obsessed with ones that had been graffitied in some way
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because i just thought it was funny that if your neighborhood watch sign has been defaced like
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maybe you have a problem you don't have a neighborhood watch so you you talked about you
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started the security camera thing without any goal in mind but you said it later on it paid off because
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it gave you a story idea yeah i write a lot about design stuff and um so both neighborhood watch signs
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and security cameras when i i wrote a little bit about my experience for design observer and people
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sent me examples it turned out to be kind of an interesting design subject because there are places
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where there is actually in uh europe where they've actually given thought to what security cameras
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could look like because i think that the visual impact of a security camera right now is kind of
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negative when you see them it makes you tense so there are places where they've tried to sort of make
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them softer seeming and so anyway the point is that it became and this is i mean i'm a journalist
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and this is part of what a journalist does for a living too is try to pick up on things that uh are
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right in front of you but no one's paying attention to you know break from the quote-unquote pack
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or find the different spin on my favorite example this is jimmy breslin's when you know like everybody
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else he had to cover the kennedy funeral the jfk funeral in the 60s but he was the one who came up
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with the unique angle to write about the guy who dug the grave right so he spent the day with the guy
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who dug the grave and that's sort of thinking in a different way outside the pack and that that piece is
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considered a sort of classic of um of journalism so a similar exercise to the scavenger hunt is
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starting a collection but you suggest getting more conceptual than say i'm collecting in stamps or
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baseball cards what is your idea of a collection look like yeah well so i should credit here and i
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should i should say that once i once i got going on it you know i was explaining how i sort of headed
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off in this direction once i started thinking i want to make this about suggestions things people can do
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a lot of them i made up but then a lot of them came from reading and things other people had done
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and then i interviewed people and came up with ideas from them and then i got my students involved
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but so one that was inspired by someone else there's this guy george nelson who's a design furniture
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designer who wrote a book in the 70s called how to see but it wasn't really how to see it was really
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how he saw it was and it was essentially a collection of his of his of things he had noticed
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photography and stuff and he he was my inspiration for this one because he was a collector
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of of images of but images drawn from reality so he would just take pictures of like every arrow he
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could spot every clock every manhole cover you know certain geometric shapes and then he would get
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really interestingly conceptual of contrasts like hard and soft so a flag outside of a concrete building
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or whatever and i was just i love his inventiveness around this and you could almost pick anything
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right now i'm collecting as it were that the sort of structures at the top of i guess i guess their
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telephone i mean are they telephone poles or power poles they have these big rickety weird collections
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of hardware up there that i guess are running power i don't even know but this is it and it's this
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it's this kind of thing that we're trained not to pay attention to that we're trained to just zone
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out and look past and that's the kind of stuff i find it really fun and exciting to look at and
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then the birds that are up there stuff like that that's what i'm collecting right now so that's the
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that's the collection idea you can take pictures as he did and i know people who do this on instagram
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who take pictures of traffic cones or a friend of mine does close-ups of telephone poles which is
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really weird but they're fascinating and it's just a it's just a it's a different way of taking in the
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world yeah that's where that's a point where your your tool that is often the source of distraction
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can be a tool used to notice more so you might not have to take you know share on instagram but you
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just start your little collection yeah your little collection in your phone of your contrasts that you
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find yeah or you could not bother to take pictures that i mean i don't take pictures and i think that
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this is this is an important point to make actually because i think that sometimes there's certain kind
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of uh people who react to this stuff by by by thinking like oh okay so i need to make a dedicated
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instagram account about this and then if it's like no you really don't like everything doesn't have to
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be translated and in some ways there's a lot of reasons not to do that like don't don't automatically
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convert every personal looking project into something that gets subjected to the marketplace right
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where you have to start worrying about how many likes it's getting if that happens fine but i just
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think that there's a lot of it's not noticing and seeing and paying attention is a means to an end but
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it's also it can also be an end in itself like it's really satisfying to just learn to take enjoyment
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from the act so another noticing activity you recommend is looking slowly yeah what do you mean by that
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well so this is specifically sort of came out of the context of museums there's a there's actually a
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slow art day thing that happens every year but you could do it anytime and the the the basic premise of
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slow art day is that you get together with a group of people you go to the museum and instead of trying
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to you know you've been to museums and you've seen people spend i think that the average is eight
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seconds or something looking at any given painting and people are practically trying to like run to the
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museum so instead of doing that you just decide you're going to look at only five things
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for 10 minutes each and then afterward you get together and talk about what you looked at what you
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and what you took in so this is obviously a really different way of perception in general we're so used
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to trying to rack up as many you know visual experiences as we possibly can and i think people spend
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sometimes more time at museums reading a little placard next to the art as they do looking at the
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art so if you're if you force yourself to look at something for that long it does shift your perception
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and you you obviously start to notice things that you overlooked at first and maybe by the end of it
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you even have a completely different understanding of the piece that you were looking at so that's the
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essence of looking slowly and you you can do this not just with art but with other stuff i think you
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talked about some design teacher that would say tell the students like you have to look at this rock
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but for like an hour yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah or packaging or you know there's almost anything you
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can do this with there's a different exercise in the book about looking out the window which sounds
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like such a sort of i try to have a range of things that are really super easy to do like you you know
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the minute you pick up the book you can start participating in this but you could spend 10 minutes looking
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out a window that you've always walked past i mean think about that like in your life there's a
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window that you walk past all the time maybe you glance out to see if the you know the world is
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on fire but you don't really you couldn't really tell me anything about what's the view from that
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window and spend 10 minutes looking out a window and look at every edge of what you can perceive
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then do it again a week later and see what's changed you know so it's applicable in all kinds of
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contexts yeah thoreau did like looking slowly exercises he would just look at a plant or a bug
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for hours hours like like the entire day yeah and people are people are dismissive of that because
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it's like well you know there was nothing to do and now you can now you can play pokemon go or
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whatever and it's true we have more distractions at our fingertips but there are good reasons to
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sometimes say i don't need to do that like i want to i want to pick up on yeah looking at watch spend 10
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minutes watching a bug crawl you know kids do it and kids love it and there's something to be said
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for reconnecting with that childhood innocence and wonder and seeing the world no yeah that you talk
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about kids have a natural disposition to do that and i saw this firsthand we were in vacation
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on vacation in vermont and my daughter's five she we went to this river to go swim but she was like
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in the shallow section and she was there for probably a half hour on her hands and knees
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just looking because she was looking for rocks and she was looking for fish and she just sat there
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like for literally a half an hour yeah and it's also fun to see her because she has her own little
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collections she's got rock collections yeah and she's always on the lookout for loose change and she
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finds it all the time because she knows where to look like she goes to places where people
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overlook so we were at a ice cream store the other day and there was like a vending machine and so
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she like went underneath the vending machine and she pulled out all this change like oh look what i found
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that's great and it's great that you pick up on that you know and that you can i'm always telling
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people like that kids are good inspiration for this kind of thing and if you have access to a child
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you know take inspiration from like pay attention to what they're paying attention to because uh they
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don't have that jaded feeling of having seen it all before the world is full of wonder i saw bella used
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to talk about trying to view the world like an alien but kids for kids that comes naturally they sort of
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are aliens you know it's all novel to them so they get very excited about things and uh we shouldn't
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dismiss that we should embrace it and we should be jealous we're gonna take a quick break for your
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word from our sponsors and now back to the show so in museums there's a lot of exercises you provided
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and like the slow looking so just look at a painting for 10 minutes 30 minutes even if you're if you're
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feeling bold but the thing with museums though they're designed so that you pay attention to certain
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objects right like there's a light and the way that things are put on put on the wall or on a pedestal
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so what can we do in museums so we notice things that we're not supposed to notice yeah it's a really
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super interesting context because there's a lot of thought is put into making you pay attention to
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the right things and not you're not supposed to be looking at the guards you're not supposed to be
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you're not supposed to be noticing that like oh it's kind of dusty on this
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dream or whatever so in a nutshell it's basically try to pay attention to things that that you're
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not supposed to pay attention to so among the things i suggest are are in fact paying attention
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to the guards i often will ask a guard what their favorite piece is you know you don't want to hassle
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these people they're doing their job but they have a different relationship to this room full of art
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than you will ever have like they spend so much time there i think i like to encourage people to
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tune into objects that could be art and this is a little bit inspired by because that because those
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spaces are so charged with you know importance there have been a number of incidents there was one i
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think in san francisco where somebody left a pair of glasses on the floor and people started to just
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assume it was a piece there were people gathering around this pair of glasses and taking pictures of
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it so i like to say like look for things that aren't art but could be maybe the fire extinguisher
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maybe some security camera perhaps and then another one is people don't pay attention to this but
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you know when you're walking around a museum you're often walking into like the
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you know the rob walker wing of the uh thing like and but and it's a name that's not really familiar to
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you here's a place where your phone is actually maybe useful like go ahead and google who is who
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who is this person that this wing is named after and see if there were any interesting things about
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them or in the case of i actually got the chance to lead a museum walk in dallas it's dallas museum of
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art and we did this and there was this one collection of stuff that was displayed in a really idiosyncratic
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way and that's because this this donor who the wing was named after insisted on that format so it's
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kind of interesting you learn something that not that the museum was hiding that but that they weren't
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it doesn't get foregrounded so it gives you a completely different way of taking in the stuff
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that you're being asked to look at yeah i do that with the um looking at the plaques of like who who the
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donors were like at yeah yeah like even at schools you'll often see this find out who they were i
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like the idea of asking people at museums who you would not think to ask what their favorite piece of
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art where it was or is and the idea that just came was ask a janitor right because they're in there all
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the time and you typically though janitor doesn't have an opinion about art but no they probably have
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their favorite piece of art yeah for sure and you know and museums in general are you know they
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they want people to approach the work with different perspectives you know what i mean i think that
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they're thrilled to have that and that they would like to have they would like to have more people
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coming to the museum with a fresh or an open perspective that yeah like let the guard lead the tour
00:24:28.580
almost i think that they're open to that it's not an antagonistic thing i think that they're uh
00:24:36.040
they're into it because they are but it's it's an interesting environment because you you you have
00:24:42.040
this feeling that like you have to do it right and you don't have to do it right you can do it any way
00:24:46.520
you want so we've everyone's probably seen those photos of masses of people surrounding some famous
00:24:51.360
work of art like the mona lisa and they're snapping pics with their smartphone which i never understand
00:24:57.180
because it's like your pics gonna be really crappy but you recommend people don't take pictures at
00:25:02.640
art museums but rather draw art they see what why is that well so drawing and i cannot pretend that i
00:25:10.620
am the inventor of this idea but drawing in general is widely believed to i mean if you have to draw
00:25:18.800
something you look at it in a completely different way you're looking at details you're looking at
00:25:24.160
shape you're looking at form you're engaging with it whether that is drawing another artwork or whether
00:25:31.120
it's drawing i have suggestion in the book it's like draw everything draw everything on your desk
00:25:36.500
you know you can draw what you see out the window people's immediate reaction to this is always like
00:25:41.720
well i can't draw well you don't have to put these drawings on the internet just get yourself a
00:25:46.760
notebook a cheap notebook because the point isn't to show off the point is to work on your powers of
00:25:53.340
perception and just do one make a drawing don't worry about showing it to anyone and then the next day do
00:26:00.320
another one and then do another one and just have fun with it don't worry if you're making faithful
00:26:05.720
reproductions just think about how the act of drawing it forces you to slow down it forces you to pay
00:26:12.200
attention to detail it forces you to see and that's a really important exercise i try to make writers do it when i teach
00:26:19.500
a different sort of workshop about writing about objects and i encourage the participants in that to
00:26:25.080
spend time if you really want to learn how to describe something try drawing it and you'll force
00:26:31.180
yourself to perceive it in this much more detailed way so a lot of opportunities to flex those noticing
00:26:36.160
muscles at the museum or even it's just in noticing and drawing things on your own desk another game you
00:26:42.320
suggested for people to start noticing thing is if whatever situation you might be in say you're at a
00:26:46.760
restaurant is you look at all all the people involved who are there and ask yourself what would
00:26:51.920
be like uh what would be the plot of a high story in this situation so what does this exercise cause you
00:26:59.800
to notice that you overlook this is there's a couple people who i talked to for the book who i'm a big fan
00:27:06.880
of making up stories essentially about about people around you as a way to pass the time but i had dan
00:27:13.640
arieli the behavioral psychologists talk about looking at forces and jeff mannock the writer
00:27:18.540
talking about these kind of uh you know heist plots and disaster scenarios and stuff like this
00:27:24.640
and you know it's it's it's 50 50 it's 50 imagination and 50 observation and they fuel each other so
00:27:33.340
and seriously it is just a game but it's a more to me it's more fun than than checking instagram
00:27:39.620
to just speculate like okay what clues can i pick up on what do i think this person like who's the
00:27:45.640
most likely you know bad guy or whatever you want to say in there and then it makes you look at like
00:27:51.520
what are my escape routes how is this room really designed why are these tables so close together
00:27:56.260
how do i route around there's a another thing in the book about this friend of mine who is always
00:28:02.180
looking for the quickest way out of a party because he hates parties and it just uh it gives you a
00:28:08.780
little reset a different way of looking at it i find this comes in super handy and you know you
00:28:12.960
mentioned different scenarios but i like it when i'm stuck in line you know the security line at the
00:28:18.340
airport great place to start making up stories about in your head about who's who's going to do what
00:28:25.460
who's going to be the hero who's going to be the problem yeah because you have to look at the people
00:28:28.540
their body language uh so one guy might look like he's in a rush or he's nervous and you look at what
00:28:32.940
they're carrying like why are they carrying that you know why are they wearing that t-shirt are these
00:28:36.980
people together are they right together yeah who are they like maybe these other it's like oh i bet
00:28:42.480
this person and this other person who are like 10 10 people apart they're actually in league you know
00:28:47.360
it's fun it's just fun now you know obviously i should just put in the caveat that like
00:28:51.140
be discreet and sane about all this right yeah well you can just do it in your head you don't have to
00:28:56.840
like narrate it out loud it in your head you're making you're making time go by well i say similar
00:29:01.720
to this we've had a lot of self-defense experts come on the show and they talk about situational
00:29:06.780
awareness where you're in a room where you're in a building the first thing you do is you figure out
00:29:11.340
or decide or observe where all the exits are at right yeah even the exits you might not notice
00:29:17.400
because people forget like say you're a grocery store there's exits in the back right where it says
00:29:22.100
employees only and you got to think about that because people overlook that yeah it is it's
00:29:27.420
absolutely a form of situational awareness which i associate with and i'm sure do you know that book
00:29:32.260
left of bang yeah yeah we've we've had them on the podcast yeah i was gonna say and so so but this is a
00:29:37.320
sort of situational awareness light like it's not um you're not sort of in the mindset but that's a
00:29:43.460
fine mindset to be in if you're just you know you're just using it to pass the time you're not being
00:29:48.100
paranoid or whatever it's really interesting to think about that stuff and to try to it is a way
00:29:53.420
it is a way of engaging with the world as opposed to you know being the passive person who is just
00:30:00.560
engaged with their phone another thing you can do is spy on what people are doing with their phones
00:30:04.980
i'm a big fan of that so what what do you notice people doing with their phones my two favorite
00:30:10.620
well my favorite anecdote about this section another san francisco story is i was on the i i do like
00:30:15.480
to peek at what you know i kind of like discreetly looking over people's shoulders and once i was on
00:30:20.920
the bart in san francisco and i was looking at like what's that guy doing with his phone and he was
00:30:24.820
playing a game that you know it was it was a game that involved using your finger to direct a piece
00:30:34.080
of trash into the garbage can you know like you would sit in your office and throw a wadded up piece
00:30:39.660
of paper into the garbage can it was that but digital like that's what he was doing
00:30:43.940
but then you know a lot of people the other thing that's great to look at is how people who are
00:30:50.040
talking on the phone like their body language it's almost like a dance performance because they're
00:30:56.260
they're reacting to the conversation that they're in not the world that they're in so they're gesturing
00:31:01.560
with their hands and they're making facial expressions all for some audience and you know
00:31:08.900
they're holding their phone in that weird way up to their mouth like a tray right yeah and it looks
00:31:14.840
like someone needs to do a dance performance that's based on on on phone conversation gestures it's like
00:31:19.600
a madcap visual poetry thing i love it i recommend i recommend and that's something good to draw as well
00:31:27.520
so another exercise is find something you weren't looking for what does that look like so this was
00:31:33.660
inspired by have you ever had davy rothbard uh no so he he's this guy who he's this zine and then
00:31:42.340
podcast and books and all kinds of stuff called found and he is a proponent of like you're walking
00:31:47.940
down the street you see a piece of trash blow by that has some handwriting on it don't kick it out of
00:31:53.980
your way pick it up and look at it you weren't looking for it but um and he has built a whole kind
00:31:58.880
of mini empire of like finding these fascinating it started for him with uh someone left a note on
00:32:05.360
his car that they mistook his car for their ex-boyfriend's car or something and said like i
00:32:09.880
can't believe you're here and you're seeing her again aren't you and all this stuff this crazy note
00:32:15.540
and then at the end of the this hostile note it said like text me later and he realized there was
00:32:21.660
like a whole short there was a whole novel practically built into this like random thing that he wasn't
00:32:27.220
looking for so he says like you know a lot of times you'll pick up a piece of piece of uh discarded
00:32:33.000
writing somewhere on the street and it'll be nothing but one out of every 10 times one out of every 20
00:32:37.740
times there's a little story in there and you know it's an opportunity again to be surprised and delighted
00:32:43.420
by something you weren't looking for right grocery lists can tell a story grocery lists can be really
00:32:48.920
interesting yeah they're worth they're worth scrutiny they're worth a little bit of attention i had a
00:32:53.220
friend this reminded me uh in high school this was before cell phones so whenever you
00:32:57.060
wanted to communicate somebody wrote notes right for in school he would collect notes that he found
00:33:02.780
on the ground that are discarded and then he would turn them into songs oh perfect yeah which was
00:33:08.180
some of them were really like poignant because they're these are like these you know angsty like
00:33:12.240
teenage love letters but other ones are just silly because you know teenagers are silly that's perfect
00:33:17.240
though i mean that's a way of embracing the universe and taking it as like this isn't trash this is
00:33:22.180
potential inspiration and it's a personal challenge what can i do with this you know how can i convert
00:33:27.200
this thing that was literally discarded by the world how can i redeem it turn into some piece of
00:33:34.840
creativity i mean that's again one of the reasons there are so many artists in the book is that the
00:33:40.480
artists are so good at at recognizing that the overlooked is the beginning of creativity so we've been
00:33:48.880
talking about noticing with our eyes because that's what people think of but we can notice things
00:33:53.540
with our other senses what are some things that we can do to notice with our ears our smell our taste
00:33:59.260
etc yeah the book's actually set up this way we start with visual stuff and then it moves into the
00:34:05.240
other senses for exactly this reason because i think that people immediately associate when you say
00:34:09.420
noticing they immediately think visual but there are a couple of things that i would suggest
00:34:15.000
one that i do in my life all the time is this it's in the book it's it's described as there's a famous
00:34:24.160
john cage composition called 433 that when it was first performed consisted of someone sitting in front
00:34:31.460
of the piano and not playing it for four minutes and 33 seconds now this was not a very popular piece
00:34:37.180
when it was performed but you know it's a comment it's people read it as a comment on silence but it's
00:34:44.200
really a comment on listening and it's really a comment on on engaging with everything you can
00:34:50.360
and can't hear so i suggest hijacking that and covering as the way a cover band would cover something
00:34:57.660
cover 433 which you can do at any time you can not play the piano for four minutes and 33 seconds and i'll
00:35:03.980
literally do this i'll put my phone on the timer on 433 and just sit in my office and see what sounds
00:35:10.000
come at me which could be i i live in new orleans i work at home in a residential neighborhood
00:35:17.060
pointing at a my office points at a quiet street so there might be some bird song there might be a
00:35:23.060
train in the distance my neighbor peter might be out holding forth on the porch as he does from time to
00:35:29.540
time and um you kind of over time build up a little sort of like repertoire of what are the sounds of my
00:35:36.700
neighborhood so that's sort of challenge that i put in the book is think about having a what if you had
00:35:41.540
to draw a map of the most interesting sounds in your neighborhood the five most interesting sounds
00:35:47.180
then you can extend that to other senses what if you had to do a map of the five most interesting
00:35:52.580
smells in your neighborhood and there are artists who have done elaborate smell walk tours of cities
00:35:58.420
you know trying to sort of capture and we all know how visceral that sense of smell can be
00:36:04.700
or you could build something around textures taste is trickier right you don't want to go licking
00:36:10.440
buildings or whatever you don't really want to go lick building but you can think about uh you could
00:36:14.620
think about five tastes that just define your neighborhood with being uh restaurants and things
00:36:21.040
like that um but the and then we even in the in the book i even get into the idea of duchamp talked
00:36:26.820
about this idea of the infra thin which is stuff that's kind of beyond the five senses like
00:36:32.240
the feeling of the chair that someone has just gotten out of things that kind of don't really
00:36:38.420
get so that gets kind of advanced but it's fun to think about like what what what senses are what
00:36:43.460
what can i detect that doesn't even fall within the five senses and it becomes you know again it
00:36:48.140
becomes game like i looked buildings when i was a kid and you're still here to tell the i'm still
00:36:53.600
tell the tell the you know yeah when i read that about taste uh and that's the right cow you can
00:36:58.180
lick it and i was like i did that because i remember i could the memory came flooding back
00:37:01.620
you know i grew up in oklahoma city and our we did our banking at the murrah building that you know
00:37:06.940
was bombed but i remember distinctly licking that building for some reason and wow i don't that
00:37:15.680
well i mean maybe we could convert it into like you don't want to lick buildings but but like be
00:37:23.160
really ambitious and adventurous about like where you can taste things as you move about your city or
00:37:32.140
your neighborhood or the neighborhood you work in and short of licking buildings but like where
00:37:37.000
taste can be found that's a good challenge yeah rock rocks have taste people don't they do have a taste
00:37:42.180
um so we also talk about in the book you talk about like the role of solitude
00:37:48.660
in noticing what is what's the role do you think most noticing is like is it it's an individual thing
00:37:54.240
um primarily or can you do this with a group uh you can do both and there's the way that the way that
00:38:00.800
what happened the next in the in the way the book is structured the way the uh exercises are organized
00:38:05.380
is there are there's a batch that are specifically designed it to help you in noticing other people
00:38:13.120
basically but then it does end on a on a more personal inward note with ideas about and i think
00:38:20.180
this is important now to go back to what we were talking about at the beginning there are there are
00:38:25.340
very logical reasons why we need to be aware you know why that fear of missing out thing is real like
00:38:31.840
we want to be generally aware of what the pack the tribe the society is thinking about but it's also
00:38:39.140
kind of vital and it's harder now to take that time to devote to yourself to devote to your own
00:38:46.720
reflection so that some of the ideas literally come down to in one case make an appointment with
00:38:52.700
yourself the same way that you make appointments all week long with people for work reasons or social
00:38:58.300
reasons or whatever give yourself that hour a week where and this came from mike birbiglia
00:39:03.520
talking about the way he put it was you have an appointment with your brain
00:39:08.520
at a bus and so cafe this is so he could work on a personal project and feel like that's as important
00:39:15.440
and you have to honor that as much as you honor business meetings and then i had a student who i make
00:39:22.320
my students invent their own exercise attention exercise and i had a student who said oh i misunderstood
00:39:29.840
the assignment i did it wrong because what i did was i bought a cactus and i took care of it for a week
00:39:35.460
and i said okay that's definitely not what i had in mind but caring for something is the ultimate
00:39:43.580
you know act of attention and that is the goal of building those attention muscles is to make sure that
00:39:50.540
you're paying attention to what you care about and you care about what you're paying attention to
00:39:54.720
well rob this has been a fun conversation that like there's a ton more of these exercises in the book
00:39:59.200
where can people go to learn more about the book and your work so the best place to go is robwalker.net
00:40:05.900
and robwalker.net slash noticing is the section that has stuff about the book including the
00:40:14.620
there's a newsletter that comes out every week or two where i share new exercises or ideas that i've
00:40:22.760
come up with since the book and also the very popular icebreaker of the week feature where i get
00:40:31.540
people to submit and if you have listeners who have a good icebreaker question i really hope that they'll
00:40:36.600
zoom on over there and submit it because that's a reader driven feature so that's the best place i'm on
00:40:41.720
twitter at not rob walker and facebook at facebook.com slash consumed so any of those places are good
00:40:50.520
so the icebreaker that's intrigued me what is like the most bizarre interesting icebreaker prompt you've
00:40:56.040
gotten well this is a little bit of a cheat because it's something that i got from and i give her
00:41:02.420
whitney her name's whitney who she in some ways inspired this whole thing and has this amazing had this
00:41:08.740
amazing question that i experienced in real life i was seeing her for i was part of a group work thing
00:41:14.640
and we were at lunch and she had this question about whether under the right circumstances if you
00:41:22.140
were offered a chance to eat human flesh but you were guaranteed that no one was like the for what
00:41:29.840
somehow no one was harmed would you taste it would you taste it and listening to people answer that and
00:41:36.300
like their rationales and the looks on their faces i know that sounds weird but uh it's really
00:41:41.700
interesting it's a really good icebreaker yeah do that on your first date do not not do that on your
00:41:49.020
dating advice from rob walker ask no yeah right no well rob this has been a great conversation thanks
00:41:54.860
for your time it's been a pleasure listen i really appreciate you were great i guess it was rob walker he's
00:41:59.900
the author of the book the art of noticing it's available on amazon.com and bookstores everywhere you find
00:42:04.120
out more information about his work at his website rob walker.net also check out our show notes at
00:42:08.660
aom.is slash noticing we can find links to resources we can delve deeper into this topic
00:42:12.880
well that wraps up another edition of the aom podcast check out our website at
00:42:23.440
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00:43:02.980
reminding not only to listen to the aom podcast but put what you've heard into action