Rob Walker - The Art of Noticing: 131 Ways to Spark Creativity, Find Inspiration, and Discover Joy in the Everyday

Filmmaker James Benning once described an exercise from a class he taught called Looking and Listening at the California Institute of the Arts. Id take ten or twelve students someplace (an oil field in the Central Valley, the homeless area near downtown Los Angeles, a kilometer-long hand-dug tunnel in the Mojave foothills, etc.), where they would head out on their own and practice paying attention, he later wrote.

The one thing more than anything else, is learning to pay attention.

ROBERT IRWIN

The phrase practice paying attention really struck me when I read Bennings account in a book called Draw It with Your Eyes Closed, about creative assignments for art students. It stuck with me after.

I was at the time planning a five-week class I still teach once a year for the Products of Design graduate program at New Yorks School of Visual Arts. Every year, at some point in our class, I ask my students to practice paying attention before our next meeting. There are no other parameters. Each student resolves this deliberately vague request differently.

My ambition is to provoke them into thinking about what they notice, what they miss, why it matters, and how to become better, deeper, and more original observers of the world and of themselves. And that, in turn, became the inspiration for this book.

Paying attention is a pretty vital skill for a designer. Then again, being what Saul Bellow called a first-class noticercultivating the ability to attend to what others overlook, experiencing enchanting reality as a new and fortuitous giftis crucial to any creative process. And when I say creative process, I mean it as an idea that applies to a broad range of professions and pursuits. The scientist, the entrepreneur, the photographer, the coach: Each relies on the ability to notice that which previously seemed invisible to everybody else.

Baseball executive Billy Beane found success by paying attention to data that others ignored.

Marine biologist Rachel Carson paid heroic attention to the scandalously obscured (and deadly) side effects of pesticides and thereby launched the modern environmental movement.

Warren Buffett paid attention to undervalued companies, becoming arguably the most successful investor of all time.

Jerry Seinfelds observational comedy brilliantly exploited a keen eye for the absurd lurking in what was taken for granted.

Artist and performer Laurie Andersons remarkable eye for the hidden meanings in everyday language and culture made her an unlikely avant-garde superstar (and, as it happens, my all-time hero).

Anybody interested in thinking creatively seeks (needs) to notice what has been overlooked or ignored by others, to get beyond distractions and attend to the world. Every day, successful teachers, doctors, lawyers, small business owners, and middle managers pick up on the subtle clues and details that sail past everyone else.

That, in fact, is why companies like Google and Goldman Sachs have introduced programs specifically designed to help workers counteract our culture of distraction in order to regain their focus and creativity, often under the auspices of meditation or mindfulness training. It is why military leaders from Dwight Eisenhower to James Mattis have extolled the virtues of taking a determined break from interruption and intrusion to make informed and thoughtful decisions.

Paying attention, making a habit of noticing, helps cultivate an original perspective, a distinct point of view. Thats part of what I try to teach my students, and its part of what I try to practice myself.

But paying attention isnt easy.