Читать книгу Non-Obvious 2017 Edition - Рохит Бхаргава - Страница 31

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.