Читать книгу Non-Obvious 2018 Edition - Рохит Бхаргава - Страница 34

Being more observant means training yourself to notice the details that most others often miss.

I was invited not long ago to a formal dinner connected to 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 ten minutes later, a team of six people, not including our waiter, came and delivered all the desserts to our large table of thirty 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 a short time.

By observing the wait staff for a moment, 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 on the table above your plate. If you picked option two, he placed the spoon to the right of your plate.

When the team of food runners came to the table, all they needed was the “code” to decipher the spoon positioning and they could deliver the desserts to the right people with ease and accuracy.

Perhaps you already knew that spoon trick, but imagine if you didn’t. Simply observing it gives you a glimpse into the little processes that we rarely pay attention to that keep the world moving along. Now, you might be thinking, Who cares how waiters deliver dessert?

Of course, understanding how dessert is delivered will hardly change your life, but imagine that moment multiplied out to a thousand different situations. Observing details can lead to understanding something insignificant, but it can also lead to your next big business idea.

Learning to be more observant isn’t just about seeing the big things. Instead, it’s about training yourself to pay more attention to the little things. What can you see about a situation that other people miss? What can the details you’re noticing teach you about people, processes, and companies that you didn’t know before?

This is the power of making observation a habit.