the art of noticing

Paying attention and listening. Looking for connections and relationships in the outside world. Searching for beauty. Seeking stories. Noticing what you find interesting, what makes you lean forward. And knowing all of this is available to use next time you sit down to work, where the raw data gets put into form.

There is no telling where that

Pay particular attention to the moments that take your breath away—a beautiful sunset, an unusual eye color, a moving piece of music, the elegant design of a complex machine.

Being a first-class noticer, and cultivating the ability to attend to what others overlook, is crucial to any creative process.

“Let’s say we go to a bar, and we see people that are dating,” Ariely suggests. We also notice that the place is noisy, that it’s dark, that it’s crowded, that there’s alcohol: all sound observations. “But now, as a social scientist, I want to think of it like a Newtonian physics problem,” he continues, “and say: ‘What are the forces at work?