But what about making a decision, solving a problem at work, or something even more amorphous? It works the same way. When psychologist Peter Gollwitzer tried to determine how to enable people to set goals and engage in goal-directed behavior as effectively as possible, he found that several things helped improve focus and performance: (1) thinking ahead, or viewing the situation as just one moment on a larger, longer timeline and being able to identify it as just one point to get past in order to reach a better future point; (2) being specific and setting specific goals, or defining your end point as discretely as possible and pooling your attentional resources as specifically as you can; (3) setting up if/then contingencies, or thinking through a situation and understanding what you will do if certain features arise (i.e., if I catch my mind wandering, then I will close my eyes, count to ten, and refocus); (4) writing everything down instead of just thinking it in your head, so that you maximize your potential and know in advance that you won’t have to try to re-create anything from scratch; and (5) thinking of both repercussions—what would happen should you fail—and of positive angles, the rewards if you succeed.
Selectivity—mindful, thoughtful, smart selectivity—is the key first step to learning how to pay attention and make the most of your limited resources. Start small; start manageable; start focused. System Watson may take years to become more like System Holmes, and even then it may never get there completely, but by being mindfully focused, it can sure get closer. Help out the Watson system by giving it some of the Holmes system’s tools. On it’s own, it’s got nothing.
One caveat, however: you can set goals to help you filter the world, but be careful lest you use these goals as blinders. Your goals, your priorities, your answer to the “what I want to accomplish” question must be flexible enough to adapt to changing circumstances. If the available information changes, so should you. Don’t be afraid to deviate from a preset plan when it serves the greater objective. That, too, is part of the observational process.
Let your inner Holmes show your inner Watson where to look. And don’t be like Inspector Alec MacDonald, or Mac, as Holmes calls him. Listen to what Holmes suggests, be it a change of course or a walk outside when you’d rather not.
2. Be Objective
In “The Adventure of the Priory School,” a valuable pupil goes missing from a boarding school. Also vanished is the school’s German master. How could such a calamity occur in a place of such honor and prestige, termed “without exception, the best and most select preparatory school in England”? Dr. Thorneycroft Huxtable, the school’s founder and principal, is flummoxed in the extreme. By the time he makes it from the north of England to London, to consult with Mr. Holmes, he is so overwrought that he proceeds at once to collapse, “prostrate and insensible,” upon the bearskin hearth rug of 221B Baker Street.
Not one but two people missing—and the pupil, the son of the Duke of Holdernesse, a former cabinet minister and one of the wealthiest men in England. It must certainly be the case, Huxtable tells Holmes, that Heidegger, the German master, was somehow an accomplice to the disappearance. His bicycle is missing from the bicycle shed and his room bears signs of a hasty exit. A kidnapper? A kidnapper’s accomplice? Huxtable can’t be sure, but the man can hardly be blameless. It would be too much to chalk the double disappearance off to something as simple as coincidence.
A police investigation is initiated at once, and when a young man and boy are seen together on an early train at a neighboring station, it seems that the policemen have done their duty admirably. The investigation is duly called off. Quite to Huxtable’s chagrin, however, it soon becomes clear that the couple in question is altogether unrelated to the disappearance. And so, three days after the mysterious events, the principal has come to consult Mr. Holmes. Not a moment too soon, says the detective—and perhaps, several moments too late. Precious time has been lost. Will the fugitives be found before even greater tragedy occurs?
What makes up a situation like this? Answering that question is not as easy as stating a series of facts—missing boy, missing instructor, missing bike, and the like—or even delineating each one of the accompanying details—state of the boy’s room, state of the instructor’s room, clothing, windows, plants, etcetera. It also entails understanding something very specific: a situation (in its broadest sense, be it mental, physical, or something as un-situation-like as an empty room) is inherently dynamic. And you, by the very action of entering into it, shift it from what it was before your arrival to something altogether different.
It’s Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle in action: the fact of observing changes the thing being observed. Even an empty room is no longer the same once you’re inside. You cannot proceed as if it hadn’t changed. This may sound like common sense, but it is actually much harder to understand in practice than it seems in theory.
Take, for instance, a commonly studied phenomenon known as the white coat effect. Maybe you have an ache or a cough that you want to check out. Maybe you are simply overdue for your next physical. You sigh, pick up the phone, and make an appointment with your doctor. The next day you make your way to his office. You sit in the waiting room. Your name is called. You go in for your appointment.
It’s safe to assume that the you that is walking in to get the checkup is the same you that placed the call, right? Wrong. Study after study has shown that for many people, the mere fact of entering a doctor’s office and seeing the physician—hence, the white coat—is enough to significantly alter vital signs. Pulse, blood pressure, even reactions and blood work can all change simply because you are seeing a doctor. You may not even feel particularly anxious or stressed. All the same, your readings and results will have changed. The situation has shifted through mere presence and observation.
Recall Dr. Huxtable’s view of the events surrounding the disappearance: there is a fugitive (the boy), an accomplice (the tutor), and a bike stolen for purposes of flight or deceit. Nothing more, nothing less. What the principal reports to Holmes is fact (or so he believes).
But is it really? It’s psychologist Daniel Gilbert’s theory about believing what we see taken a step further: we believe what we want to see and what our mind attic decides to see, encode that belief instead of the facts in our brains, and then think that we saw an objective fact when really what we remember seeing is only our limited perception at the time. We forget to separate the factual situation from our subjective interpretation of it. (One need only look at the inaccuracy of expert witness testimonies to see how bad we are at assessing and remembering.) Because the school’s principal at once suspected a kidnapping, he has noticed and reported the very details that support his initial idea—and hasn’t taken the time to get the full story in the least. And yet, he has no clue that he is doing it. As far as he’s concerned, he remains entirely objective. As the philosopher Francis Bacon put it, “The human understanding when it has once adopted an opinion (either as being the received opinion or as being agreeable to itself) draws all things else to support and agree with it.” True objectivity can never be achieved—even the scientific objectivity of Holmes isn’t ever complete—but we need to understand just how far we stray in order to approximate a holistic view of any given situation.
Setting your goals beforehand will help you direct your precious attentional resources properly. It should not be an excuse to reinterpret objective facts to mesh with what you want or expect to see. Observation and deduction are two separate, distinct steps—in fact, they don’t even come one right after the other. Think back for a moment to Watson’s Afghanistan sojourn. Holmes stuck to objective, tangible facts in his observations. There was no extrapolation at first; that happened only after. And he always asked how those facts could fit together. Understanding a situation in its fullness requires several steps, but the first and most fundamental is to realize that observation and deduction are not the same. To remain as objective as you possibly can.
My mother was quite young—unbelievably young, by
today’s standards; average by those of 1970s Russia—when she gave birth to my older sister. My sister was quite young when she gave birth to my niece. I cannot even begin to list the number of times that people—from complete strangers to mothers of classmates and even waiters in restaurants—have thought they were seeing one thing and acted according to that thought, when in reality they were seeing something entirely different. My mother has been taken for my sister’s sister. These days, she is routinely taken for my niece’s mother. Not grave errors on the observer’s part, to be sure, but errors nonetheless—and errors which have, in many cases, gone on to affect both their behavior and their subsequent judgments and reactions. It’s not just a question of mixing up generations. It’s also a question of applying modern American values to the behavior of women in Soviet Russia—an entirely different world. In American lingo, Mom was a teenage mother. In Russia, she was married and not even the first among her friends to have a child. It was just the way things were done.
You think; you judge; and you don’t think twice about what you’ve just done.
Hardly ever, in describing a person, an object, a scene, a situation, an interaction do we see it as just a valueless, objective entity. And hardly ever do we consider the distinction—since, of course, it hardly ever matters. But it’s the rare mind that has trained itself to separate the objective fact from the immediate, subconscious, and automatic subjective interpretation that follows.
The first thing Holmes does when he enters a scene is to gain a sense of what has been going on. Who has touched what, what has come from where, what is there that shouldn’t be, and what isn’t there that should be. He remains capable of extreme objectivity even in the face of extreme circumstances. He remembers his goal, but he uses it to filter and not to inform. Watson, on the other hand, is not so careful.
Consider again the missing boy and the German schoolmaster. Unlike Dr. Huxtable, Holmes understands that a situation is colored by his interpretation. And so, unlike the headmaster, he entertains the possibility that the so-called facts are not what they seem. The principal is severely limited in his search by one crucial detail: he—along with everyone else—is looking for a fugitive and an accomplice. But what if Herr Heidegger is nothing of the sort? What if he isn’t fleeing but doing something else entirely? The missing boy’s father supposes he might be helping the lad flee to his mother in France. The principal, that he might be conducting him to another location. The police, that they have escaped on a train. But not a single person save Holmes realizes that the story is merely that. They are not to look for a fleeing schoolmaster, wherever the destination may be, but for the schoolmaster (no modifier necessary) and the boy, and not necessarily in the same place. Everyone interprets the missing man as somehow involved in the disappearance, be it as accomplice or instigator. No one stops to consider that the only available evidence points to nothing beside the fact that he’s missing.
No one, that is, except for Sherlock Holmes. He realizes that he is looking for a missing boy. He is also looking for a missing schoolmaster. That is all. He lets any additional facts emerge as and when they may. In this more evenhanded approach, he chances upon a fact that has completely passed by the school director and the police: that the schoolmaster hasn’t fled with the boy at all and is instead lying dead nearby, “a tall man, full-bearded, with spectacles, one glass of which had been knocked out. The cause of his death was a frightful blow upon the head, which had crushed in part of his skull.”
To find the body, Holmes doesn’t discover any new clues; he just knows to look at what is there in an objective light, without preconception or preformed theories. He enumerates the steps that led to his discovery to Watson:
“Let us continue our reconstruction. He meets his death five miles from the school—not by a bullet, mark you, which even a lad might conceivably discharge, but by a savage blow dealt by a vigorous arm. The lad, then, had a companion in his flight. And the flight was a swift one, since it took five miles before an expert cyclist could overtake them. Yet we surveyed the ground round the scene of the tragedy. What do we find? A few cattle tracks, nothing more. I took a wide sweep round, and there is no path within fifty yards. Another cyclist could have had nothing to do with the actual murder, nor were there any human foot-marks.”
“Holmes,” I cried, “this is impossible.”
“Admirable!” he said. “A most illuminating remark. It is impossible as I state it, and therefore I must in some respect have stated it wrong. Yet you saw for yourself. Can you suggest any fallacy?”
Watson cannot. Instead, he suggests that they give up altogether. “I am at my wit’s end,” he says.
“Tut, tut,” scolds Holmes. “We have solved some worse problems. At least we have plenty of material, if we can only use it.”
In this brief exchange, Holmes has shown that all of the headmaster’s theories were misguided. There were at least three people, not at most two. The German instructor was trying to save the boy, not hurt him or flee with him (the most likely scenario, given his now-dead state and the fact that he followed the initial tire tracks and had to overtake the fleeing boy; clearly, he could be neither kidnapper nor accomplice). The bike was a means of pursuit, not stolen property for some sinister motive. And what’s more, there must have been another bike present to aid the escape of the boy and unidentified other or others. Holmes hasn’t done anything spectacular; he has just allowed the evidence to speak. And he has followed it without allowing himself to skew the facts to conform with the situation. In short, he has behaved with the coolness and reflection of System Holmes, while Huxtable’s conclusions show every marking of the hot, reflexive, leap-before-you-look school of System Watson.
To observe, you must learn to separate situation from interpretation, yourself from what you’re seeing. System Watson wants to run away into the world of the subjective, the hypothetical, the deductive. Into the world that would make the most sense to you. System Holmes knows to hold back the reins.
A helpful exercise is to describe the situation from the beginning, either out loud or in writing, as if to a stranger who isn’t aware of any of the specifics—much like Holmes talks his theories through out loud to Watson. When Holmes states his observations in this way, gaps and inconsistencies that weren’t apparent before come to the surface.
It’s an exercise not unlike reading your own work out loud to catch any errors in grammar, logic, or style. Just like your observations are so entwined with your thoughts and perception that you may find it difficult, if not impossible, to disentangle the objective reality from its subjective materialization in your mind, when you work on an essay or a story or a paper, or anything else really, you become so intimately acquainted with your own writing that you are liable to skip over mistakes and to read what the words should say instead of what they do say. The act of speaking forces you to slow down and catch those errors that are invisible to your eyes. Your ear notes them when your eye does not. And while it may seem a waste of time and effort to reread mindfully and attentively, out loud, it hardly ever fails to yield a mistake or flaw that you would have otherwise missed.
It’s easy to succumb to Watson’s conflating logic, to Huxtable’s certainty in what he says. But every time you find yourself making a judgment immediately upon observing—in fact, even if you don’t think you are, and even if everything seems to make perfect sense—train yourself to stop and repeat: It is impossible as I state it, and therefore I must in some respect have stated it wrong. Then go back and restate it from the beginning and in a different fashion than you did the first time around. Out loud instead of silently. In writing instead of in your head. It will save you from many errors in perception.
3. Be Inclusive
Let’s go back for a moment to The Hound of the Baskervilles. In the early chapters of the story, Henry Baskerville, the heir to the Baskerville estate, reports that his boot has gone missing. But not just one boot. Henry finds that the missing boot has miraculousl
y reappeared the day after its disappearance—only to discover that a boot from another pair has vanished in its stead. To Henry this is annoying but nothing more. To Sherlock Holmes it is a key element in a case that threatens to devolve into a paranormal, voodoo-theory-generating free-for-all. What to others is a mere curiosity to Holmes is one of the more instructive points in the case: the “hound” they are dealing with is an actual animal, not a phantasm. An animal who relies on his sense of smell in a fundamental fashion. As Holmes later tells Watson, the exchange of one stolen boot for another was “a most instructive incident, since it proved conclusively to my mind that we were dealing with a real hound, as no other supposition could explain this anxiety to obtain an old boot and this indifference to a new one.”
But that’s not all. Apart from the vanishing boot, there is the issue of a more obvious warning. While consulting with Holmes in London, Henry has received anonymous notes that urge him to stay away from Baskerville Hall. Once again, to everyone but Holmes these notes are nothing more than what they seem. For Holmes they form the second part of the key to the case. As he tells Watson:
“It may possibly recur to your memory that when I examined the paper upon which the printed words were fastened I made a close inspection for the water-mark. In doing so I held it within a few inches of my eyes, and was conscious of a faint smell of the scent known as white jessamine. There are seventy-five perfumes, which it is very necessary that a criminal expert should be able to distinguish from each other, and cases have more than once within my own experience depended upon their prompt recognition. The scent suggested the presence of a lady, and already my thoughts began to turn toward the Stapletons. Thus I had made certain of the hound, and had guessed at the criminal before we ever went to the west country.”