"This is an old problem. I suppose it comes from people wanting to be correct and not trusting themselves, fearing they’ll seem like uneducated country bumpkins in his day, if they told what they saw and how it struck them. I don’t remember ever being forced to wear those sorts of blinders when I was a child. Children do report what they see."
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In reading the conversation with Jane Jacobs [hat tip Farnam Street] it occurred to me how much current opinions rely on those of others. There's that paragraph in the story where Jacobs talks about her father, a diagnostician so he had learned to observe directly, like a detective.
The comparison is quite apt as a detective needs to be analytical and creative, base suppositions on clues as well as first hand experience — listening while suspending judgment long enough to take it all in and make sense of it.
Making sense of things requires that we make do with who we are and the resources at hand in order to make it — achieve an outcome, get results, find out more.
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Valeria is an experienced listener. She is also frequent speaker at conferences and companies on a variety of topics. To book her for a speaking engagement click here.
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