Hello again world. Noticing. It’s such a simple word, and such a simple concept. You’re walking down a city lane, and you see a billboard. This isn’t any normal billboard, it happens to be fairly large. You look at it. What’s just happened? You’ve noticed the massive Will Smith poster for ‘Focus.’ That’s noticing for you right? Well maybe not. In this post, which I’m almost certain will be very confusing, you’ll too may notice that noticing can be far more impacting than simply seeing, hearing or smelling something.

Are we thinking at all when we notice things? Whether it be Will Smith’s gigantic face at Melbourne Central or not, is seeing something, the same as noticing something? When we see a car’s boot smashed in, what do we do? Do we see the crash, and think, “oh cool , car crash,” and instantly move on? Or do we see it and begin to wonder how this may have happened, or how perhaps you yourself could avoid creating such damage? The key difference between seeing, hearing or smelling something and noticing something, is that ‘noticing’ should actually help us learn. We can’t live our lives on auto pilot, it’s up to us to experience life by being alert to things. We need to constantly learn things to keep growing as people. And how can we do that? One way perhaps could be to try to learn things through noticing not just the things around us we see or hear, but the ideas around us all also.

It’s perhaps now time for us to ‘focus’ (insert canned laughter here) on the idea of noticing things, as a key tool in learning to make things better. Where would technology be without Steve Jobs noticing the idea of the mouse for instance, instead of just seeing it and thinking it was sort of cool? We need to realise that there are so many things around us which could indeed make the world a better place. The power of the internet, such a broad idea, has been noticed by Mark Zuckerberg, who is working constantly to make the world wide web available so that we can all be connected. These people have noticed an idea to have immense potential, and have acted upon it. Now we know that not everything we notice is completely world changing. But perhaps people, it’s time to notice not an idea, but ourselves as this potential. We can really be whoever we want to be and it’s time for us to begin to notice this.