Why We Overlook Details

As the owner of a cleaning business (among other things), I know that my employees have to have excellent attention to detail. When I’m training them, I like to challenge them with a “Selective Attention Test” video. Try testing yourself: it’s only a minute and twenty seconds.

If you’ve seen that test before, try this one: count how many red cars there are in this 30-second video. Did you count 6? Great. Now tell me how many white cars there were. Or how many total cars. That’s a little trickier, isn’t it?

For most people, the problem isn’t that they can’t pay attention to details. It isn’t even that they can only pay attention to some details. (After all, we can’t expect to catch everything: Roy H. Williams quotes a study by Yankelovich that says we’re exposed to 8,000 ads a day–imagine trying to take in every detail of every ad you see!) The problem is that we don’t prioritize our attention consciously.

Where Our Eyes Go…

About a year ago, I attended a training for business owners that uses exercises from the military to teach lessons on running a better business. In one of the exercises, we drove on a closed track with an instructor. The instructor would temporarily cover our eyes while we drove–when we could see again, there would be an “accident” on the track just ahead of us that we would have to avoid. The first time I went through the course, I of course immediately drove right into the accident.

The instructor explained, “Where your eyes go, that’s where the car goes.”

Our first instinct is to look at the accident, but inevitably that just leads us to drive right into it, just like I did. The way to avoid this is training yourself to look at the whole picture–see the accident, but also see what else is in the picture that’s going to provide you a safe route out. It takes active practice to get over that instinctual response and look at the whole scene.

Our real-world experiences tend to follow a similar pattern. We never actively train ourselves out of our instinctual or initial attention priorities, and when an “accident” comes along, we crash into it instead of circumnavigating it successfully. Even worse, we can’t understand why things went so poorly or how else we might have solved the problem because we’re not looking at the details in the context of the bigger picture.

Attention to Success

When I was first starting out with my Carpe Diem cleaning business, I had a very challenging client. He was extremely successful and owned a 6,000-square foot home in the best neighborhood in the city. He was also very critical. Every week he would have a fresh complaint about my cleaning. I lived in constant terror of his negative feedback and was always afraid I was going to lose the job.

Even though I lived in fear every week, I was 20 years old and needed the money. Having him as a client brought as much stability to my business as it did stress. I knew I couldn’t afford to lose him, so I did my best to listen to his complaints every week and do better.

One day, his nanny told me, “Our boss says you’re the best cleaner we’ve ever had.” I was shocked. As it turned out, it wasn’t that I was so terrific at actually cleaning; it was that I paid attention to his feedback and worked hard to meet his expectations. In other words, I put the focus of my attention on where it mattered most: the relationship with the client.

Any time the client criticized my work, he was presenting me with an “accident.” In response, I could have focused on being more thorough in the way I was already cleaning, or I could have looked at the criticism as feedback and focused on changing my cleaning style to better match what the client was demanding, even if it meant being less thorough in other areas. Focusing on the cleaning itself would be focusing on the accident–doubling down on the problem, not the solution. By choosing to focus on the client’s specific feedback, I was taking a different approach: I asked myself what my broader goal was (satisfying the client), noted the problem or accident that the client was presenting, then focused my attention on the specific details that would help me navigate around the problem (listening to and incorporating the specific feedback the client was giving me).

As my business grew and I moved up from cleaning to managing, I learned that this mindset still applied. With our naturally limited capacity for attention to detail, we can’t possibly have a perfect grasp on every element of our business (as much as we would like to). We end up splitting our attention, often unconsciously, and putting the majority of our attention on one or two things. The biggest mistake we can make as business owners is over-prioritizing our attention to our product and under-prioritizing our attention to our customers.

Our customers are the holders of our “safe routes.” When we’re product-oriented, our mental focus is on the details of the product–how we can make the product better. Like in the selective attention video, we’re so busy counting passes that we don’t even see the gorillas that are wreaking havoc in our business. When we’re customer-oriented, our mental focus is on how we can make the product better for our customers. We see the whole picture, gorillas and all, then, using the feedback from our customers, we make a conscious choice to drill into the details that are most important for providing returns.

How We Place Our Focus

Mother Teresa never attended anti-war rallies–instead, she would only go to pro-peace demonstrations. She knew the secret of intention: whatever you focus on, you get more of. Putting her attention on war, even if it was with an anti-war perspective, would only create more attention and awareness for war. By directing her attention positively towards peace, she could ignore war entirely and grow attention and awareness around peace itself–she was able to move directly towards her ultimate goal.

How does this relate to business? Without realizing it, we may run our businesses like anti-war campaigns instead of pro-peace rallies.

I remember watching a season finale of Celebrity Apprentice years ago. The finalists were down to Joan Rivers and Annie Duke. Watching them in the final challenge, I noticed that in every clip Annie was complaining about Joan, and everything awful Joan was doing, and how she was going to beat Joan. Meanwhile, Joan didn’t seem to be thinking about Annie at all. I knew right then that Joan was going to win the challenge (and she did). Annie was running an anti-Joan campaign, and Joan was running a pro-Joan campaign, but either way, all the attention and focus was on Joan.

In our work, we can choose to be Annies, and focus on everything that’s going wrong and working against us (and watch our business suffer or fail as a result), or we can be Joans, focused on what we’re capable of achieving and what’s in our power to control or change.

My own friends and coworkers are always surprised to learn I’m a natural pessimist—“You’re always so hopeful and positive!” In truth, I really am a natural Annie: I have an easy time focusing on criticism and approaching things negatively. But I work hard to overcome that natural bent and think optimistically like a Joan. I know that if I want to have more positivity or success or happiness in my life, I have to focus on those things. It’s not that I don’t see the negative along with the positive–I just make a conscious effort to focus on the positive.

At best we’ll only ever be able to expand our ability to pay attention to more detail by an incremental amount. Instead of trying to expand our attention, we’re better off focusing it consciously. Labeling the details that you associate with a solution- and growth-oriented mindset (like customer feedback) as important can help you choose the right details to focus on and the right ones to overlook.

What are the details you’ve been focusing on? What “gorillas” have you been overlooking in your work? Have you been waging an “anti-war” campaign? How can you transform it into a “pro-peace” campaign?

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