Sometimes I feel like an entitled and privileged schmuck. What’s wrong with me that in a world full of information, of stimulation, of the ability for limitless exploration, that I find myself uninspired, unengaged, unexcited about a lot of the things I do on a day-to-day basis. And maybe it’s just me. Does anybody hear or feel kind of not so excited about the things they have to do every day? Yeah, OK. Glad to know I’m not alone.
Back in 2014, I’d just given a talk in Phoenix and I was in the Phoenix Sky Harbor Airport. And I just wanted to be alone, I was very tired and I just went over and sat in a corner, this open carpeted area where nobody was there. And I laid my back against the wall that was there and opened up my own little ‘Apple Store’ around me. You guys know what that looks like.
I got my MacBook Pro and my iPad and my iPhone and I’m sitting there just minding my business waiting to board my flight when all of a sudden I see one of the most terrifying things I’ve ever seen in my life. A baby — about 30 feet away from me crawling directly for me. He wasn’t by himself, his dad was there. He didn’t have like a cliff bar and a twenty-dollar rail pinned to his onesie.
But I knew how this was going to play out. You guys know too. He’s going to crawl up to me and he’s going to stick out his grubby sticky, I mean, adorable precious little paws and he’s going to ruin my devices, right? I know it, I see it happening. And so all I’m doing is racking my brain saying: ‘how can I stop this child from his path of destruction without looking like an old curmudgeon, right?
And while I’m trying to figure this out, the most amazing thing happened, because that baby taught me a lesson about fascination that I may have never learned on my own. So many of us, including me before I had this run in with the baby, I think that fascination is something that comes as a result of doing something, especially something new and novel. It’s the reason we job hop and we thrill seek and we hop from relationship to relationship and even sometimes abuse drugs and alcohol is because we believe that there’s something outside of us that reengages and reignites that sense of fascination inside of us.
But what if — what if you could manufacture fascination from the inside out? What if it was a moment by moment decision, a conscious choice to be fascinated? Cultivating that ability is the key to overcome boredom and to never experience this uninspired, unexcited life that typically we do have in our lives sometimes.
So from a very young age, we learn that children are typically more creative, right? They have this kind of in-the-moment imaginative creative thinking and it’s not that they’re more fascinated because they’re naive or they’re unintelligent, because they have this capacity for fascination that we just kind of lose over time. It hasn’t been repurposed or reorganized or reengineered for this busy heavy lifestyle that we as adults have created and then drill into our own heads that that’s the way it has to be.
Dr. Stephanie Calderon, she’s an expert in childhood brain development, she said that as kids get older their capacity to be creative and imaginative is told to go take a timeout. So their newly developing rational process and the analytical mind can take center stage. And as we’ve all experienced at one point or another it can be very hard to impress us when we’re leading with our rational brain. It’s the reason as adults we need half a billion dollar Powerball payouts and nail-biting buzzer-beating basketball games and outrageous over-the-top reality shows just to get our juices flowing.
And there’s nothing wrong with the rational brain but it’s the reason that there’s nothing fascinating about the chicken parm you had the other night for dinner at your local Italian restaurant because you’ve had chicken parm a thousand times. And it’s why you weren’t super engaged when your spouse came home and told you about the disrespectful thing that Stephen Accounting said because you’ve known countless Steves in your life and you know exactly what happened in that story.
And it’s why even at this moment some of you may have already decided that you either agree or disagree with what I’m saying and you tuned me out and all that’s okay. It just means your rational brain is working. I would invite you to unglazed your eyes because I am going to share something really powerful with you in a minute. But I get it.
With all the demands we have from work and family and all the obligations that are always flying at us we as adults are wired for resolution, we want answers and we want them as quickly as possible. And anytime we’re in a state of uncertainty for any extended period of time where we really don’t know what’s going on, we don’t know how to wrap things up in a bow and move on, it brings up stress and anxiety and despair. And there’s nothing wrong with the rational brain. I’m not down at it, we need it. If I didn’t have my rational brain working I wouldn’t be able to form the sentences to speak to you. I wouldn’t have had the hand-eye coordination to drive here. I wouldn’t remember my wife’s birthday December 10. Brownie points.
But when your goal is to manufacture fascination, the analytical mind, it just can’t do on its own. It needs help from a different mindset, a different approach.
And the great thing about this is that I don’t have to actually teach you anything, because it’s my belief that you simply need to relearn something that at some point we unlearned to get back to the point we were as kids where we can tap into manufacturing fascination on demand. It’s like if you had hardwood floors and at some point they got covered up by ugly 70 shag carpeting. The hardwood floors didn’t go anywhere. They’re lying there waiting to be rediscovered.
So how do we do that? How do we start pulling back the 70 shag carpet so we can bring out these rich beautiful hardwood floors, so we can tap back into where we were able to manufacture fascination on demand? Well I’m going to tell you, and it’s only three words. It’s possibly the only three words you need to remember from this entire talk. And although it’s only three words they can be three of the scariest words in the English language, second only to gas station sushi.
There are three words that when we say them especially as adults, that can make us feel worthless or less than or inferior and it’s not something we’re typically rewarded for saying, especially in our professional lives.
Now before I tell you, though, I do want to do a quick little exercise of somebody in the audience. Sir, you look easy. Are you easy to work with guys, come on? Have you seen a deck of cards before? Are you familiar what a deck of cards looks? Okay, great. So if I were to ask you: how many cards – on a typical deck of cards what would you say? 52, very good. And if I were to say: how many suits, like diamonds, hearts — how many suits are there in a deck of cards, what would you say? 4, fantastic. And if I were to ask you: how many Jokers there are in a typical deck of cards, what would you say? 2, beautiful. Give him a round of applause.
And you see what happened there. I asked questions that were able to engage his analytical processing mind. He took almost no time to think about it. He called upon his memory, he’s seen a deck of cards a billion times. And so it was no problem. He knew everything there was to know about a typical deck of cards. So thank you — you can take this home as a souvenir.
But that’s why we don’t experience fascination in our lives. It’s because we assume it’s a typical deck of cards without questioning, whether that’s really true. And that brings the secret, he key to manufacturing fascination and brings me back to these three words, the only three words you need to remember to live in this place. And here they are. I don’t know. I don’t know.
Because the reason that we don’t experience fascination is because we think as soon as we experience something once, we know everything there is to know about that thing. It’s the reason there’s nothing fascinating about chicken parm. You know everything there is to know about the story about Stephen Accounting. You know everything there is to know about a typical deck of cards. But when we slow down and we can admit the truth that if we challenged those assumptions we may actually find something much more fascinating than we expected, then we can start tapping into being able to manufacture fascination from the inside out.
Now I don’t want you to forget those three words. We’re going to say them together. So I’m going to say one, two, three, then you’re going to say: I don’t know. You guys ready? Okay, on the count of three: one, two, three. I don’t know. Doesn’t that feel empowering? Of course it doesn’t. Because when we think that we know something it makes us feel empowered. It makes us feel like we’re good enough. And it’s also the thing that separates us from manufacturing fascination. The ‘I don’t know’ mindset changes all of that.
Which is all well and good in this room while I’m up on the stage but this little baby alien is still coming right for me, right? He’s now a mere feet away from me and as I brace for impact and I’m kind of squinting and waiting to see all my devices be ruined, he blows my mind by changing his course ever so slightly and instead of focusing on me and my ‘apple store’, he focuses on the wall that I’ve been laying my back against. And I watched in fascination as he crawls up to the wall and goes from being on all fours, and doing his best drunk mime impression and climbing his way up the wall until he’s standing upright, he is fascinated by this wall. He’s experiencing it with all of his being, he rubs his belly, he rubs his face against it, he even licked the wall at one point which is really disgusting: where’s this kid’s father, whatever?
But what he showed me in that moment, not being able to be distracted by people walking by or the overhead speaker saying for Mr. and Mrs. Garcia to check in with the gate agent or the TSA officer with the drug sniffing dogs, the fact that he was able to put so much attention on that wall in that moment had me question: how much presence and attention was I bringing to my conversations with my wife, with my clients, with my family and friends? How much love and focus and attention was I bringing to the work that I was putting out to the world?
And looking back it was easy to see when I wasn’t doing that because it was the times that I felt the most unengaged, uninspired and unexcited. And so what that baby taught me in that moment was about the power of attention. And as Henry Miller says: the moment one chooses to put attention on anything, even a blade of grass, it becomes a mysterious awesome, indescribably magnificent world in itself.
And because we all know that when you’re a speaker quotes make you sound smarter, here’s one more. Heraclitus said: no man ever steps into the same river twice for it is not the same river and he is not the same man. And that’s one of the truths I want you to get today is that no matter how many times you’ve experienced something in the world you will never experience it the same way twice. And so if every experience has the potential to be a new experience, then every experience has the potential to be fascinating.
Now I want to share with you something real that you can actually use something I call a fascination hack, if you will, that I’ve used daily in my life for the last couple of years and I have my clients use all the time and it gives us such great results of really manufacturing fascination. And it’s this: the next time you’re doing something seemingly mundane, having a meal, you’ve had a thousand times sitting through another staff meeting, grocery shopping, doing the dishes — slow down and take a mental list of all the things that had to perfectly align in the world, all the people, all the circumstances, all the situations for you to be experiencing that thing in that moment. The first time I did this and that it completely blew my mind was I go every morning to get coffee from my local coffee place. I’m sure you never heard of it, it’s called [Barflux] and I go there every morning and there’s nothing fascinating about my coffee, it’s the same coffee every day.
And for whatever reason one day when they handed me the cup of coffee, I slowed down and I just looked at the cup and I thought about the raw materials that had to be processed to make this cup, the machinery that had to be invented to process those materials, the manufacturing plant that had to be created, the people that had to be trained to use all of it, a different set of people that ship this cup across the country directly to my coffee shop that is then made available to the barista that I gave my order to, to pour the coffee into it and hand it to me so that I could have it in my hand. Not to mention the stories, the challenges, the situations, everything that encompassed the lives of every single person that took part in my life and the lives of all the people involved in this just for me to get this cup of coffee. And all of a sudden that cup of coffee became one of the most miraculous fascinating things I’d ever seen in my life.
When you practice this fascination hacking and you really practice living the ‘I don’t know mindset’ you’re going to create deeper connections, you’re going to be able to see miracles in the mundane. You may come up with your best business idea ever and you may find the solution to a problem that just wasn’t available to you when it was your rational mind running the show.
So my challenge to you while you’re here at TEDx is this: When you’re meeting new people or when you go back to your regular life and you’re going to work or you’re going to a networking event or talking to your spouse or playing with your kids, as much as your initial reaction may be to speed through, to rush, to find a shortcut, to get through this something to get to the next something, I would invite you to slow down, take a deep breath, to get curious and to see just how miraculous and fascinating everything has the potential to be. And while I don’t know if any of this will actually change the world, I’m absolutely fascinated to find out.
