Prescience
The ability to anticipate the course of events and predict the near future was something I developed over time. It started when I was six years old and a boulder cracked my head open and left me with a 40-stitch gash on the top of my little head. But it wasn’t the rock that gave me the powers, it was that we just moved to a new town, in a new state, and in the middle of the school year and I had to show up to my first day with my head wrapped in a skullcap. The teacher introduced me and the first question some girl asked was “Does everyone in Milwaukee have those things on their head?”
That was the first time I ever remember actually wanting to be invisible. I had to wear the cap for a long time and I became obsessively observant; I wanted to know who was looking at me, so I spent my days watching everyone. After the cap came off I seemed to have a heightened sense of my surroundings, maybe because I didn’t want my head to get smashed again, but more likely is that I made it a habit to observe. But this alone did not give me my prescience, for that I owe my new at the time. He was from corporate and he came in to take me to breakfast at Friendly’s, after I got promoted to National Sales Manager in Columbus, Ohio. He asked me if I read the Wall Street Journal today. When I said no, he said to I had to read it everyday, cover to cover. And from that day on, I did.
At first it was a bit confounding because of the sheer number and the depth of the articles. I started getting up really early, going in to the office, and reading it before anyone else came in It served two purposes; One, I got to say good morning to everyone as they walked by my office and two, it gave me something to talk about that, unless the person had read the journal, they probably didn’t know about it. After reading it for a couple of years I started to understand how the world worked and was able to talk about any industry, like it was my own.
So observation plus research equals foresight. I think it is the most important skill I’ve learned.
Listening
The president of the station group I worked at came to Columbus one day to give a talk to the entire staff. He said he wanted to tell us two things. One, he asked us to picture something we really wanted, I pictured a Alpine White Porsche 911, and then to visualize ourselves having it, and to do that everyday. He promised that we would get what we pictured. I know it sounds a little campy but I did it anyway. I quickly learned that picturing my 911 wasn’t the way I was going to get it. Instead I had to turn in to the person who could afford a new Porsche, and it worked. Unfortunately I am too old to race around in one now so I never bought one.
The second thing he wanted us to learn was how to listen. He said that when your client is talking, don’t interrupt, just listen to what he says, he’ll tell you what it will take to sell him, and then you can figure out a way to do what he wants and get the sale. This doesn’t just work in sales; it works in almost every social situation I find myself in. That doesn’t mean I have to sit around and listen to crazy people all day, but I know whether they are crazy or not, before I shut them off.
Curiosity
It seems to me that I have always been curious about how things work. I had a habit of taking apart my things and trying, and mostly failing at first, to put them back together. By the time I was a teenager I had taken my stereo and rebuilt it a dozen times. After that it was appliances, houses and cars. And then came the computer. I know how those early wi-fi enthusiasts must have felt, always trying to replace the weakest link with the strongest in order to have the best system possible. That is what the computer became for me. Not one just to take a PC out of the box set it up and leave it, I was a gamer, I had to always rebuild mine whenever a faster video card or processor came out. It is where I learned to use a cherish Google. By asking the right questions you could almost always find an answer. It might have been yes or no, but it was always an answer and an explanation. After a while, I stopped asking Google about computers and started asking, “how do I build a website?” I found the answer and started building them. I like websites because they exist around a state of constant change. You can never be done; there is always something new to do and learn.