Excerpt From
Master Mind:

"You can see a lot just by looking," baseball great Yogi Berra is reputed to have said. I know that he actually did say that because I asked him straight out at a birthday party for New York Giants' Michael Strahan. Yogi, in his own inimitable way, knows what he's talking about. The world around you is yours to interpret and to use. If you can make sense of what the world is telling you, you can tune your awareness like you would tune a radio, bringing in clearer and clearer signals for your own enjoyment and benefit.

So often, however, we see what we want to see (or not see). Our attention is unfocused. We selectively perceive the world around us, often missing other possibilities that may be staring us in the face. We fall into patterns that hide or confuse those other possibilities. This is the state most of us live in all our lives. It's called selective perception.

Not convinced? Try these deceptively simple perceptual tests. How many F's are in the following statement?

FINISHED FILES ARE THE RE-
SULT OF YEARS OF SCIENTIF-
IC STUDY COMBINED WITH THE
EXPERIENCE OF MANY YEARS.

If you counted three, you are wrong. There are six. Because the F in "of" sounds like a V, it seems to disappear. Habit makes us fail to perceive many things, and past-learned patterns create expectations to perceive in a particular way.

A good friend of mine, a sharp-minded CEO of a Fortune 500 company, was cited once for running a stop sign. He had been out of town for some time and the sign had been erected during his absence. His "pattern" had been to drive down that street without stopping, and because of that pattern, he did not realize that there was a stop sign until after he had gone through it. By the way, he paid his fine - pleading perceptual limitations is apparently a poor excuse in the eyes of the law.

Most of us stumble through life half-blinded and unaware of the new and exciting world around us every second. Inattention can lead to danger. Even as a kid, I knew this, though I probably wouldn't have put it like that. I would have said, "Don't go that way, there are snakes." Which is what I said to my brother when he wanted to go down a ravine and I didn't. I didn't know exactly why I thought there were snakes - my brother, by this time, knew me well enough to believe me and ventured no further. Later we found out that the area was literally infested with serpents. When I thought more about it, I realized that I had picked up on the visual cue of tiny holes in the banks of the ravine, holes that were indeed snakes' homes. It wasn't a conscious connection, but rather my attention looking out for signals. My radar antenna was way up then, and it's way up now. I pay attention, and I see more than most people. You can learn to do that too.