CHAPTER 10
What Are These Bells For? The Art of Listening to Yourself
WHAT IF, BEFORE you told anyone else, you first had to test out all your ideas on a Magic 8 Ball? You would explain your plan, ask the ball if it was a good idea, shake the ball, and the ball would give any of a range of answers, including “Yes,” “My reply is no,” and “Ask again later.”
We intuitively understand the absurdity of letting the Magic 8 Ball evaluate our thoughts and dash our hopes. But the reality is that the Magic 8 Ball would probably be a better sounding board than the next person you share an idea with. True, the Magic 8 Ball’s responses are random, but at least it will never fall prey to the double-problem perspective.
Other people get caught in the morass of the problem you are facing. They get stuck in the details of the problem. Then, when you find a way to climb over the problem, other people look for a problem with your solution. The Magic 8 Ball, on the other hand, offers positive responses 50 percent of the time.
To give yourself a chance to find a solution, you must listen to your own voice. The solution is within you. But when you find the solution, the biggest threat you will face is letting someone else speak over your voice.
Other people will say no. Other people will share their doubts. It’s not because you are wrong—it’s because that’s what other people do. They see the problem. If they could see a solution, they would have come up with one.
Unconstrained thought is power. It’s your access to the answer. Every other voice is a harness that slows you down.
When it really matters, a single mind creates action, while a meeting of the minds creates hesitation and doubt.
Listen now.
You have the answer. The solution is within you. Listen to it.
* * *
HOW DO YOU get people to do their very best work? Tell them what to do, show them, tell them again. Yell at them, remind them, restrict their options so that they have to do it the right way. Keep them at high alert. Pester them, insult them, do whatever is necessary to make clear what you want and make anything else unacceptable.
At least, that’s how movies generally work. At the center of the bluster and buzz of activity is a director, barking out orders and tracking every detail to ensure that his vision comes to life.
How did Clint Eastwood direct Gene Hackman, Sean Penn, Tim Robbins, Morgan Freeman, and Hilary Swank to Academy Award–winning performances? He did the opposite of all of those things.
Eastwood wants his actors to act, not to dangle on the end of a string he pulls. He wants his actors mentally engaged with the scene, not constantly drawn out by instructions and shouting and a sense of impending calamity. He believes the best work comes from talented individuals working to the very best of their ability, not from having one collective vision imposed on them.
Eastwood puts so much trust in his actors and their instincts that some initially question if they are up to the job. Tim Robbins, who won an Academy Award for his performance in Eastwood’s Mystic River, said he initially felt intimidated by the freedom Eastwood provides actors to shape their performances. “You wonder if you can do it,” Robbins said, “and then you find out very quickly, you can.”
The process starts long before an actor steps onto the set. Eastwood doesn’t want screen tests from his actors. He doesn’t want to see how they would interpret the work when they know the least about the story and the character. He doesn’t want them to feel trapped by their initial portrayal, or to think that they must replicate that for the film. Instead, he only looks at actors’ previous work and thinks about what they would be capable of achieving in his films.
Eastwood’s sets are calm. There are no bells ringing, no assistants running around shouting; no one snaps the clapper in an actor’s face. No one is paid to interrupt and startle his actors and knock them out of their thoughts.
Eastwood had an inclination toward quiet sets, but it crystallized when he took a break from directing to star in In the Line of Fire. “I walked on the set for In the Line of Fire, and there were bells going off,” Eastwood explained. “There is a certain jarringness to the nerves when there’s noise. And I said, ‘What are these bells for? There isn’t a fire.’ And the assistant was yelling, and I said, ‘Now just relax. If you’re yelling, everyone is going to be yelling to get over your yelling. So just talk quietly and everybody will talk quietly along with you.’”
Because Eastwood believes that the best performances come from within, not without, he’s quiet, too. He doesn’t direct by watching the monitors; he watches the actors. And if he feels something, he’s knows it’s working. Instead of offering constant notes on the actors’ performances, Eastwood doesn’t have much to say at all. He doesn’t offer his actors endless analysis of endless takes of each scene. In fact, he can’t do that, because he doesn’t do endless takes. Once or twice is enough for him.
The actors know that if they go for something emotionally draining, something just so, they need not worry about trying to robotically repeat the moment a dozen times. Actors thrive on the energy of knowing a great first take will be in the movie.
No one even shouts “Action!” on the set of an Eastwood movie, because no one would shout “Action!” in the lives of any of these characters. He wants his actors in the mind-set of their characters, not snapping into it like a machine. “I never could understand why the directors always had to yell, ‘Action,’” Eastwood said. “It’s kind of an adrenaline thing, but in certain scenes you don’t want adrenaline.”
Instead, Eastwood will start the cameras with a few quiet words—“Let’s do this and see how it goes”—or with just a subtle roll of his finger. At times he films when the actors think they are just rehearsing, because he wants them to capture performances that feel freer, more natural and comfortable.
Most other directors shoot everything that happens in duplicate, with one camera recording film meant to be used in the final product and the other creating a disposable video for the director to watch on site to assess whether the scene worked. Eastwood, on the other hand, doesn’t stop the production to watch the video and evaluate what he has. In fact, he doesn’t even bother making the duplicate video copy. That means that when the scene is over he moves right on to the next one. The process feels more natural. And the actors don’t have to constantly step out of character, because they’ll be filming again shortly.
Eastwood’s philosophy of directing comes down to a very simple premise: Do not get in the way. People will do their very best work when you let them. Morgan Freeman won an Academy Award when Eastwood directed him in Million Dollar Baby. He believes Eastwood’s approach brought out his very best work, and that you could take what Eastwood does and apply it to running a business, a team, or life in general. “What Clint Eastwood learned long ago, and can teach the rest of us, is that people get off being left alone to do their jobs,” Freeman said. “All he asks is that you come ready, just like him.”
* * *
WARNED THAT THINGS were so bad in town that 50 percent of the children dropped out before finishing high school, Maurice Lim Miller’s response caught his guide off guard. “Tell me about the other fifty percent,” Miller said. “How do they make it through?”
And that is the essence of Miller’s approach to battling poverty. In a social services universe built around what people can’t do, Miller wants to understand what they can.
For many years Miller led an organization that worked very hard to lift people out of poverty with a traditional approach. They came into a family’s life and they inserted themselves in everything. He vividly remembers the feeling when he accompanied one of his organization’s social workers on a home visit. The family members were all newly arrived refugees who had fled genocide, navigated pirate-filled waters, and made their way to the other side of the world to begin new lives. And there the mother of the family stood, being lectured by a social worker half her age, told what she needed to do, where and when to do it. The mother submitted to the lecture, but across the room, her teenage son seethed with the indignity of it.
Miller understood the absurdity of the exchange. Here was his very well-meaning but sheltered social worker instructing a woman of boundless strength and fortitude on how to live her life. This was backwards. What, Miller wondered, could that woman teach us?
The social worker saw the woman as she had been trained to see her—as a case, as a problem, as someone defined by what she lacked. The woman didn’t have the money necessary to provide for her family right now, and the social worker was there to address this problem.
But much as Clint Eastwood doubted the value of telling an actor how to act, Miller recoiled from telling poor people how to be poor.
Beyond his own organization, Miller came to believe that almost every social service organization was set up around the same understanding of the poverty problem. “There is such a strong stereotype about the nation’s poor—being low-income means being broken—that no one is interested [in] or even willing to consider and learn from low-income families,” Miller said. In his experience, the policymakers, professionals, organizations, activists, and people who dole out grant money all see the world that way.
When Miller was a young boy, his mother struggled to keep food on the table. But asking for help was so demeaning that his mother simply couldn’t bear it. Miller saw poverty through his mother’s eyes, he saw it as that refugee family lived it, he saw it in every person assumed to be broken. He knew that when we give out help, we extract a price in pride, self-determination, and control. Getting help almost requires giving up. It requires adopting the same problem mind-set of the helpers. “The focus on need undermines our ability to see their strengths,” Miller said of the way we respond to the poor. “And it undermines their ability to see their own strengths.”
Miller wanted to break out of that mind-set. We need to take the blinders off, as he puts it. No more assumptions about what poor people lack. No more assumptions about the need for the poor to be told what to do.
Miller cast away the basic definition of the poor person problem, and it led him to an entirely new approach.
He started what he called the Family Independence Initiative with two dozen families in Oakland. He didn’t hire any social workers, and he didn’t tell these families what to do. Instead, he asked.
He asked the family members what they wanted to do with their lives. He asked how they were going to reach their aspirations. He asked: What’s the plan? What’s next?
Breaking his families into three groups, he brought each group together as a ready-made social network of people who shared similar challenges and could look out for each other. He scheduled meetings for each group once a month and asked all involved to keep careful track of their goals and their efforts.
He had one firm rule for his staff. Never tell anyone what to do, and never tell anyone how to do it.
While the typical cost per family of a full-scale social service intervention was several times larger than Miller’s budget, he believed that putting a computer in each household and offering no more than $200 a month in temporary assistance could help move these families toward their goals and ultimately have a transformative effect. “Poor people are not in free fall,” Miller explained. “They don’t need nets, they need springboards.”
The effects were eye-opening. Family incomes jumped. People started savings accounts for the first time. Almost a third started some kind of business. The effects were not just financial. Miller’s efforts all but eliminated the disastrous combination of desperation and isolation as the number of people in the program who said they had friends they could count on more than tripled over two years, to 91 percent.
The steps people in the program took may seem tiny, but the effects were monumental. Tamara, a single mother in San Francisco, had a steady job but faced a monthly struggle to pay the bills and the rent. When she joined the program she announced her goal: She wanted to be a city bus driver. Asked to lay out a concrete plan to reach her goal, she spelled out the steps that would get her to driving school and qualify her for driving a bus. The monthly meetings with other families gave her a sense of accountability, a need to show that she was serious and making progress.
She saved up enough to take a week off from her job to attend bus driving school. She aced the driving lessons and was a bus driver within weeks. The new salary was a security blanket. The fear that the money would run out before the month was over was gone. She started saving for a down payment on a house—and within two years she had moved her family into their first house.
Miller created the Family Independence Initiative because he didn’t listen to what everyone else had to say about poverty. Now he asks the people he works with to do one thing: listen to themselves. “I didn’t have the answer for Tamara’s life,” Miller happily admits. “She did.”
* * *
IT’S SOME KIND of consumer preference study. They are going to ask you if you like some new kind of game or puzzle or something.
Pretty easy way to make a few dollars, and it won’t take very long.
You are met at the door by a woman. She’s a market researcher. She tells you she will be showing you some new products today and asking about your reaction.
As she leads you inside, you walk by an office with an open door. It’s a plain room, with a desk, a chair, a filing cabinet, and a large bookcase piled high with stacks of files and papers.
She takes you to the conference room next door. You now see it’s actually part of the same room as that first office, separated by one of those accordion-style retractable room dividers.
The woman tells you that she has a questionnaire for you to fill out with questions on your interests and shopping habits. She says that while you fill out the form, she is going to do some work in her office. She will be back in ten minutes.
As you take a look at the questions, you hear her shuffling papers around on the other side of the accordion wall. You hear drawers open and close.
Four minutes later, though, it sounds as if the woman is moving something around in her office. If you listen closely, you hear her climb onto her chair. Apparently she’s reaching for something on the top shelf of the bookcase.
And then the chair gives way. You hear a crash and a thud and a scream. The woman has fallen.
“Oh, my God, my foot … I … I … can’t move it. Oh … my ankle,” she cries.
“I … can’t get this … thing … off me,” the woman wails. The bookcase must have fallen on her.
She cries and moans.
What do you do?
Do you slide back the divider and see if you can help? Or walk around and go through the door?
Do you call out to her and ask if she needs help?
Do you just sit there and think about it, doing nothing to actually help?
This was, of course, the point of the experiment. There were no puzzles or games. There was only a carefully staged accident occurring just a few feet way. Did you help?
There was one key difference between those who got up to help and those who sat and did nothing. People who were alone when they filled out the questionnaire moved quickly to help the woman.1 People who sat in the room with others filling out the survey at the same time usually did nothing at all. In fact, subjects who were alone were ten times more likely to help the woman than subjects who sat with others.
Why would there be such a huge difference? Everyone was hearing the same sounds of distress—the thumps and moans and cries were all coming from the same recording, so they were identical. Everyone was mere feet away from an injured woman. You didn’t even have to get out of your chair to call out to her. You didn’t even have to leave the room to peek behind the accordion wall. But if there was someone else there, that was too much to ask. Why?
As study authors Bibb Latané and Judith Rodin put it, “Bystanders look to others for guidance before acting.”
With another person in the room, there was something else to factor in besides the needs of the injured woman—there was your standing relative to others. Are you doing the right thing? Are you overreacting? What does the other person think about what I’m doing? With another person there, we want our response validated.
When two or more people “overheard the emergency, they seemed noticeably confused and concerned, attempting to interpret what they heard and to decide on a course of action,” Latané and Rodin wrote. “They often glanced furtively at one another, apparently anxious to discover the other’s reaction yet unwilling to meet eyes and betray their own concern.”
It’s not that you don’t care when you’re in a group. But you want to care in the correct fashion.
When no one came to her aid, the researcher ultimately wriggled her way free and came limping through the door several minutes later. She asked people why they had not responded to her distress. No one said he or she was waiting to see what another person did. No one.
And that is the real power of group surrender. Not only do we place our ideas and our priorities behind others, but we surrender independence without even noticing we’ve put up the white flag.
When the woman came limping out, the subjects who had ignored her cries did not apologize. They did not take stock of themselves and swear to think for themselves from now on. The subjects couldn’t see what they had done as being wrong, because they had obviously acted within boundaries the rest of the group found acceptable.
For the person sitting alone, however, there was no desperate hesitation. The same clear, internal voice that guides Clint Eastwood’s actors and Maurice Lim Miller’s participants guided them to act fast after the crash. That clear internal voice made them ready to help. It made them able to identify what needed to be done and do it. When we listen to our own voice, we are not trapped inside a problem wrapped inside another problem. When we listen to our own voice, we jump at the solution.
“There may be safety in numbers,” Latané and Rodin concluded, “but these experiments suggest that if you are involved in an emergency, the best number of bystanders is one.”
One bystander thinks and acts independently. One bystander genuinely responds. He doesn’t gauge where he stands compared to others and measure their inclinations against his. One is the number for strong, decisive action, whether someone is trapped under a bookcase or needs to climb out of a dangerous and degrading life.
* * *
ONCE A WHORE, always a whore. The stinging words came out every time Miranda said she wanted to leave the life and go what they called “straight.”
In fact, every time Miranda would tell one of the other prostitutes she knew that she needed to find something else to do with her life, she would hear the litany of reasons why it would never happen. She would never find a job that paid like this, if she was even lucky enough to ever find any job. She would never be able to fit into a button-down world anyway. And was she really going to be out there cutting the grass and painting the fence at the perfect little dream house she imagined living in?
When you boiled it all down, she couldn’t stay in the life and she couldn’t get out. Everyone else in the business saw the problem that was her life—and their lives, too—and told her just to accept it and give up, as they had.
As much as she couldn’t stand the negativity from her peers, she had trouble figuring out how she could prove them wrong. She wondered what the first step to a regular life was. Quitting the life without something to do, without even a plan, seemed way too risky. But continuing to work while she figured things out was too depressing. She didn’t know what to do to make what she needed to happen possible.
She did at least have her unusual hobby to lean on as a diversion. It was good for stress relief, a little humor, and even a little sense of triumph.
Miranda combined her professional expertise, her technological savvy, and a detective’s eye for the detail that wasn’t quite right into what she called her one-woman working girl’s truth squad.
One by one, she had dedicated herself to revealing phonies, scams, and setups in the local prostitution industry. If something about a photo in an online ad didn’t look quite right to her—maybe the lighting was just too good, or the angle of it suggested someone had really thought this through, or maybe the setting seemed too exotic and too far removed for a local girl—she labeled it a potential phony. Miranda then scoured the Internet looking for its source. Often the photo turned up in use by different prostitutes in different cities, all claiming to look just that good.
Miranda created her own online database of phony photos to warn her clients and anyone else that the woman in the photo wasn’t really going to be there when they showed up. The fake photo was just meant to lure clients to the door—on the assumption that once they showed up they would have expended too much time and effort to up and leave at the sight of the actual, less attractive prostitute.
Miranda was also on the lookout for prostitutes who changed their working names. That smelled like a scam to her. She would try to link together the various names used by a woman, and then collect the comments made by her previous clients. Often the point of the name change was to bury a bad reputation for mistreating clients or stealing their money in a cash and dash scam. In its simplest form, a cash and dash prostitute would insist on being paid in full and in advance before heading inside to secure a hotel room. Instead of returning to the client with the room key, the prostitute leaves out the back door and is long gone before the client thinks to look for her. Variations include taking the money inside her apartment and then stepping into the bathroom to freshen up, only to have a frightening boyfriend type emerge from another room asking the man what he’s doing there. Nobody ever gets their money back in these situations.
The other major red flag Miranda was on the lookout for was suspected police stings. When Miranda saw an ad for a new provider who insisted the client come to her but who was entirely vague about the experience and the price, she marked it as likely coming from Uncle Leo (that is, a law enforcement officer). The police could not get too far into the details—that would constitute entrapment. And they wanted to control the setting, so they insisted that clients come to them.
It was, she understood, a business of liars and cheats. But Miranda thought it didn’t have to be. She believed every time someone was scammed, it just made it harder for her to keep the trust of a client and earn a living. And it was kind of fun picking out the phonies and shining her online spotlight on them.
It turned out that serving as kind of a Better Business Bureau for prostitution was doubly good for her business. Miranda wound up earning the loyalty of numerous clients—people she had saved from being scammed, stolen from, or arrested.
More than that, it turned out that it was her hobby that got her safely out of the business.
Enmeshed in a lengthy investigation of an escort agency website she suspected was fishy but that she couldn’t quite pin down, Miranda turned to a message board favored by technology geeks and hackers. She described her interest in what she called “Internet sales scams” and asked for help cracking open a suspicious website.
Her question brought forth a flood of responses, including several that helped her see the coding underlying the site and figure out where it originated. After Miranda thanked the board for its help, one poster asked Miranda to contact him.
Nervous that one of these hackers had figured out her profession and was going to try to make life more difficult for her, Miranda nevertheless took a leap of faith and dashed off a quick message.
She was right. The poster did know what she did. But he was writing because he wanted to know if she was interested in a new line of work. The man ran an online reputation firm. Companies hired his company to make sure that their competitors were not manipulating reviews and trying to alter the market on phony grounds. Based on her keen eye for manipulation, the man thought Miranda might be a strong fit for his team.
He called her to discuss. The money was good. The hours were flexible. There was no rigid dress code. Miranda wanted to accept his offer before he’d finished making it. But then she caught herself. She asked for twenty-four hours to think it over. He said of course. She spent the time figuring out how the offer might be a scam.
But she couldn’t find anything wrong with the man or the company. She quit her old job that day.
Miranda doesn’t look back with scorn on the colleagues who told her she’d never get out. They couldn’t see what was possible for her—and there were many times she couldn’t see it, either. “But I never stopped. I never thought that was all I could be,” she said. “And it turned out I was right.”
* * *
FOR JOE COULOMBE, there was one guiding principle he followed in starting his company and guiding it for almost three decades: Don’t do what everybody else does.
Today, being different has brought his namesake store, Trader Joe’s, a devoted following of shoppers who rave about the Greek yogurt and the pita crackers and the array of products that they can’t get anywhere else. With Trader Joe’s now in thirty-one states, fans who move to regions of the country without a store have even been known to launch massive petition drives pleading with the company to expand near them.
It’s all enough to propel the company to more sales per square foot of store space than anyone else in the supermarket industry and a first-place ranking in consumer satisfaction. Trader Joe’s profits are so reliable that, unlike its major competitors, it has no debt and keeps more than enough cash on hand to finance the construction of new locations.
It all started with a commitment to be different from the competition. When the supermarket industry was transforming from the modest-sized stores of the 1950s into the mega-stores common today, Trader Joe’s was founded with stores one-fifth the size of a typical market. And it refuses to knock out walls to get bigger.
When he first started sketching out the Trader Joe’s concept, friends in the industry told Coulombe that, in order to survive, he would need bigger stores, with more items. People want a store where they can get everything, they said. If you try to compete on the strength of a store that’s about the size of two supermarket aisles, they warned him, you’ll quickly be forgotten.
Coulombe believed he could work with what he had and make it an advantage. He would just make those two aisles unforgettable.
The size of his stores, though, was an accident of its legacy. Before Trader Joe’s, Coulombe had run a group of Southern California convenience stores that were dying against intense competition.
For Coulombe, losing the stores would be like a Los Angeles Dodger striking out against a little league pitcher. He had an MBA from Stanford. He had been hired by his previous employer to learn everything there was to know about convenience stores. And after he helped that company launch its new convenience stores, he thought they were so promising he bought the stores himself. He was supposed to succeed beyond his imagining. And now, for all his credentials, he was failing at the simplest of businesses.
What could he possibly do to bring people to his stores? He didn’t see an angle that would help him beat bigger chains with lower operating costs. But what would happen, he wondered, if he kept the convenience of his stores and the low prices but ditched all the chewing gum and potato chips and products people could buy everywhere and replaced all that with good stuff people couldn’t get anywhere else?
He built the store around intriguing food items no one else had. When people found the wine or the sauce or the cracker or the cheese they loved, he hoped they would keep coming back for more. And because getting into and out of his stores was quick and easy, shoppers didn’t mind that Joe didn’t stock half the items on their grocery list.
Over the years, consultants told him again and again to fix that problem. They said he was limiting his own profits and missing an opportunity to expand beyond his niche because there were too many supermarket items Trader Joe’s didn’t carry. There was a limit to how far you could go on ten kinds of hummus and zero kinds of beer, they told him. But Joe understood, from his convenience store days, that if he offered what everybody else had, not many people would bother to come to his little store. “We adopted a policy of not carrying anything we could not be outstanding in,” he said. If it didn’t help differentiate his store, what was the point? In the process, Joe built a connection with customers that couldn’t be shaken by the competition.
Joe built a unique connection with his store staff as well. Instead of following standard industry practice by paying near minimum wage and dividing the labor into rigidly specified tasks, he did the opposite. He set annual salaries at the median income of the store’s region. He gave everyone who worked in the store the responsibility to serve the customer’s needs first, so that whenever the checkout line backed up, every single employee was available to work the register or bag the groceries. It didn’t take an MBA to see the return on this investment. Because they are well paid and engaged in the business, the staff is loyal to the company and turnover is lowest in the supermarket industry. Because they know the entire store and its products so well, the customer gets better service from a staff that can actually recommend products based on their personal experience.
There is also a little bit of adventure baked into a Trader Joe’s visit. Despite the limited array of products, new items are continually introduced and certain existing items are phased out. Shoppers never know if they are going to stumble onto a new favorite when they come to the store. And the product buyers at Trader Joe’s work to ensure that when they do offer something new, it’s not the same trendy food item customers see everywhere but, instead, the next trend that hasn’t happened yet.
“In that respect, we are not a conventional grocery store,” Joe said. “We’re closer to the fashion business than the supermarket business. And the reason we are so distinct is that when everyone told me I was wrong about this, I knew I must be onto something good.”
THE TAKEAWAY
Clint Eastwood gets Oscar-winning performances out of his actors because he doesn’t leave them worrying every minute about what he thinks. Maurice Lim Miller is transforming lives because he believes people have their own best answers. Trader Joe’s is an industry leader and Miranda is living her dream because neither would listen when told to be just like all the rest.
The people around you can see your problem clearly, and, given the chance, they will see the problem in your answer. More importantly, if we are not careful, we’ll let others do the thinking for us. We are ten times more likely to help someone in distress when we are alone because alone we can think for ourselves and see answers more clearly.
There’s a reason your hometown is covered in Stop signs and not a single Go sign. Because go is natural. Go is automatic. Go is what we’d do all the time if we listened to our own voice. Stop is what other people say to us.
TWO FOR THE ROAD: TAKING YOUR ANSWER FORWARD
Ignore the critic. Take the next criticism you get and ignore it. Don’t worry about it. Don’t answer it. Don’t give it a thought. Larry Ellison, the CEO of computer services giant Oracle, warns that when you have a great, innovative idea, “you’ve got to be prepared for everyone telling you you’re nuts.” Indeed, Ellison said he cannot remember a single major decision he’s made at the company that didn’t draw fire from critics. “Sometimes people just throw labels at you and throw criticisms around that are not rational,” he said. Instead, he ignores the doubters. “I let it go because you can’t change behavior that you think is right just because someone is calling you names.”
Be mindful. Half the people in a University of Toronto study received lessons on mindfulness principles such as being slow to judge and being readily open to exploring new ideas. The other half did not. Then they all took what amounted to a distraction test, with unpleasant images periodically shown to see if they could be knocked off the task at hand. Those who had not had the mindfulness lesson wasted 276 percent more time on the useless, negative distraction photos.2 Take a moment today to appreciate being open. Take a moment today to give yourself permission to see things differently. Take a moment today to be mindful, and you’ll waste less time on what doesn’t matter and open a clear path for your own ideas.