WHEN FUTURE CNN Hero Derreck Kayongo stepped out of his hotel shower with questions about a tiny bar of soap, he never dreamed that one small observation could have such a large, international impact. In the five years since he was inspired to found Global Soap Project, Kayongo has seen his initial idea for reusing refuse multiply many times over. What started as simply taking discarded bars of soap from American hotels, disinfecting them, and distributing them to people in his native Uganda who had no way to even wash their hands quickly turned into a hygiene revolution. His charity has since evolved to help curb the spread of Ebola in Sierra Leone and work with midwives to stop preventable puerperal sepsis, also known as “childbed fever,” which regularly kills newly delivered mothers in developing countries. And in an initiative that brings his entrepreneurial and humanitarian journey full circle, Kayongo now provides micro-loans to local soap makers, like his father, so they can contribute to making their own communities healthier.
Most surprising, though, are the transformations Kayongo has personally witnessed. During his very first delivery of five thousand newly recycled bars of soap to a village in Kisumu, Kenya, things didn’t go according to plan.
He recalls, “The mamas lined up with their children, smiling and laughing, as I piled the bars on little tables. I told them the story of the soap. I said, this is no ordinary bar of soap. It has been made lovingly by American volunteers just for you. This is the soap of hope.”
When he returned the next morning to see how the women liked the soap, he learned that most of them had been afraid to use it.
“You said it was the soap of hope,” they told him. “That it was made lovingly just for us. We could not use something so precious!”
“Oh no!” he remembers saying. “I told them, you must use it! You must go bathe!”
Then one of the villagers, a thin woman with large, dancing eyes, came up to him and confessed that she had used her bar but not in the way he imagined.
She said, “I took the bar of soap, it smelled so beautiful, and I put a little bit of water on it and I applied it all over my whole body.”
“All over?” Kayongo asked.
“Yes, all over,” she said, smiling. “And I did not rinse it off.”
“Why?” he asked.
She answered, “Because I have never smelled like a girl before.”
Kayongo was overwhelmed with the realization that when we recognize and act upon even the smallest of things, we have the power to change lives.
This is the true lesson of seeing what matters—that noticing the overlooked, the ordinary, or the seemingly unimportant can not only help solve our initial problem or cement our success, it can also produce unexpected, paradigm-shifting, and beautiful by-products. Side effects that impact us and the world around us more than we ever thought possible. The unwrapped bar of soap saves lives. A grainy photograph of a cow evolved from a lesson on visual acuity to a military training program that accurately detected enemy aircraft during World War II. A zipperless zipper inspired by burrs in nature changed the fashion industry but also made living and working in space possible.
What I teach is not rocket science. With all due respect to the rocket scientists of the world, I think it’s better. Because when you reawaken your senses and re-engage your sense of inquiry, the possibilities for transformative change are endless.
While I’ve gotten thousands of testimonials through the years from past participants of The Art of Perception, I was surprised and delighted to receive the first one for this book before it was even published. It came from the only person who could have given it, since no one else had been able to read the book yet: my editor, Eamon Dolan, a first-rate professional communicator who I didn’t think needed additional lessons in perception.
After months of being immersed in my world (and my manuscript), he was on the subway headed to work when he noticed a woman across the aisle who seemed uncomfortable. She was searching through her purse frantically, and she appeared to be sobbing. When she started coughing and gasping, a couple of people asked her what was wrong, but she couldn’t talk. As the train pulled into a station, a few passengers just looked at one another as if wondering what to do, and one tried to comfort the woman.
Eamon ran out of the car and down the platform to the middle of the train, where he found the conductor with her window open.
“You need to take this train out of service now and call for medical assistance,” Eamon said. “There’s a woman in the second car—I think she’s having an asthma attack, and she can’t find her inhaler.”
The train stayed in the station, cops and EMTs arrived, and they took care of the woman. As they helped her off the train, she was still breathing heavily, but she’d stopped coughing and could talk. She confirmed that she was having an asthma emergency and couldn’t locate her rescue inhaler. Since 80 percent of asthma deaths can be prevented with normal medical treatment but often occur when adults forget to carry an inhaler, Eamon may have saved this woman’s life.
“Before I edited your book,” he told me afterward, “I wouldn’t have done that. Not because I didn’t give a damn but because I wouldn’t have observed as closely as I did, acted as quickly as I did, or communicated as well as I did. Working on your book gave me the habit of observing my surroundings better—so I knew that the woman and I were in the second car from the front of the train, I noticed the woman behaving oddly, and I remembered that conductors sit in the middle of trains and usually open their windows in stations, unlike the motormen, who sit at the front.”
Visual Intelligence hadn’t just sharpened his observation skills; it also helped him establish a new pattern of thinking. As he went on to list the processes he had instantly engaged in, he might as well have been walking me through the chapters of the book. He recognized that other passengers saw the situation differently, and he didn’t let that alter his own perceptions (chapter 3). He noted the who, what, when, and where of the scene (chapter 4). He perceived details such as the specific number car he’d boarded (chapter 5), he analyzed the scene from different angles (chapter 6), and he guessed what was missing: an asthma inhaler (chapter 7). He also told me that chapter 7’s lesson on how to prioritize information on the fly had stuck with him, so he knew to tell the conductor the most urgent thing first: to stop the train rather than pulling out of the station. And he packaged his observations with a message tailored specifically for his listener (chapter 8).
“You made me more alert to word choice than I would have been otherwise,” he said. “So I used the MTA’s language—‘out of service,’ ‘medical assistance’—so the conductor might take in my message more easily and quickly.”
He concluded that Visual Intelligence had given him the courage to act fast and make an educated guess about what was ailing the woman despite having incomplete information (chapter 11). I understood this last bit the best—and the rush of happiness that comes with it—because it’s how I felt after the police told me I’d helped bust a prostitution ring in the hotel. When you tap into your visual intelligence, you are transformed—into a super sleuth, a case cracker, and a guardian angel all in one. You feel like you’ve uncovered a secret world that’s been right there all along.
Every day I’m fortunate enough to watch as people from around the world—high school teachers, intelligence operatives, Fortune 500 CEOs, students, civil servants, and stay-at-home parents—uncover a power they didn’t know they had. The same power you have. It’s why I can’t stop teaching The Art of Perception, and why I am so thrilled to share the same “secrets” with you. I cannot wait to hear about how you change your own life and the lives of those around you by using the faculties and fantastic abilities you were born with.
Remember in your quest for the big picture not to lose sight of the small details.
Don’t be afraid of complexity, and don’t rush to judgment. Step back and take things apart one layer at a time the way you would a complicated work of art. Start at ground zero. Prioritize by importance. Make sure you’ve considered all of the data possible. Did you miss a mahogany table?
Always ask questions, especially of yourself. No matter how “obvious” it seems to you, state what you see, because it’s possible that no one else will see it. Don’t forget the basics; say that one scene is a photo and one is a painting. To crystallize your communication, assume that the person you are communicating with can’t see what you’re seeing at all. Ask yourself, “Was I as clear as possible? Did I ask the right questions to elicit the answers I need?”
Make sure you are only dealing in objective facts. Describe what you see without letting your emotions and assumptions block your perception. Don’t divorce yourself from your experience, but be conscious of it and how it might affect you so it doesn’t lead you toward faulty assumptions.
When we choose to see the world differently, with a critical eye, we are choosing to be exceptional. To help you realize how far you’ve come and how exceptional you now are, I invite you to go back and look at one of our very first paintings, The Portrait by René Magritte on page 23. What was first a simple, if odd, still life—or perhaps a picture skimmed over without thought—is now ripe with possibility. Note the relationships and juxtapositions, the smudges and the sharp reflections, the textures, the smells, the realistic, and the fantastic. What do you see now that you didn’t before? The painting itself did not change. You did. Now you’re seeing what matters.