Be a Noticer (Your Creativity Depends On It)
It's 2024. It's high time we got some innovation in car horns.
(Stay with me, it's gonna get weirder before it gets better.)
Look, I don't know about you, but I'm out here every day trying to communicate many more things than this technology lets me. Sure, I can do "beep-beep!" (hi, friend!). I can bust out a reliable BEEP! (JERK!). I can even convey that rare but important BEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEeeeeeeoop. (WHAT THE LITERAL SH*T ARE YOU DOING ARE YOU SERIOUS RIGHT NOW YOU COULDA KILLED ME I HAVE HALF A MIND TO oh you're gone.)
But that's it. And that's insufficient. Automakers, get on this. Forget self-driving cars. Forget little fans in our seats to blow cool air on our backs and butts. Give me better horns. (Actually, please add the fans. When God created Italians, he went, "These people are much too beautiful, and they know it. I shall make them hairy and sweaty.")
In 2020, I found myself in desperate need of some car horn innovation (and probably some seat fans). Although you could argue nothing important happened that day, four years later, I can't stop thinking about it.
At the time, I was living in a big, brick building in Boston. Picture a middle school but with apartments inside.
Because it used to be a middle school.
But now it has apartments inside.
The building rises above a narrow one-way street lined with super old homes, like a lonely red lunchbox sitting among some twigs. For some reason, despite how cramped it makes the street, the town decided it was fine for people to park on both sides. That leaves barely enough room for a literal lunchbox to operate, let alone a car.
On afternoon, I turned onto my street and stopped. About halfway up, a car door blocked my road forward. The door belonged to a big black pickup truck, and the truck belonged to a woman who has haunted me since that moment.
The same way a car horn has various stages of beeps, a car door has various stages of open. This one was doing the "BEEEEEEEEeeeeeooop" version of opening. It wasn't cracked open. It wasn't open enough to let the driver out. It was shoved-to-the-point-of-straining-its-hinges open. In an abandoned town, this door was a nonissue, but on a one-way street in Boston? I almost called the local news.
Instead, I eased the car forward. The door stayed put. The driver hadn't noticed me yet.
I placed my palm on the horn, but I was too close to comfortably honk. I would scare the driver half to death.
As I crept closer, I saw a pale white leg with a blue sneaker at the end, dangling out the driver's side door. I took my hand off the horn and my foot off the brake. I could hear the engine rumbling. Why couldn't she? The tired crunched along the street. Brake. Release. Brake. Release.
Nothing. I tried everything except my horn to say to this driver:
Hey.
I'm right here.
Pay attention.
But the leg didn't move, and neither did the door. I got close enough to see the outlines of leaves from the maple trees above dancing on her leg. I eased forward yet again. I could see a freckle or two on her leg, as well as the owner of those freckles. I remember she looked really tiny in this huge truck, and a shock of blonde hair poked out the back of a blue baseball cap.
I crept the car forward juuuust a little more. I even gently pressed on the gas to rev the engine. (Yet another commentary on the sad stage of car horn innovation: I used my engine for the whispered reminders my horn was unable to share.)
At this point, it felt to me like the woman must be dead. Do I just hit the horn now and scare her straight through the roof? Do I shout at her? I had done everything in my power to deliver the driver's version of the pedestrian clearing their throat.
Hey.
I'm right here.
Pay attention.
But she didn't.
* * *
To this day, I don't know what happened next. Maybe I honked, or shouted, or eased close enough she heard me. I can't remember her face or why she failed to notice me that whole time. I'm assuming she was staring at her phone. Those details have been lost to time. But that moment refuses to follow suit. For four years, I have not been able to forget that moment. It's moved into my brain and set up camp. I just don't know what to do with it yet.
That's the gift and maybe curse of a storyteller. We notice things. Or at least, we're supposed to notice things. Then, once something has been noticed and perhaps sufficiently simmered in our brains, we put our butts in the chair (if only with some cooling fans inside), and we do the work of turning moments into stories. Because that's how stories actually happen. They're built. It's not a snapshot you're conveying but something you MADE.
In other words, you don't experience stories. You experience life. Then you use your abilities to turn that into stories.
I haven't had a clue what to do with that seemingly nothingburger of a moment in 2020. I only know I've been unable to forget it, right down to the shadows of those leaves and the crunch of the tire and the glint of the sun off the black door blocking me.
So here we are, you and I, writer and reader, creator and consumer. I am trying to make sense of this the only way I know how: by doing the work. Because that's how stories happen.
(You're sensing a theme.)
In the latest episode of my show, How Stories Happen, I'm joined by author and speaker Ann Handley. Together, we dissect a recent story about a seemingly throwaway moment in her day which she turned into an incredible story.
Ann shares the story of receiving a book in the mail. As an author, that's quite common for her. It wasn't a "mysterious" box. It wasn't wrapped in "ominous" packaging. It wasn't a newsworthy moment. It was just ... a moment. Like the time I encountered a woman dangling her leg from her truck, Ann's life experience contained no loud signal that this was a worthy story. It arrived quietly, without a blaring horn.
In the episode, she talks about seeing that book and debating whether and how to turn that into a story. (She does. It's great. We dissect it together after all.) I've heard Ann talk about a bunny in her backyard and a magazine she saw in Maine. On the show, she talks about seeing a squirrel in a tree, eating a piece of pizza. (Okay, so THAT one arrived with a friendly little beep-beep!)
"I am that squirrel," said Ann on the show, referencing a different squirrel, not pizza-squirrel, which is just the second of three total squirrel references made in the episode. Ann is constantly scurrying around, gathering up these little nuts, storing them away for safekeeping. Maybe they're something. Maybe they're not. But she spots them and saves them. That's the unglamorous but necessary part of being a storyteller that nobody on LinkedIn wants to talk about. Your job is to sift the mundane for meaning. Your job is NOT to experience outlandish things, then convey them beat for beat.
And so pizza-squirrel and regular squirrels and magazines and bunnies and books arriving in the mail -- and that woman with her damn door -- all get stuck in your brain and become material for making things.
That's what happens when you're a storyteller. More than structuring stories, you become good at something even more powerful in our work:
You become a noticer.
We talk about all these things in our work, and I know they matter: differentiating our brand positioning, writing and speaking and podcasting and video, building an audience, selling our offerings. But these things are downstream from what really matters. Are you saying anything that matters? Can you hold attention? Have you developed a premise to inform your work? Do you know anything about yourself? How about your audience? These are upstream from the things that sound like "the work." And if those are upstream, than the very source of the water itself is to be a noticer.
I think of it like this:
AI and people both rely on LLMs as their foundations. AI has large language models. People have little life moments.
But for the most part, we're not using our own LLMs enough. We're not using those moments to do the work that only we can do. Ask yourself why that might be true for you.
Maybe you're not taking those moments seriously. You notice stuff all the time, but nahhhh, that can't be material to use -- especially in your work.
Maybe you're not saving those moments consistently. You notice stuff all the time. Heck, you even take that stuff seriously and think it's useful material. But when it's time to do the work (or as Ann says on the show, "put your claws on the keys"), those moments have been lost, like a wisp of smoke in the tornado that is this work sometimes.
Maybe you're not noticing those moments at all. They're there. They're everywhere. But you're just drifting past them, numbing yourself like that woman and her damn door. You're staring at your phone, oblivious to the world, or you're looking around, but you're not really seeing what's around you.
Stop undervaluing your little life moments. Stop forgetting them. And for the love of pizza and squirrels and pizza-squirrels, stop numbing yourself to the world. Years ago, someone asked what I wished most for the world of content creators, and I said that I wished we had more sensitive creators. I don't mean we all see a dying flower and start crying. I mean we sense things around us. We remain open and use our senses.
My wish is that we become noticers.
Heading into today's writing, I had no idea what the story about the woman in the truck can be used for. I just know that, in my work, whenever I notice something that seems mundane and can't seem to shake it, if I put my butt in the chair and turn that into a story, it tends to go with me everywhere. It becomes a signature story, capable of teaching and inspiring and delivering my message and building my audience everywhere I go. It's not a signature story because I tell it everywhere. It's a signature story because I've found a way to sign my name to it.
"How do we all sign our work?" asks Ann on the show -- and in the story we dissect together from her newsletter.
It starts with paying attention and taking our observations, memories, and emotions more seriously.
Again, starting this piece today, I didn't know that the story about the truck door would map to the episode of my show, and the overlap would be the idea of noticing. That woman clearly didn't notice me or anything. It all makes sense now, and from here onward -- in social content, during guest interviews, during my own episodes, during speeches and books and more -- I can continue to refine that story so it hits harder. Because while I experienced that moment, I did not experience a story. You're now part of me trying to turn that moment INTO a story.
Is the version you got today the "right" version? Hardly. Is the insight I extracted the "right" way to say that? Nope. But It feels like I've got the raw material, and now it's time to cook. Because that's what I aspire to be as a storyteller. A chef. I shop for ingredients in the store called Whole Life (as in, mine), and I come home with all this ... stuff. Maybe it's something. Maybe it's not. Only by saving it, then shaping it, does the story emerge.
This work is creative nonfiction, after all. We are not stenographers, capturing the world beat for beat. We are storytellers. We are not impartial actors, unmoved and unfeeling. Just the opposite. Much more than conveying what happened, stories convey how it made us feel. As Ishiguro said, "Stories are like one person saying to another, 'This is how it feels to me. Can you understand what I'm saying? Does it also feel this way to you?'"
I have kept that moment with the woman and her car door inside my brain until now. It haunted me. For four years! It was time to turn a moment into a story. It happens messy, then less messy, then a little bit less messy. But it has to HAPPEN. A story is built, not experienced.
If you want to tell more or different stories, if you want to differentiate your content or your entire platform, and of course, if you want to resonate with others, not just reach them, then it's time to rely on your own LLMs.
Every day, you are surrounded by ideas and material. They just don't blast their horns at you.
Every day, you are surrounded by little life moments. Take them seriously. Save them consistently. But above all, notice them.
Hey.
Pay attention.
I'm right here.