Not very observant

Post Reply New Topic

Hi,

I have a problem that I want to express here that I am wondering two things about 1) whether other people have experienced this and 2) what strategies they have to manage it or train it.

I'm not very observant. This is important because At 37 I finally have my first adult job as a developer. But, I kind of suck at it, and the main weakness I have is that I seem to miss simple things. Like, I'll have a problem and after hours of sitting eventually discover that I just missed something which seemed like an obvious observation that somebody could have figured out in a minute. Before you tell me that that is just normal, in my case I think its a good deal worse.

I used to be very into chess, at my peak my USCF rating was 2009 which is pretty decent. But, that experience taught me that the way I played was alot different then most of the other chess players I interacted with. Other people seemed alot faster at making observations, discovering features of the position they were looking at and were much better/faster at expressing that in what is called the "post mortem" after the game is over(for me when I look at one thing I often forget about another and I could just never keep up on the fly, often when I was the much stronger player ). Also I was absolutely horrrible at blitz. Where even amateur unrated players could beat me. And what it came down to was I'm a glacially slow thinker who frequently misses details which I feel should have been obvious and simple to see.

I read alot of stories growing up, and when I'm reading stories I"m often in the habit of skipping over parts and instead just going for the abstract understanding of what is happening at a given moment. I wonder if that was where the problem started, or I"ve just always been like this. When I try to study math where the information seems to be crammed into a much more dense space, I have a hard time sitting there and going step by step, its like I just want to jump ahead and then I'm lost.

It feels like, observing things even tires me out very quickly and I don't like to do it. So can anyone else relate to this, and if so have you succeeded in improving your "fluency" at observing detail?

You're not alone. I've the same issues.

It's part of the ADD

Yet, sometimes, I can look at someone else's code and almost immediately find their problem.

My attention has gotten a lot more fragmented since I started surfing the 'net. I don't think that the faster cuts of modern video editing are doing me any good at all, either. You could try rationing those, or using the antidote, which is meditation.
Observation is trickier than it seems. One problem is the persistence of visual memory. Two tricks that can help are 1: Checklists. Every pilot uses them. 2: Follow the plot, not the objects. If you are verifying a chain of events, you have to look at every part, not just the big ones.
Are you a Real Estate Developer?