Expect the Unexpected
Feeling disappointed, I continued to float across the surface of the water. I had been snorkeling for nearly 15 minutes at this point and hadn't seen a single fish. I was about to give up and head back to the catamaran when I heard someone shout something about an eel.
An eel!? Where!? I see nothing…
With the new confidence that there was, in fact, something interesting to see, I took another look. As I let my eyes relax I noticed a few fish in front of me. They were smaller than I expected, but as soon as I saw them they were impossible to miss. I saw another. And another. And another. I would have sworn a minute before that this entire cove had no fish, yet now there were hundreds. Then, I see the eel. All this was there the whole time, yet I was ready to sign off on there not being anything worth while to see.
Sometimes what we’re searching for is right in front of us, but if it doesn't look like what we're expecting then we are likely to miss it entirely. The Invisible Gorilla Experiment is the most famous example of this when a group of people so focused on counting basketballs that they miss a full sized person in a Gorilla suit walk across the scene. They weren't expecting a Gorilla, so they didn't see it:
“Without expecting something, we’re unlikely to pay attention to it… when we are not paying attention to something we are likely to not see it” -Christopher Charis, cognitive psychologist and coauthor or the Gorilla Experiment, New York Times
This inattentional blindness occurs in moments like my snorkeling adventure; I was expecting to see larger fish which resulted in me missing the hundreds of small fish right before my eyes. It can also occur in our everyday life: once our expectations are set, we are more likely to see the expected and miss the unexpected entirely. So the question is, what are you expecting to see when you wake up in the morning? Will it be a good day? A bad day? Are you expecting the people around you to be kind and succeed? Or are you expecting them to let you down?
The next time you catch yourself walking in to any situation with crystal clear expectations, maybe take a minute to relax your focus. If you're not careful, you might be missing out on something right before your eyes.
