Note: While reading a book whenever I come across something interesting, I highlight it on my Kindle. Later I turn those highlights into a blogpost. It is not a complete summary of the book. These are my notes which I intend to go back to later. Let’s start!

  • Let’s stop trying to be so productive all the time and make an effort to be more curious. Do you want to look back on a life of items crossed off lists drawn up in response to the demands of others? Or do you want to hang on to, and repeat, and remember, the thrill of discovering things on your own?  
  • Every day is filled with opportunities to be amazed, surprised, enthralled—to experience the enchanting everyday.  

  • A HEIGHTENED observational mind-set takes over when we’re tourists. In a new place, we pay attention to everything, it seems. (Ecologist Liam Heneghan has given this “heightened and delighted attention to the ordinary, which manifests in someone new to a place,” a name: allokataplixis, combining the Greek allo, meaning “other,” and katapliktiko, meaning “wonder.”) But we spend most of our time in familiar places that have lost their inherent novelty. We take these surroundings for granted, and we stop paying close attention. A recurring commute becomes profoundly numbing. Psychologists who study perception call this phenomenon inattentional blindness. One of my students pledged to “notice something new” every day on the two-block walk she made to and from our classroom studios. You can do the same from a bike, car, bus, or train. No tech tools are required.

  • A study by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York concluded that its patrons spend a median seventeen seconds in front of any given painting. Start with Slow Art Day’s ten-minute benchmark. You’ll get a glimpse of what drives Irwin’s remarkable process: You’ll see details you missed, you’ll draw new connections, and you’ll reconsider first impressions.  

  • Find a place to sit or lie down and look up. Take your time. See what’s up there. Then look for what’s beyond that.

  • ONE STUDENT OF MINE, Steve Hamilton, noticed an “incongruous bench” not far from our classroom that, he realized, “no one sits on.” He made a habit of occupying this spot for fifteen minutes every day and studying passersby.  

  • SPEND TEN MINUTES looking out the window you most persistently ignore. Find one in your office or your bedroom or wherever, the one you so take for granted that you forget it’s even there. Examine the edges of what the window makes visible. Find three things you’ve never noticed. Describe the scene in front of you. Next time you encounter a window that’s new to you, stop and look. Study the view. Tally the details. Look for movement. Think about what you can’t control. See what happens.

  • Participants are challenged to examine all the works in a particular gallery and decide which one they’d be willing to buy, which one they so despise that they’d like to burn it, and which one they love so much that they want to steal it. The best thing about Buy, Burn, or Steal is that you can play it anywhere, alone or with others.

  • Duchamp repurposed existing words and images and with a simple gesture redrew a boundary between the everyday and the elevated: Art is what I say it is. Think then of some regular walk or drive or ride you experience often, or even that you’re experiencing for the first time. Imagine yourself a curator. Decide what, among the things you notice, you might declare to be public works of art. Perhaps a disheveled pylon marking a street flaw that ought to have been fixed by now. Maybe a post that seems to be a lingering remnant of an otherwise departed fence. Possibly even a child with a piercing stare. Grant yourself the superpower of making “art” wherever you go, and see how that changes what you perceive. Art is everywhere, if you say so.  
  • SOCIAL SCIENTISTS carefully observe the facts of the world. But that may just be a starting point. “It’s not just about observing what a person does,” says Dan Ariely, a professor of psychology and behavioral economics at Duke University and the author of Predictably Irrational, among other books. “It’s trying to understand the reasons behind that.” Ariely’s research focuses on how to tweak human behavior—and that depends on understanding what shapes behavior in the first place. “Let’s say we go to a bar, and we see people that are dating,” Ariely suggests. We also notice that the place is noisy, that it’s dark, that it’s crowded, that there’s alcohol: all sound observations. “But now, as a social scientist, I want to think of it like a Newtonian physics problem,” he continues, “and say: ‘What are the forces at work? What’s pulling people in different directions that is showing up as an interest in being in this place?’ ” He offers a few examples: “Maybe going to a noisy place helps people overcome moments of awkward silence,” he says. “Maybe being in a loud place allows people to sit closer to each other, and from time to time whisper or talk in each other’s ear.” Maybe being around a lot of other people offers some sense of safety—but also enough activity to keep one from feeling like the center of attention. And so forth. These “forces” are, strictly speaking, invisible. We’re talking about mind-sets and feelings, instincts that even the individuals involved may not be consciously aware of. Invisible forces are a fun challenge to seek out—particularly in a situation that involves lots of people drawn (or thrown) together, whether at a party or at the Department of Motor Vehicles.  
  • Maybe the most important thing you can train an aspiring improviser to do, he says, is listen and observe and stay fully open to the possibilities in whatever his or her fellow actors might be saying or doing. Thus the famous “Yes, and…” rule: Whatever your partner says or suggests, you never contradict or disregard it; you embrace it and build on it.  
  • Practice this kind of openness to your environment. Look for flickers of human individuality amid the routine of the everyday. Imagine how that flicker could be amplified and extended, how a fleeting moment can be remade into an unforgettable one. Engage with your world and say, “Yes! And…”  

  • We may never be able to recapture exactly the feeling of looking at the world before we’d spent so much time looking at the world. But next time you are confronted with some scene or situation that feels numbingly familiar, stop and ask: What would a child see here?

  • Put yourself on the lookout for the potentially interesting as you move through the world: on the metro, at bus stops, on campuses, at work; in bowling alleys, parking lots, even prison yards. Not every discarded napkin or receipt will fascinate, but one in twenty might. The discards of others can be windows into lives you’d never otherwise see—fragments of stories that open us to wonder and curiosity.

  • Spend just a few hours or a day monitoring yourself. Listen to and think about the sounds you make—walking, typing, clearing the dishes, talking, singing along with a favorite tune. Take notes. Experiment with making as little sound as possible and then with making as much sound as possible, and note how this changes your concentration, the way you move, the speed at which you perform routine tasks.

  • ONE OF MY STUDENTS began collecting sounds. Before going to sleep, she’d listen intently, striving to pick out and identify every noise. A distant barking dog. The hum of the air conditioner. A passing car. Applying this idea over time can be a way to rediscover a familiar setting. Collecting at a particular time of day is a useful organizing device. Begin to note sounds consciously. Build an inventory. Keep hunting. You’ll hear things you’d missed altogether.