Back when I was an undergrad in college I supported myself by delivering pizzas for Dominos. My school was situated next to a small college town in Mississippi. For those who have never been to Mississippi there are several words that can be used to describe the place. The word I am going to use today is “Trees.”
Mississippi is full of trees. Well, 61% of Mississippi’s land is forest. It also has more tree farms than any other state, generates more forestry products than any other state, and has managed to increase forest acreage over the past 40 years. But that is really beside the point. The point is that it’s woody.
My small college town was no exception. Most of the town was shaded by the deep green canopy. Many of the streets were dark and damp and wonderfully mysterious. Wonderfully unless you are a Domino’s driver looking to deliver a pizza.
To make matters worse, many of the houses had a serious “label malfunction.” So delivering to the right house would sometimes involve a good deal of guesswork. This is where I discovered something amazing: I’m really good at guessing.
I’ve always been good at guessing, but I never really thought about it until I was delivering pizzas. When, in one night, I guessed on the money three times I started to think I had supernatural powers! Since I don’t believe in supernatural powers, I had to find another explanation.
So I started collecting data. Over the span of a month I found that about 80% of the time I would guess correctly when faced with a street full of poorly identified residences. This was more success than random chance would generate, so I started giving this phenomena some serious thought.
I finally decided that I was not psychic, but just observant, even if only on a subconscious level. There are many small, and individually insignificant, details in your environment that can offer clues about the contents of that environment.
It could be that I noticed one good address on the street and simply deduced the addresses of the other buildings. It could be that one house had their porch lights on. It could be a latent memory of delivering to that house in the past. There were many factors that could contribute to my guess, and most of them were not things I was thinking about intentionally.
I have always had an attention to detail, even when I wasn’t giving detail any attention. That seems odd, but I have at times found myself “rewinding” a situation in my mind and noticing things that were not prominent in my consciousness at the time. Often, those little details have been crucial to making snap judgments, guesses, or reactions.
Some people call this intuition. I prefer to think of it as observation.