A quick preview before the show: if you’re looking for a way to ignite your creativity, be it as a writer or as a creative, I highly recommend you enroll in Meet Cute.

Inattentional blindness is the inability to notice completely visible objects around you because your attention is elsewhere.

This psychological phenomenon can be as harmless as zoning out of a conversation with a friend while daydreaming about what you’re going to have for lunch to as dangerous as speeding through a stop sign in a multi-ton hunk of metal while attempting to respond to a text.

All of us suffer from inattentional blindness to some degree, especially where it concerns surroundings we’ve become accustomed to.

If you live in New York City, you become blind to towering skyscrapers, honking cabs, sardine-packed streets, scurrying rats and never-ending liveliness.

However, show a friend or loved one around the city for a day or two and you will quickly realize just how much you’re missing as they ooh and aah over your extraordinary surroundings that have become ordinary to you.

Creatively speaking, inattentional blindness is stifling.

While it can’t be prevented entirely, we can keep our eyes wide-open by holstering our phones and developing what Alexandra Horowitz calls a mental Search Image…

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Everybody needs a mechanism to select what, out of all the things in the world, they should both look for and at, and what they should ignore.

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A red-tailed hawk can spot a field mouse flying 60 mph 100 feet in the air.

This is, in part, because a hawk’s eyes have 8x the ocular power of humans but also because a field mouse is one of a hawk’s many mental search images. In order to hunt a mouse, a hawk has to first be looking for a mouse.

When creatives say they are uninspired, there’s a a very good chance they aren’t living like hawks. In other words, they’re suffering from inattentional blindness.

To battle inattentional blindness we must play the game of hawk and mouse. Like the hawk that is always on the hunt for a mouse, we must develop our own mental search images we are always on the hunt for.

This practice is simple.

Choose something, anything, you’d like to pay closer attention to and then, for an entire week, make it a point to photograph that thing anytime you see it.

While your mental search image may or may not inspire you, that’s not really the point; the point is to teach you how to be a tourist in your own city, how to exist like a hawk, how to free yourself of inattentional blindness and, most importantly, how to pay attention and tap into endless inspiration.

By Cole Schafer.

P.S. If this newsletter left you inspired, do me a huge favor and tell one person to subscribe.