Now they are looking upward instead of downward.

On Paul Van Riper's first tour in Southeast Asia, when he was out in the bush, serving as an advisor to the South Vietnamese, he would often hear gunfire in the distance. He was then a young lieutenant new to combat, and his first thought was always to get on the radio and ask the troops in the field what was happening. After several weeks of this, however, he realized that the people he was calling on the radio had no more idea than he did about what the gunfire meant. It was just gunfire. It was the begining of something - but what that something was, was not yet clear. So Van Riper stopped asking. On his second tour of Vietnam, whenever he heard gunfire, he would wait. "I would look at my watch," Van Riper says, "and the reason I looked was that I wasn't going to do a thing for five minutes. If they needed help, they were going to holler. And after five minutes, if things had settled down, I still wouldn't do anything. You've got to let people work out the situation and work out what's happening. The danger in calling is that they'll tell you anything to get you off their backs, and if you act on that and take it at face value, you could make a mistake. Plus you are diverting them. Now they are looking upward instead of downward. You're preventing them from resolving the situation."

-- page 117 (3. The Perils of Introspection), Blink by Malcolm Gladwell.

The reason I painstakingly typed out this excerpt from this book (Blink) that I am reading now is that it reminded me of someone I see everyday. Yes, those who are my colleagues, they will immediately know who is it. :) I wish the person that I am refering to reads this and understands the meaning of "Now they are looking upward instead of downward.".



(The above excerpt and the book Blink is copyrighted by Malcom Gladwell. My intention of publishing this excerpt here is entirely non-commercial.)