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“Observation isn’t just about looking—it’s about disappearing. Joan Didion grasped this better than anyone.” (Brain Food)

“Didion had a way of penetrating beneath the surface of events to a deeper and often unstable core. She did this not by asking lots of questions, but by standing back and observing.”

‘She listened!’ the photographer Julian Wasser…told me in 2022, a few months before his death. ‘She didn’t talk; she observed.’

“This ability to fade into the wallpaper and take in the scene was one of the keys to Didion’s success. As she wrote in the intro to the first collection of her writing, Slouching Towards Bethlehem, ‘My only advantage as a reporter is that I am so physically small, so temperamentally unobtrusive, and so neurotically inarticulate that people tend to forget that my presence runs counter to their best interests. The introvert’s revenge.’“

The World According to Joan Didion

You may be paid to talk or write or both, and if you are, one of the best lessons you can learn is silence.

Silence that lets you observe others when they are not fully guarded.

That’s where the best content usually is.

With very few exceptions, the smartest people I’ve been around in our business are the very ones who say the least and listen the best.