Week 78 - Look Above and Beyond 🔭

Author

Yurii Lazaruk
September 20, 2026

Hey my friend, a long time ago I learned that the worst question is the one you haven’t asked. If you’re a busy bee and don’t even have time to look around you, be curious, and ask people questions, well, you’re basically protecting yourself from some amazing things coming into your life! So let’s talk about it 🤓

I can be super laser-focused sometimes. If I'm out somewhere with my family, doing Nordic walking (usually with my AirPods on), or just going somewhere with a very specific goal in mind, I can kinda stop noticing the world around me. And I mean it literally 😅

A few times, people I know passed right next to me and even said “Hi,” and I didn't notice them at all (I knew about this only because later they said they saw me). 

I've also had the opposite situation when I was walking with someone, saw their friend or even relative nearby, and had to say something like, “Hey, isn't that your brother?” because they were completely in their own world too.

And that's totally okay. 

Sometimes we need this focused mode because otherwise we would be constantly distracted by everything around us. But the same focus that helps us get things done can also “protect” us from interesting humans, conversations, and opportunities that are happening right in front of us.

Phones make this even easier. I'm not going to tell you phones are evil (you probably know this yourself 😏). It won’t be fair because they're literally our windows to the whole online world. But at the same time, when you're walking around staring at your phone, that window to the online world can shield you from the real one that is happening two metres away.

As a driver, I actually slow down (or even stop) whenever I see someone approaching a pedestrian crossing while staring at their phone because I have no idea whether they're going to look around or just randomly walk onto the road 😅

Still, sometimes it is useful to look above your screen and a little beyond whatever you're currently focused on. I learned how useful that can be a long time ago. 

Long ago, in a galaxy far away, when Google Ads was still called Google AdWords, I wanted to understand how paid advertising worked, and, of course, I found one of those free educational events organized by an advertising agency. 

You know the format: they teach you something useful, but not too much because at the end of the day, they also want you to buy their services or join their course.

The presentation was pretty high-level, but there was one person in the audience who kept asking questions. And I noticed that their questions sounded different. Not necessarily “look at me, I'm the smartest person in the room” different. They just sounded one level deeper than the questions from the general audience. It felt like this person clearly knew something about the topic already and asked questions that helped the speaker go deeper.

I could've thought, “Whatever, just another smarty-pants,” listened to the rest of the presentation, and gone home. But I got curious.

So I went up to this person and asked what they actually did.

It turned out they were running Google AdWords campaigns for small and medium-sized businesses, which was exactly the kind of person I needed at that moment.

Because I noticed them and asked one question, I got someone who could support me with my own campaigns (definitely much cheaper than that agency), but even more importantly, I could see how they worked and learn from them. And later I even got to run Google Ads campaigns for other companies as a service.

All of that started not because I came to the event with an amazing networking strategy. I simply noticed someone.

That doesn’t mean a huge business opportunity is waiting behind every human you meet. Most likely not. Sometimes the person asking questions is just asking questions. But if you don't notice them in the first place, there is zero chance you'll ever find out.

So yes, just do what you're doing. Still, from time to time, look a little above your immediate task and a little beyond the obvious thing happening in front of you.

Maybe there is nothing there. Maybe there is. But you won't know until you look.

I had another example of this at a business event where everyone was super professional, wearing suits, expensive watches, and talking about the amazing businesses they were running and all the millions and billions they were dealing with.

And there was me in my usual Yurii high-five T-shirt talking about freelance markets and communities.

Don't get me wrong, the event was good, and I liked talking to some of the folks there, but I didn't feel super confident in that environment.

Then I noticed one person who had a lot of bracelets on his left hand, and while we were going down together in the elevator, my brain started doing what brains love doing: playing the “Should I?” game, like “Should I ask about those bracelets? Is it weird? What will he think about me?”

But eventually I silenced that voice and just asked: “Hey, you have so many interesting bracelets. What's the meaning behind them?”

He started telling me about Chinese Zodiac signs, astrology, specific stones, and how he'd made some of the bracelets together with his children.

And in just a few minutes, I learned more about the actual human behind the professional image than during the previous two hours of professional conversations.

All because I noticed something that made me curious and wasn’t afraid to ask about it.

Actually, looking alone won’t do all the work. It's not just looking. It's noticing something and then doing something with what you've noticed (otherwise, I can look at someone's bracelets for ten minutes and nothing happens).

I definitely wasn't always good at the “do something” part.

When I was at university, I once had to go to a hospital for a medical check-up. I knew I needed to go to the second floor but didn't know which cabinet.

I got there and saw two long queues. Both queues were full of students, and young Yurii had an amazing strategy for dealing with uncertainty: pick one randomly and stand there.

Of course, after waiting for half an hour, I discovered I'd chosen the wrong queue, so I had to go to the other and spend another 30 minutes there to finally get to the right doctor.

Nowadays, if I see a queue and don't know whether it's mine, I just ask. And not just one person, but the last two people at the same time: “Hey, is this the queue for X?”

Why two? Because if I ask just one person, they might be exactly like past Yurii and also have absolutely no idea why they're standing there 😅

I didn't go and study some advanced methodology of asking questions after that. I simply started asking more myself, and it has saved me so much time and stress ever since.

I think that's also why being observant and being curious work so well together.

When you're observing, you see more things to be curious about. When you're curious, you ask more questions. And when you ask more questions, you start learning things that you wouldn't learn by just standing there thinking about them yourself.

Does that mean you have to walk around questioning every stranger you see? (Please don't 😅) But being more observant definitely expands your horizons.

And it also makes you more interesting to others because you know more things, have more stories, and see more angles than you did before.

There is a book I really liked called On Looking by Alexandra Horowitz, which is actually about looking and noticing, but from a much broader perspective. She walks through the same environment with different people (experts who look at the world in totally different ways), and suddenly the same street isn't really the same anymore.

A geologist sees one thing, a physician notices something else, a sound expert hears things most of us ignore, and a blind person experiences the same environment in a completely different way.

And I love that idea. Because very often we think what we see is reality, but it's just the tiny part of reality we're used to noticing.

(I also learned the word “thigmotaxic” from that book, and I'm not going to tell you what it means. Go read the book, or just Google it 😏)

That's also connected to something I started calling Serendipity Moments: whenever something interesting comes to my mind—an idea to try, a person to ping, something to ask—I try to act on it right away.

Usually, it's not some five-year business plan that will change my whole life. It's more like a five-minute thing that somehow caught my attention.

I don't know whether it will work (sometimes it doesn’t), but some of the best things in my life happened because I noticed one of those tiny moments and did something before I had enough time to overthink it and procrastinate.

That's kinda my Activator nature too: I'd rather try and see what happens than sit there for three weeks making a perfect plan.

Overall, you don’t have to scan everything around you like some human-opportunity radar. Sometimes I go Nordic walking, and I really don't want to talk to anyone. Sometimes I'm with my family, and I just want to be with my family. Sometimes I'm working, and please, please, no people. And that's okay.

You don’t always have to be open to everything because that's exhausting.

Just remember that your focused mode isn't the whole world, and from time to time, look around.

Notice who is asking interesting questions, wearing weird bracelets, or when you clicked with someone. Notice when you don't know whether this is the right queue and just ask instead of wasting hours. 

And if something genuinely makes you curious, maybe go one small step further and see what happens. Because you won't find interesting people and opportunities everywhere, but you can definitely create more of them if you actually notice what's happening around you.

Actionable Step 🤓

Next time you're at an event, meetup, office, café, queue, or any other place with humans around, give yourself ten minutes to look around.

You don't have to network or talk to five strangers (or even throw your phone into a river 😅).

Just look around and notice what or who catches your attention.

Maybe it's a person asking an interesting question, something unusual they're wearing, a conversation you hear, or simply something you don't understand.

And if one thing makes you genuinely curious: ask one question and see what happens.

tl;dr Being laser-focused is useful, but it can also make you miss humans and opportunities happening right in front of you. Remember to look above and beyond what you're doing, notice what makes you curious, and ask a question. There won't be opportunities everywhere, but the more you observe and interact with the world around you, the more opportunities you can create.

And what’s your experience? 🤓

Share your story with me on LinkedIn or just answer this email 🤗

💡 What influenced me this week 💡

Thoughts of the week:

  • “If we had no faults, we should not take so much pleasure in noting those of others.” - François de La Rochefoucauld, The Economist’s daily quotes

  • “If you’re not enough without it, you’ll never be enough with it.” - Sahil Bloom’s newsletter

  • “The single greatest challenge for any high-performing, ambitious person is eliminating the guilt associated with free time and rest.”- Sahil Bloom’s newsletter

  • “There's no shortage of demand for your time if you don't create boundaries around it.” - Sahil Bloom’s newsletter

Song of the week:

Book and quotes of the week:

“Reality is constantly being redrawn in images that are increasingly effective. Step by step, the fabulous strangeness and beauty of reality is unveiled.”

“The world that we know, that relates to us, that interests us, what we call “reality,” is the vast web of interacting entities, of which we are a part, that manifest themselves by interacting with each other.”

“Is it possible that a fact might be real with respect to you and not real with respect to me? Quantum theory, I believe, is the discovery that the answer is yes. Facts that are real with respect to an object are not necessarily so with respect to another”

Tools that I use with referrals:

  • Descript - for anything around podcasting and video editing

  • Beehiiv - for a newsletter (that’s what you receive 😅)

  • Text Blaze - to access message templates with shortcuts (like “/ty”)

  • Exali - promo “FROMYURII” - indemnity insurance for independent experts in Europe

  • Manus - for building complex systems and projects

Daily actions:

  • tell 1 person what I’m thankful to them for

  • read a self-development book/listen to a professional podcast for 15 minutes

  • make a valuable post/comment on LinkedIn

  • tag 10 people in my connections database

  • connect with 30 interesting people on LinkedIn

Weekly actions:

If you have any thoughts, ideas, or questions, please 👇

And if you’d like to have more 👋 Friendworking in your life 👇

See you next week! 👋