A study from Harvard Business School shows that we learn more when we couple our experiences with periodic reflections. Even though people prefer to learn by doing, “participants who chose to reflect outperformed those who chose additional experience.

As Bill described it, his job as our coach was to “see little flaws in the organization that with a little massage we can make better. I listen, observe, and fill the communication and understanding gaps between people.

This is one example of the power of observation at work; listening, looking for patterns, assessing strengths and weaknesses.

A 2012 study by Harvard neuroscientists found that people often took more pleasure from sharing information about themselves than from receiving money. The Belgian psychologist Bernard Rimé found that people feel especially compelled to talk about negative experiences. The more negative the experience was, the more they want to talk about it. Over the course of my career as a journalist I, too, have found that if you respectfully ask people about themselves, they will answer with a candor that takes your breath away. Studs Terkel was a journalist who collected oral histories over his long career in Chicago. He’d ask people big questions and then sit back and let their answers unfold. “Listen, listen, listen, listen, and if you do, people will talk,” he once observed. “They always talk. Why? Because no one has ever listened to them before in all their lives.

Perhaps they’ve not ever even listened to themselves.” Each person is a mystery. And when you are surrounded by mysteries, as the saying goes, it’s best to live life in the form of a question.

I’m always interested in what others, and not just the esteemed critic from The New York Times, think about what we’re doing. If your business involves making people happy, then you can’t be good at it if you don’t care what people think. The day you stop reading your criticism is the day you grow complacent, and irrelevance won’t be far behind.