You Hear What You Listen For

Two men were walking along a crowded sidewalk in a downtown business area. Suddenly one exclaimed: “Listen to the lovely sound of that cricket.” But the other could not hear. He asked his companion how he could detect the sound of a cricket amid the din of people and traffic. The first man, who was a zoologist, had trained himself to listen to the voices of nature. But he didn’t explain. He simply took a coin out of his pocket and dropped it to the sidewalk, whereupon a dozen people began to look around them. “We hear,” he said, “what we listen for.”

Source: American evangelist author Kermit L. Long quoted by Karen Anderson in The Busy Manager’s Guide to Successful Meetings (1993)