A waiting room is a free lab. Watch how people handle waiting, and you’ll learn how they handle life.

Waiting strips people down to their defaults. Nobody performs in a waiting room, so you get to see the impatient tapping, the person who befriends the receptionist, the one who reads, the one who cannot sit with a blank ten minutes. How someone handles an empty stretch with no reward in it tells you a good deal about how they handle the rest.

Next time you are stuck waiting, spend five of those minutes watching instead of scrolling. Pick one person and guess their morning. You are practising attention, which is the base layer under every other skill.