I used to have an early morning class, and I was usually greeted at the door by my client’s assistant, who would arrive at work a few minutes before his boss.

He would ask me how I’m doing, and I would sometimes reply “yuvarlanıp gidiyoruz” (we’re rolling along). It’s a colloquial way of saying “I’m fine.” It’s one of those common, but not that common, phrases that a Turk might use, and a foreigner like me almost never will.

And so when I use it, it almost always gets a good-natured smile and a laugh.

My point is that if you want to get attention, break a pattern.

We’ve talked about chaos theory before, and you know my perspective that it is an illustration of how desperately our brains want to see patterns.

And so, if you want to hold an audience’s attention, the surest way is to break a pattern. I guarantee, they will watch closely as you map out the new one.

And the pattern you break doesn’t need to be big. It can be quite small, actually. In this example, it was just a foreigner saying “I’m fine” in a non-standard way. Sometimes you can see other people doing it with the colors they wear, or the way they walk out onto stage.

If you have some big, deep, profound pattern that you want to break, good for you. But if you don’t, don’t worry about it, just break a small one, it’ll have pretty much the same effect.