When people hear that my ninja training turned into a career as a private investigator, they picture smoke bombs. Black masks. Somebody dropping out of the ceiling.
The truth is a lot less cinematic. Most of what I learned about staying hidden came down to two things. Climb something, or sit still.
That’s it. That’s the secret. (If you want to know how a ninja ended up with a PI job in the first place, it started in a rented conference room with a Marine who couldn’t believe he was hiring a ninja.)
I hid from my own trainer
When I was still in training, my trainer set up a practice stakeout. My job was to get into position and stay there without being spotted.
The spot was about a mile from where we started, so I walked it. He could drive past the location, but he couldn’t stop. Stopping would have blown the whole exercise.
Afterward, he told me he thought he saw me.
“I bet you didn’t,” I said.
He said he saw something over by one of the trees.
I told him that unless he was looking about six feet off the ground, he didn’t see me. Because I was in one.
He was looking at the right tree. He was just looking at the wrong part of it.
People don’t look up
That stakeout taught me the most useful rule in surveillance, and I leaned on it for the rest of my PI career.
People don’t look up.
They scan at eye level. They check the bushes, the parked cars, the guy walking his dog. Almost nobody tilts their head back and checks the branches.
So I spent a lot of time in trees. More than a grown man should probably admit to. It’s how I got the footage on the Foxfire Drive case that a million people watched on TikTok, and it’s why I’m still a little offended that so many of those commenters were shocked I could climb one.
Nobody is watching you
The second lesson took me longer to believe. Most people are so wrapped up in their own day that they won’t notice something strange happening in their own neighborhood.
I tested this more times than I can count. I’d pull over in the best spot I could find, turn the car off, and sit for hours.
Nobody came. Nobody called anybody. Every now and then a neighbor would wander over and ask if I was having car trouble. I’d tell them I was fine, they’d nod, and they’d go right back to their day.
That was about as close as I ever got to getting caught. A friendly offer of jumper cables.
Blending in isn’t really about a disguise. It’s about being boring enough that nobody wants to think about you. A parked car is boring. A man in a tree is invisible. A man in a ninja mask on the sidewalk is going to get noticed real quick.
Patience is what ninja training really taught me
The ninja stuff gets credit for the stealth. But the actual skill was patience.
Surveillance is mostly waiting. You wait for the door to open. You wait for the car to move. You wait while your leg falls asleep on a tree branch and you start making deals with the Lord about your bladder.
The people who are good at it aren’t sneakier than everybody else. They’re just willing to stay put longer.
You see more when you sit still
Sit in one place long enough and you start noticing things you’d never catch walking past. Who leaves at what time. Which porch light is on a timer. What a normal day on that street looks like, so you know the second something isn’t normal.
That habit stuck with me long after the PI job ended, right alongside the patience I picked up comparing fingerprints. Turns out nothing was wasted, not even the hours I spent in a tree.
What I use it for now
These days I teach call centers how to manage their people and their time, and I write novels on the side. No trees involved.
But the job is about the same. You sit still. You pay attention to the small stuff everybody else walks past. And you wait, sometimes a lot longer than you’d like, for the moment something finally happens.
The only difference is that nobody asks if I’m having car trouble.
There’s always a story under the story.
If this one stuck with you, I’ll send the next one straight to your inbox.