Minding your surroundings is as natural as the senses you use to assess them. It’s how broadly yet deeply you can integrate it into the way you effectively react to the actions of the relative world around you that matters.
Knowing more about the details of your immediate presence, no matter how seemingly irrelevant or innocuous will enhance your ability to make better decisions in response to outside forces.
Instead of always and only focusing on the path right in front of you, explore everything within your field of view and “file” any bit of information you can in your memory palace to calculate later.