Pattern Recognition: Helpful or Harmful?
Like it or not, much of our behaviour can be explained by instincts or as Google defines it, our “natural or intuitive way of acting or thinking.” Indeed, instincts are a type of pattern that is built into us, hardcoded if you will. These include sexual desire and attraction, hunger and the assimilation of food, the dizzy feeling you have when looking over the edge of an extremely high building or cliff, and the strange sensation you get when someone doesn’t quite seem right or appears to be lying to you.
Like it or not, much of our behaviour can be explained by instincts or as Google defines it, our “natural or intuitive way of acting or thinking.” Indeed, instincts are a type of pattern that is built into us, hardcoded if you will. These include sexual desire and attraction, hunger and the assimilation of food, the dizzy feeling you have when looking over the edge of an extremely high building or cliff, and the strange sensation you get when someone doesn’t quite seem right or appears to be lying to you.
In fact, today, as I was sitting at my desk I noticed a man dressed in high vis gear while talking on his phone walking down my driveway. As soon as he spotted me sitting in my office staring back at him, he quickly turned around and walked back up the driveway. At first glance, this could be disregarded as someone that got the wrong address or a trade worker wanting to do some maintenance. The strange thing about this guy is that he did exactly the same thing last week. While it seemed strange last week I was in the middle of a client call when it happened so I couldn’t chase him down to find out who he was and what he wanted. Today, however, I was free, so I promptly followed him up the street. He continued to have what looked like quite an animated conversation while he was walking and after about 30 metres he put his phone in his pocket, he then turned around and saw me following. Without skipping a beat, he kept walking, pulled his phone back out of his pocket and picked up with the animated conversation. By this stage, I was pretty certain this guy was up to no good and wasn’t really having a conversation with anyone. Cautious but curious, I kept following him to see if he was going to get in a car or truck….assuming he was a tradie. He got to a street corner and stopped so I kept walking. He stood with his back to me continuing to ‘talk’ on his phone for about 2mins. I waited patiently maintaining 1.5 metres of a distance of course. He put his phone away and turned to me with a steely look in his eye. I asked, “ Are you alright there mate?”. Cool as a cucumber, he said that he was waiting for a delivery and needed to figure out if the truck could turn around in our driveway. This might be a plausible explanation on a country road but not for a house that’s on a six-lane, divided road Highway such is ours! Predictably, it turned out that there was no truck, just his van that is most likely full of stolen goods from other properties he managed to successfully ‘hit’. I managed to capture a pic of his van without him noticing me and promptly reported his registration details to the police.
In the above example, it’s easy to see how my interpretation of a behavioural pattern triggered an instinctual response for me to act. Noticing patterns in behaviour, allows you to appropriately take action when you see something that doesn’t quite ‘fit’. The problem with this is, now, every time I see someone in high vis gear walk down our driveway, I’ll be more vigilant in my assessment of their intentions. In some cases, like mine, it’s probably a good thing but in others - like soldiers returning from war- it can lead to issues such as anxiety, depression or PTSD.
Pattern recognition is a powerful tool to evaluate what to do next, and in many assessments used by organisations to select candidates based on their ‘fluid intelligence’, tests of abstract reasoning examine your ability to spot patterns and determine the correct response in the sequence. In this way, correctly interpreting patterns is a huge advantage for human beings both past and present….but I’m not so sure about the future. Patterns are thought to be behaviours that have evolved to help us survive and succeed in our natural environment. While this is true for the majority of the time, our environment is changing more rapidly than our natural more intuitive ways of acting or thinking and therein lies the problem. Our environment barely resembles anything ‘natural’ anymore. We are walking around with some seriously powerful hardware in our heads (talking about our brains here) with an ever-changing environment that is becoming increasingly complex year on year. Our software (patterns and instincts) is in many ways, horribly outdated. This is the equivalent to playing the first version of space invaders on a modern PC. Unless the program has been updated and adapted to the new operating system, it simply won’t work or will be compromised at the very least.
While there are our baseline instinctual patterns that are largely automatic and often, irrelevant, the future belongs to those that can begin to write their own code, design new patterns that serve as behavioural blueprints and set the example for others. We typically know these people as ‘leaders’ in modern society but I like to think of them as ‘Pattern Programmers’ or ‘Pattern Hackers’. These people have learned the art of programming their own behaviours to meet the needs of their environment. It takes effort, discipline and tonne of self-awareness but the result is a ripple that grows exponentially along with their contributions to society. A recent example is Bill Gates, who is in my opinion, one of the greatest pattern hackers of all time. He has the ability to identify patterns in behaviour and extrapolate what that means for industries, countries and in the case of COVID-19, the world. If you haven’t already watched it, have a look at Bill’s Ted Talk from 2015 where he outlines the risk of a global pandemic and the world’s inability to respond to it appropriately.
The truth is, while not everyone will learn how to ‘write their own code’ so to speak, we are all walking around with pretty much the same hardware in our heads. It’s the programming that you do that’s going to set you apart…and like anything hard, it’s something you can learn. You’re not always going to get it right, but it’s time to evolve your ability to respond to your environment proactively because our inbuilt programming is no longer sufficient. Whether you have a suspicious character wanting to rob your house or want to be the next Bill Gates, I’m certain that if you consciously work on shaping your mindset and how you interpret your environment, you’ll be better at recognising patterns that will help you succeed.
If you’re interested in exploring your own patterns more, download my pattern recognition worksheet and send me a note if you need any help with it.
References
Bill Gates’ Ted Talk 2015 - https://www.ted.com/talks/bill_gates_the_next_outbreak_we_re_not_ready?language=en#t-128669
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Learning how to learn: The infinite pattern
2020 is already becoming the most challenging year most people have ever experienced. Rather than fill your newsfeed with strategies to ‘Lead through uncertainty’ or ‘manage your team via zoom’, I wanted to share what I learned in 2005, 15 years ago. Joseph Campbell’s work on the Hero’s journey inspired me to create the infinite pattern which I’ve used to recount my experience.
2020 is already becoming the most challenging year most people have ever experienced. Rather than fill your newsfeed with strategies to ‘Lead through uncertainty’ or ‘manage your team via zoom’, I wanted to share what I learned in 2005, 15 years ago. Joseph Campbell’s work on the Hero’s journey inspired me to create the infinite pattern which I’ve used to recount my experience.
1) The Call to learn (January 2005)
I’d worked my arse off to get accepted into the honours year for my bachelors in Psychology. I spent most of my first-year and second-year at university trying to figure out what I wanted to study, but by the time I found psychology, I’d already racked up a few fails on my academic transcript. By third-year, things were getting more serious and I’d decided I wanted to apply myself. I hadn’t considered doing honours but one of my mentors at the time suggested that I should at least try. The odds were stacked against me but with a bit of hard work, I slogged it out and got accepted. I’d also managed to score a place with one of the most sought after supervisors so I had a lot to be happy about. By mid-January, I was already conducting experiments on learning and memory using Rats in a Morris water maze. Things were going brilliantly for me…I finally felt like everything was falling into place. Toward the end of January, things started to go awry. Firstly, the month worth of experiments and training that I’d been doing turned out to be a dead end. I had to change direction for my honours thesis which added a bit of time pressure to what is already an intense year. To add to that pressure, my wife announced that she was pregnant!
2) Finding my mentor (March 2005)
To make ends meet, I was working two jobs at the time. I was selling laptops and printers at Officeworks by night and running experiments in a neuroscience lab for the rest of the time. I was walking around in a daze, pretending that my wife wasn’t really pregnant and that somehow there had been a mistake. By the end of March, it was official. She’d hit the 12-week mark so we were going to have this baby. For me….shit got real. I wasn’t ready to have a kid…. I was pretty much a kid myself. I’d only just figured out what I wanted to study. My first reactive thought was to defer doing my honours so I could focus on working to make enough money to support my family in a responsible way. Interestingly, none of the academics that I spoke to at university advised against this option so I made a call to defer my studies and ‘do the right thing’. When I told my boss at Officeworks what was going on and that I needed to work full-time, in the nicest possible way, he rejected my plea for help. He told me that the best thing I could do for myself and my family was push through and finish my studies. In other words, toughen the f**K up! It wasn’t what I wanted to hear but somehow, I knew he was right.
3) Crossing the threshold (May 2005)
By now, I was deep into my honours thesis and all of the rigamarole that goes with it. I was also reading the ‘bible’ for parents to be, What to expect when you’re expecting, getting more anxious about being a dad by the second. The more I knew, the more anxious I became. That was until someone told me that nobody has the perfect formula for kids and you won’t know what you need to do until you need to do it. They then added that once you think you’ve got it all figured out, it all falls apart and you have to try something different. While frustrating and annoying, this was exactly what I needed to hear. It enabled me to cross the threshold between what I know and enter the realm of the unknown. For a few months, I was focussed, supportive (so I thought), open, and felt a little bit excited about being a dad. Then, shit hit the fan.
4) Facing challenge (August 2005)
Following a routine visit to the doctor, my wife was put on bed rest due to the risk of our baby being born 2 months premature. On the 20th August, our son was born 6 weeks early and weighed about 1.6kg (that’s about half what a healthy full-term baby weighs). Needless to say, my honours thesis was an afterthought once he was born. My wife and I were visiting the hospital every day because he was too little to bring home. He was being fed through a tube, stuck inside a humid-i-crib with only short times where we were allowed to cuddle. It was one of the strangest experiences I’ve ever had. I wanted to love and protect this little human that I’d brought into the world but was completely dependent on the nurses and doctors to look after him. After two months of visiting the hospital every day, feeding him through a tube and tracking his daily growth on a chart we could finally take him home.
5) Overcoming Self (October 2005)
There wasn’t a person in the world that judged me for putting all of my focus on my son. Despite all of that, my non-existent honours thesis was gathering metaphorical dust on an imaginary shelf. The due date was looming and I was preparing myself to face the cold hard truth that I’d failed. When I spoke with the honours coordinator about options I was advised it was too late to pull out without failing but it wasn’t too late to submit my thesis. If however, I was planning on submitting my thesis, I needed to honour the faculty rule that no theses get marked until everybody (who indicates they will hand their thesis in) hands in their final thesis. I wanted to give up as I honestly thought failure was inevitable. I had more than a handful of people provide me with the ‘out’ I was looking for which entailed pulling up stumps. My wife, however, refused to accept my defeat. She shared with me exactly what she needed to share and it changed my perspective forever. In many ways, the words she used broke all the rules of diplomacy and it certainly wasn’t a message delivered with eloquence. Regardless, she gave me a proverbial kick up the arse that I needed to screw my head back on and get the job done. After one week, approximately 210 cups of tea, a minor case of deep vein thrombosis, some very generous help from my supervisor, and some mild hallucination due to lack of sleep, I handed in my thesis one week past the due date. In handing in that thesis, I’d conquered myself and all that I knew was possible.
6) Consolidate (November 2005)
After the intensity of the year that was 2005, I forgot to mention that we were also planning our wedding. With the Christmas holiday period came an opportunity to regather myself and find my groove as a dad (as awkward as I was). My memory is a bit shady, but I’m pretty certain it involved lots of nappies, sleepless nights, and the odd moment of bliss to remind me that it was all worthwhile. I went to visit my supervisor to thank him for his support through what had been a very challenging time. By that stage, I also found out that I’d received a 79 for my honour thesis which I was extremely happy about. When I boastfully commented on my mark, my supervisor agreed that is was a good result. He then said, “You got a good mark but you didn’t learn as much as you could have”. Once again, while I didn’t like what I was hearing, I knew exactly what he meant and I agreed with him. There were too many instances where I took the easy road, the popular choice or the responsible path. Too often I chose to stay stuck in the ‘known’ rather than venture into the unknown.
7) Teaching Others (January 2006)
It was a small wedding, close friends and family held in my uncle’s backyard. I think our largest expense was a rental car for the week and flights to Melbourne. Somehow, the simplicity of the day, the people and the ceremony highlighted what was most important. All my fears that came with being a new dad, our son being born early, potentially failing my honours year and toying with becoming a full-time employee at Officeworks (no disrespect to the role), were opportunities to learn how to learn.
Fig 1. Infinite Pattern of Learning.
The infinite pattern
Like that crazy year in 2005, I’ve had a few doozies since. So far, 2020 is certainly up there when it comes to rank-ordering the most challenging. Whenever I’m feeling like things are tough, or I don’t know what’s going to happen, I draw strength from that time in my life when the only way to know how to proceed was to let go of what I knew. To embrace the unknown, as paradoxical as it sounds, enabled me to face the necessary challenges to get over myself. Having since worked with thousands of people to overcome challenges I’ve recognised that this pattern isn’t unique to me. Rather, it’s a pattern we all follow when we learn how to learn through life. Some call it the school of hard knocks. Others see it as bad luck. I see it as an infinite pattern of learning we all experience over and over again. If you navigate life with an awareness of this pattern, it won’t necessarily make it easy but will make your experiences more meaningful. Ask yourself right now…Where are you in the infinite pattern? Are you stuck in the known? Have you ‘crossed the threshold’ into the unknown yet? What’s your next ‘call to learn’?
If you’re keen to learn more, contact me at Joe@joehart.com.au or visit my website at joehart.com.au