You get paid to pattern match.
Unless you’re doing manual labor, shovel in hand, you will get paid to make quality decisions, and make them faster than the other guy. The more the merrier.
It’s another one of those “simple not easy,” things we overcomplicate. The ability to quickly come to a decision, a course of action, that is likely to work. That’s it. That’s the game.
Sometimes you’ll fail and when you do, you’ll pattern match again, to find the next best move.
How do we do it?
Through gut feeling or instinct, right? Just born with this natural intuition?
Sure, you were.
The thing with that intuition, with “having a bad feeling,” it’s never really in advance, it’s never some divine intervention that wakes you in your sleep. It’s either a lucky guess, or even more common, it’s when you are already so far down Shit’s Creek it’s a miracle you are with us today reading blogs.
See? Half of those “bad feelings” were in the middle of some intergalactic struggle for survival. We’d like to operate much more swiftly in our own lives.
But that starts with some true facts.
You didn’t come out of your mother’s womb with some sort of entrepreneurial instinct, despite your Twitter bio. You were not touched by the hand of God, blessed to be a people person. If you’re navigating the world with any level of success, you simply lived, experienced, learned, and now you can access that information quickly, and apply it. You can overlay your experience, that map of outcomes, on top of the current landscape, and come to a conclusion.
It helps if you’ve got the guts to act on that conclusion. That’s where the rubber meets the road.
It’s pattern matching.
Jerry Seinfeld said that “pain is knowledge rushing in to fill a void, with great speed.” The faster it comes, the more pain you’ll feel. If your girl dumps you, it hurts way more if you don’t see it coming. The pain is a little different if you’ve been drifting apart the whole semester and daydreaming about your new lab partner. Or as Jerry points out in more simple terms, if the “post of your bed was not where you thought it was, when your foot hits it, that knowledge is going to come rushing in, really fast.”
And once you feel that pain, once you’ve gathered the knowledge, it’s only reasonable to think that you will not be so cavalier the next time you go marching through that room. You enter, it’s nighttime, you’re fumbling your way in the dark, tired, crabby, ready for bed, but hold on one second. We’ve seen this song and dance before. Your brain is pattern matching. Quick, quick quick. We hope. Quickly enough to avoid that same fate for you and your toe. Phew, close one.
Have you been there before? I think you have.
The matching doesn’t end in that room, we use it all the time. Any similar scenario. And the people that get paid and have success and have all their toes are the ones that can map those experiences across various domains.
In football, if you can’t see the play develop, recognize it, identify it, match it with what you talked about in the film room, and make the correct move, you just can’t get on the field. Doesn’t matter how fast and strong you are.
When Malcom Butler picked off Russell Wilson to end Super Bowl XLIX, its wasn’t because he was some freak athlete. He was a rookie free agent out of West Alabama. But guess what else? He knew the play, and “goal line three corner” was the answer. They had practiced it, talked about it, rehearsed it. And when they called it, he was ready.
In life, someone cracks a joke at your expense, or your mom’s, and that witty comeback doesn’t come to you until you’re in the car and halfway home. Shit! That would have killed. Sorry, it’s too late. Hold onto that sucker for next time if you can. Not everyone has the quick wit to produce something on the fly. Most don’t. It’s a skill though, you can prepare, you can cram, and you can learn from others if you don’t have the life experience.
In the military, if you are slow to decide, slow to act, you don’t make the mission. That sounds good to us chicken shit civilians but for SEAL Team 6, you don’t want to get stuck on the bench while your team goes to get the bad guy.
More examples? Here you go.
The business world is similar, we see who can quickly adapt to the customer’s questions. Who can pivot when we have service issues? Who can change course when things are in decline?
Salespeople might have a hard time making progress, a hard time finding solutions, a hard time closing, because they can’t pattern match quickly enough. They can’t anticipate based on past scenarios that are similar.
Intuition, gut feeling, even Deja vú, it’s all the same. Been there done that, and I know a better ending. That is who gets on the mission, sees the playing field, and signs the new customers.
Having seen it all before is one hell of a feeling. Strive for it.
Player’s practice, they watch film, they talk shop.
Navy SEALs do drills, study schematics, and debrief.
Executives plan, rehearse, and sync.
What they are all doing is making sure what they encounter on game day, on the mission, and at the meeting, will be second nature. That every issue and every question feels like a “been there done that, got the t-shirt” scenario. They are installing the patterns of their field to be matched when needed in the wild.
How quickly and accurately can they match what is happening with what they have seen before? Live on two legs or in the film room?
That’s what they get paid for. That’s what you will get paid for. The ability to pattern match.
