#pattern-recognition

#pattern-recognition

Have you ever experienced an encounter with an image in the sky or thought that the lyrics to your favourite song related to your personal life? These are examples of having moments that are either unsettling, poetic, or just plain strange. Such experiences are known as apophenia, expressions of our innate tendency to find patterns and attribute meaning to things that are random.

Have you ever accurately predicted what will happen on a cricket pitch before the ball has been bowled? It's an incredible feeling. That moment when you glance at the field, remember who's on strike and think: Here comes the short ball, only for it to arrive, be pulled and then safely pouched by the fielder you had mentally circled at deep square. For a split second you feel omniscient. Like you've cracked the code.

Long before he became a self-made billionaire, best-selling author, and one of the world's most recognizable motivational speakers, Robbins was a janitor making just $40 a week with no plans to go to college and little clarity about his future. By his early 20s, he was scrambling for opportunity-studying successful people obsessively, seeking mentors, and testing ideas in real time. By 24, he had made his first million as a motivator.

When I was learning multiplication, my father showed me the "rule of 9." Multiply any number by 9, he said, and then add together the digits of the product, and you will always land on 9. 9 × 2 = 18 → 1 + 8 = 9 9 × 3 = 27 → 2 + 7 = 9 9 × 12 = 108 → 1 + 0 + 8 = 9 Every time, the addition came back to 9. It stimulated my curiosity.

As the year ends, the reflection impulse kicks in. We scroll through photos, scan our calendars, take stock. How was your year? The question seems simple enough. But watch what happens when you try to answer it. First come the flashes: a vacation, an argument, a project completed, a relationship ended. Images without order. Then comes the verdict: good year, bad year, somewhere in between. We move from scattered impressions to summary judgment, often skipping everything in between.

When asked who a successful leader is, some people will say Barack Obama, some will say Jean Luc Picard, and others may say Oprah Winfrey. For many people, a successful leader is someone who has vision, a well-defined strategy, and is great at decision-making. These skills help a leader to motivate teams, drive sales, and ensure that the teams they oversee offer great long-term performance.

It is clean and complete. It captures almost everything I have watched over the last decade, with the exception of a couple of hours of viewing on flights or in hotel rooms. Normally, the algorithm serves up a menu of options that includes something that will satisfy me. And that's the thing about algorithms: They are tuned to normality. They make predictions based on statistical likelihoods, past behavior, and expectations about the continuation of trends.