Episode Notes

Juneteenth is the 12^th federal legal holiday we are celebrating today. The official date is June 19, but it fell on Father’s Day this year. “The holiday was first celebrated in Texas, where on that date in 1865, in the aftermath of the Civil War, enslaved people were declared free under the terms of the 1862 Emancipation Proclamation (13^th Amendment),” according to History.com.

 Juneteenth has been celebrated since 1866; many of us weren’t familiar with the holiday until it became a legal holiday on June 17, 2021, and is now recognized as a national holiday. Government employees have a paid day off while private businesses choose how to acknowledge this day.

What I would like to say about this day that fits with today’s topic of the gift of recognizing patterns is this. The June 6 Committee Hearings display a deliberate pattern by the 45^th President of the United States to overturn our elections. The committee has connected the dots uncovering the horrific truth of what happened in the Oval Office on that terrifying day. I recognize the pattern in how sectors of our population were manipulated and exploited by the 45th President putting himself above the Constitution and the will of the American people. Frankly, all of us are being chipped away at, questioning our sense of self. These groups are now Rogue Republicans rewriting the 2016 platform of the Republican party to further control, exploit, and destroy our Democracy. 

There are terrorist entrepreneurs like Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (KSM), the principal architect of the 9/11 attacks, and other entrepreneurs with deviant criminal intent trying to override our United States Constitution. All entrepreneurs have an uncanny ability to recognize patterns that help them exploit opportunities either for the greater good of humanity or for their own personal or ego-centric gains at the expense of our humanity.

I would like to help you hone your pattern recognition skills and focus your entrepreneurial activities on serving the greater good of humanity. We all benefit from intentional efforts that inspire and unite us toward a kinder, equitable, and more considerate world.

Logan Ury sparked the idea for today’s topic. I read about Logan Ury in the New York Times on June 13, 2022. She is an author, behavior scientist, and coach who helps anxious daters and has a self-described gift of “pattern recognition,” an ability to see and synthesize the ruts in someone’s dating history. She has clients complete “relationship audits” to pinpoint blind spots so clients can change their decisions regarding who they date. 

Logan’s gift of pattern recognition is an entrepreneurial skill we use to connect the dots to new opportunities for products and services. Logan found a solution to chronic dating through a data-driven approach. She noticed modern dating is more tactical, and clients need a more precise step-by-step approach. She added some prestige to how she works by applying the language of Silicon Valley C.E.O.s to a throng of anxious daters, and it set her on an enormous growth path with her coaching business. Clever, right? 

 We acquire this cognitive pattern recognition framework through experience collecting seemingly unrelated events and trends and connecting the dots to new opportunities. Three ways to recognize patterns of incoming data: statistical, syntactic, and neural.

1. Statistical Pattern Recognition – collect observations, study and digest them to infer general rules or concepts that can be applied to new, unseen observations. In entrepreneurship, we use the statistics you gather to understand populations of people or draw a dot from this observation to another.

2. Syntactic Pattern Recognition or structural pattern recognition is a form of pattern recognition in which each object can be represented by a variable- cardinality set of symbolic, nominal features. Diagrams help with organizing the statistical data you collect to notice patterns. 

3. Neural network pattern recognition. Artificial Intelligence pattern recognition using neural networks is currently the most popular method for pattern detection and real-world application. Neural networks are based on similar subunits called neurons that simulate human decision-making.

Methods for data collection are done through formal and informal market research, noticing shifts in technology and how people use technology. I use a zoom analogy. Collecting demographic information in the markets we serve and understanding government policies and regulations to find loopholes in the system that you could help close is another way entrepreneurs expand and utilize their ability to recognize patterns.

Try actively searching for opportunities to further hone how you recognize patterns. I think Brené Brown, Ph.D. is brilliant at using this skill. She gathers data stories and translates the research into stories she eloquently tells about courage and vulnerability, giving us language around feelings and emotions that help us navigate the world, improve our connections, and understand our collective society better. Atlas of the Heart: Mapping Meaningful connections is her most recent book and is also a series on HBO Max. 

Another example of a master pattern recognizer is Oprah Winfrey. I remember her talking about brilliant advice she received in the early days of the Oprah Winfrey show with movie critic and long-time friend Roger Ebert. He persuaded her to syndicate (broadcast nationally) The Oprah Winfrey Show in 1986, becoming the highest-rated talk show in American television history.

Oprah is the first woman to own a network and is known as one of the most influential people in the world because of her selflessness. 

We can also use this ability to recognize patterns in ourselves to capitalize on growth opportunities usually prompted by heartbreak or other face-planting moments. Engaging our curiosity to learn from our pain as we revisit our wounded selves and excavate the lessons shapes our narratives through the eyes of the courageous one within, ourselves. Naming the hurt and using our resourcefulness to heal and grow as an entrepreneurial leader positions us to continue taking calculated risks and being present for the next opportunity.

For new opportunities, especially the organic ideas, engage in an active search for opportunities usually initiated with curiosity or alertness to them. This curiosity could be channeled in areas where you have prior knowledge of an industry or a new industry you gravitate toward.

Putting all the information together leads to those ‘aha’ moments when the light bulb turns on. Finally, after the creative rubber band has stretched and stretched and stretched as you have been gathering information, a moment of new clarity emerges, and the mounting tension is released. Steve Blank’s insightful book Four Steps to the Epiphany writes that entrepreneurs need two types of cognitive processing: pattern recognition and epiphanies, that “serendipitously snap together” when you are engaged in recognizing patterns and adding new revenue streams to our businesses. 

What is the gift of recognizing patterns? The freedom that comes from seeing and synthesizing new opportunities that make our world a more humane and enterprising place. DOWNLOAD

NEXT STEP: Challenge yourself and do the Conscious Attentive Leadership Mentoring (C.A.L.M.) Activities, below.