Chapter 22 Pattern Recognition

One of my systems involves continuously looking for patterns in life. Recently, I noticed that the high school volleyball games I attended in my role as stepdad were almost always won by the team that reached seventeen first—even though the winning score is twenty-five and you have to win by two. It's common for the lead to change often during a volleyball match, and the team that first reaches seventeen might fall behind a few more times before winning, which makes the pattern extra strange.

If the volleyball pattern is real—and that is far from settled—I would assume there is a normal explanation for it. Perhaps seventeen just feels so close to twenty-five that the team behind feels deflated and the team ahead feels extra confident. Perhaps at the high school level, the coach whose team is behind feels the need to give the bench players some time before the end of the game. Whatever the reason, the pattern seems to hold. Perhaps it will change after this book goes to print. I'll keep tracking it.

In amateur tennis, one of the oddest patterns is called the five-two curse. In tennis, the first player to win six games by at least two wins the set, so you would expect the player who first reaches five to win most of the time. What happens instead—far more often than common sense would predict—is that the weekend player who is ahead feels they can coast while the player who is behind feels they can play relaxed because the outcome seems predictable. That sort of thinking leads to a psychological advantage for the player who is behind, who often closes the gap to five-three3 without much effort. Now the player who is ahead starts to think the lead isn't so secure. Perhaps they feel the momentum has shifted. It only takes a few good shots from the opponent in the next game to reinforce that impression. The player who first gets to five games against a similarly skilled amateur will still win most of the time but not nearly as often as you would predict. If you're an amateur player with only two games compared to your opponent's five, it helps a great deal to know you have something like a 40 percent chance of prevailing. Knowing the pattern changes how you think about your chances, and that change in thinking can then improve your performance.

Successful People

Countless self-help and business books have tried to find the patterns of behavior that make people successful. If we can find out what successful people do, so the thinking goes, we can imitate them and become successful ourselves.

Stephen Covey was probably the most famous of the success-by-pattern gurus. His book 'Seven Habits of Highly Effective People' sold more than 25 million copies. Covey described a good set of patterns for people to follow, but they‘re only a start. I'll summarize his seven habits and suggest you read his books if you want more.

1. Be Proactive

2. Begin with the End in Mind. (Imagine a good outcome.)

3. Put first things first. (Set priorities.)

4. Think win-win. (Don't be greedy.)

5. Seek first to understand then be understood.

6. Synergize. (Use teamwork.)

7. Sharpen the saw. (Keep learning.)

The holy grail of civilization is the hope that we can someday make all people successful by discovering the formula used by successful people and making it available to all. As far as I know, Stephen Covey's seven habits didn't budge the poverty rate, so there are probably deeper patterns at play.

Here's my own list of the important patterns for success that I've noticed over the years. This is purely anecdotal. I excluded the ones that are 100 percent genetic.

1. Lack of fear of embarrassment.

2. Education (the right kind).

3. Exercise.

Lacking the fear of embarrassment allows you to be proactive. It's what makes a person take on challenges that others write off as too risky. It's what makes you take the first step before you know what the second step is. I'm not a fan of physical risks, but if you can't handle the risk of embarrassment, rejection, and failure, you need to learn how, and studies suggest that is indeed a learnable skill.1 

As far as physical bravery goes, I don't know anything about it. But I'm glad some people have it so they can shoot the other people who have it before those people shoot me. I recommend that you improve your psychological bravery but say no to anything that has a strong chance of killing you.

Then there's education. Do you know what the unemployment rate is for engineers? It's nearly zero. Do you know how many engineers like their jobs? Most of them do, despite what you read in Dilbert comics. And the ones who are unhappy with work can change jobs fairly easily. Generally speaking, the people who have the right kind of education have almost no risk of unemployment.

Education and psychological bravery are somewhat interchangeable. If you don't have much of one, you can compensate with a lot of the other. When you see a successful person who lacks a college education, you're usually looking at someone with an unusual lack of fear.

The next pattern I've noticed is exercise. Good health is a baseline requirement for success. But I'm not talking about the obvious fact that sick people can't get much done. I'm talking about the extra energy and vitality that good health brings. I might be getting the correlation wrong, and perhaps whatever motivates a person to succeed also motivates that person to maintain an exercise schedule. But I think it works both ways. I believe exercise makes people smarter, psychologically braver, more creative, more energetic, and more influential. In an online article about twenty habits of successful people, the second item on the list is exercise five to seven days a week.2 Other studies back this notion—physical fitness in general and daily exercise in particular are correlated with success in business and in life.

There's one more pattern I see in successful people: They treat success as a learnable skill. That means they figure out what they need then go get it. If you've read this far, you're one of those people. You're reading this book because it offers a non-zero chance of telling you something that might be helpful.