Dear Reader,

You stride confidently through a familiar house at midnight, maybe your own, no lights required. Until, that is, your trusted coffee table decides to relocate—right into your shin. Ouch!

From an early age, we’re praised for our ability to recognise patterns. Patterns become scaffolding, letting us swiftly navigate complexity. Experience sharpens this skill, transforming friction into effortless cadence. You learn when to trust a shortcut and when a quick glance is enough. Speed feels good; familiarity comforts you. Even mathematics is sometimes viewed as the ability to extract patterns from elusive logical structures. But here’s the subtle trade-off: your expertise, built by recognising sameness, quietly blinds you to difference.

Here’s the turn: the very talent you’ve cultivated—pattern recognition—can deceive you. Imagine patterns as well-worn paths in a dense forest. They guide you swiftly through the trees, providing comfort and certainty. But rely on them too heavily, and you risk never venturing off the main trail, missing hidden clearings or beautiful vistas just beyond the familiar. The danger isn’t in trusting patterns, but in forgetting they’re simply paths—not the entire landscape.

Here I will add a personal story. For years, I have been running up Doss Trento, a suggestive hill overlooking the city where I work (here there are some photographs). It makes for a nice 7 Km run from my former workplace, a calming way to cut the workday in two and recharge batteries. One day, I chose to read something more about the site, and I realised that every time I ran there, I strolled no more than 10 meters away from the archaeological site of a paleochristian basilica. Can you believe that I never saw it?

When was the last time that you looked at something familiar, and you were able to see it as if it were the first time? Are you sure that all the details you are looking at are what you* believe* they are, or are they something different? Have you ever tried considering your own face?

“Have you ever looked into a mirror and really concentrated on the person you see there? Try it, Watson, it is an interesting exercise. After an hour of looking, you see someone else. You see, eventually, what a stranger sees, not the composite picture of facial components with which you are so familiar, but individual parts of the face—the big nose, the close-together eyes. You see yourself as a person. Not as you.”

Shadows Over Baker Street: New Tales of Terror! – Tim Lebbon (the book as a whole has multiple authors)

Psychologist Daniel Kahneman also neatly highlights our predicament and brings it one step beyond:

“We can be blind to the obvious, and we are also blind to our blindness.”

Thinking, Fast and Slow – Daniel Kahneman

So, how can you resist pattern-induced drift? By consciously balancing speed and attention. Patterns are your scaffolding, not permanent structures. Use them as launchpads rather than traps.

Here’s a simple playbook that I use for staying alert:

  • Regularly challenge your assumptions, especially when things seem obvious. Better yet, schedule a review session now and then.
  • Intentionally vary your perspective to spot unnoticed details. Are you playing chess or another board game? Ask your opponent to take her seat for a few minutes, and see how the defence is not as sound as it looks.
  • Cultivate curiosity; let questions interrupt your autopilot. If everyone agrees on something, try the other way to see the implications. Ask confirming questions and let others challenge their own assumptions as well.
  • Seek novelty to sharpen your ability to spot uniqueness. Let Spotify suggest new music to you. Grab a book about something you don’t care much about and skim through it. Just look at something. Look hard.
  • Treat anomalies as invitations—not annoyances. Remember Dr. Spock? To every space anomaly, he said, “Fascinating!”
  • Bonus tip: bring children with you. Everything is new to them, so you’ll have an automatic provocative questions generator by your side.

I must publicly admit that I struggle between two opposites: seeking originality and absorbing as much as I can from one side, and streamlining my life as much as I can on the other. Today I feel more on the “original” side, but you know what other task I have for today? Mapping out my blogging process, so I can produce more with less effort and without worrying about the recurring minutiae…

Ah, the human condition is such a lovely, constantly consuming and compelling chaotic contradiction…

Until next time, slow down, change viewpoint, look again, and notice what you’ve been missing.