I don't remember the moment when I realised that my brain works differently. It simply always has. I started playing chess before I even went to school. My papa taught me, and I became good at it very quickly. My brother and sister went to kindergarten. I didn't. I found kindergarten far too boring, so my parents kept me at home with nannies who came and went. To this day, I don't know whether that was the cause or the consequence, but I do know that I have always lived several steps ahead of the moment I'm actually in.
For years, I thought it was simply the way I think. Only later did I learn that psychology has a name for it: pattern recognition. Pattern recognition is one of the most fascinating cognitive functions of the human brain. It is our nervous system's ability to find meaning in a sea of information, data, sounds, visual stimuli, or human behaviour, connect them into a coherent whole, and predict what comes next.
How does our brain recognise patterns? By constantly working as a prediction machine. Whenever you find yourself in a situation, your brain doesn't passively wait to see what will happen. Instead, in a fraction of a second, it searches its own "database" - memories, books you've read, or situations you've lived through, and compares the current stimuli with past experiences. There are different levels of pattern recognition, such as the operational-logical level. Chess players are a good example. With a single glance at the board, they can see several moves ahead because they don't look at each piece separately; they recognise a "formation" they have seen a thousand times before. That is exactly what my papa taught me from an early age.
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Simply put, highly developed pattern recognition is neither magic nor clairvoyance. It is the result of the combination of three elements: awareness, memory, and experience. Awareness means that the brain "scans" its surroundings with a wide-angle lens. During a meeting, you don't notice only what is being explicitly discussed; your mind also absorbs the unconscious signals: who avoids eye contact, who hesitates before answering, which topics are quietly swept under the rug. Memory and associative thinking give the brain the ability to hold a large amount of information at the same time and rapidly cross-reference it. Experience provides the "material" for your internal database. The more situations, crises, successes, and failures you have experienced, or learned about, the more precise the patterns your brain has available for comparison.
My mind has worked this way my entire life, probably strengthened by all those years of playing chess with my papa. My brain naturally arranges everything into something like a mathematical puzzle, connecting details, dynamics, and human behaviour into a picture of a possible outcome. Sometimes it is a gift. Sometimes it is a burden. Most of the time, it is both at once.
In one of my previous companies, I spent years warning that one department was heading in the wrong direction - partly because the wrong person was in the leadership role, partly because there was no strategy, and partly because of operational mistakes. In the end, the department declined by almost 80 percent over five consecutive years. Yet the owner still refused to change anything. What concerned me most was the fact that he kept insisting on better results, from me, because I was formally responsible for that manager, while at the same time refusing to change the setup, remove him, or carry out the complete reorganisation the department clearly needed.
It always reminded me of a quote from a 1981 Narcotics Anonymous pamphlet, published without an attributed author, which later became widely known in Al-Anon and other recovery communities:"Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results." Several times I had serious conversations with the owner and asked him why he refused to change something that so obviously wasn't working. He had no logical explanation. He saw the numbers. He saw the decline. He saw good people leaving. Yet he kept making the same decisions. Poor results never remain just numbers. They always end up affecting people.
Today, when I ask myself why some owners or managers behave this way, my answer is that the reason is often not business logic but the need for control. I may be wrong, but my experience has taught me that micromanagers and insecure, or simply inexperienced, leaders would rather choose a familiar failure, where they feel in control of the process, than an unfamiliar success, where they would have to trust someone else. In that kind of environment, even good ideas can remain unused. And it can be incredibly frustrating in day-to-day operations when you can see the bigger picture but have no influence over the key strategic decisions - which, more often than not, don't really exist because micromanagers tend to get deeply stuck in operations.
The moment the owner demanded better results from me while, at the same time, tying my hands, I realised that he was actually shifting the responsibility for his own fear of change onto me. And unfortunately, I came to understand the feeling of Cassandra, the Trojan princess who could see the future, yet no one believed her. According to one version of the myth, Apollo cursed her after she rejected his love. True, he gave her the gift of prophecy, but I honestly believe she never asked for it in the first place. Cassandra saw every danger threatening her city, including the fact that the Trojan Horse was a trap. Yet everyone thought she was mad, and in the end, Troy fell. The greatest tragedy is not seeing what is coming. The greatest tragedy is seeing it, warning others, and having no one willing to listen.
Having a brain that is constantly looking for patterns can be exhausting. Because the brain wants to find meaning and patterns at all costs, it can sometimes go into overdrive and start connecting things that have no real cause-and-effect relationship. And then there is the inevitable chronic stress. When the brain recognises a pattern suggesting that a project will fail a year from now, it never experiences that danger as something "far away." For your nervous system, the danger is here now. That is why your body shifts into a state of stress on a subconscious level, even though you are sitting in a quiet office.
As exhausting as it can be, this way of thinking also comes with a price. People who constantly recognise patterns can easily fall into the trap of doubting their own judgement or feeling that there is no point in sharing ideas when those around them keep ignoring them. In organisational psychology, this phenomenon is sometimes described as organisational gaslighting. Although the term gaslighting originally comes from intimate and family relationships, psychologists have observed that the very same patterns of psychological manipulation occur in workplaces where management, or the organisational culture itself - systematically undermines, distorts, or denies the objective reality experienced by employees. The goal, whether conscious or unconscious, is to make employees, especially those who point out problems - begin to doubt their own perception, competence, memory, or even their sanity. And indeed, when your assessments repeatedly run into a wall of silence or are simply ignored, you begin to wonder whether you might actually be the one who is wrong.
I broke that cycle by always returning to facts and numbers. That 80% decline is proof that I was right, no matter how bitter that proof may be. Even today, that department has never truly recovered. The fundamentals remain the same: the same style of leadership, the same chronic lack of strategy and stability, and the same constant turnover of people. As a result, the outcomes remain the same as well.
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Troy ultimately fell because no one was willing to listen to Cassandra. But our role is not to save every Troy that refuses to see the horse standing at its own gates. Pattern recognition is a gift. But its true value only becomes evident when you work with people who are courageous enough to look the truth in the eye. Everything else is simply exhausting your own nervous system fighting battles that were already lost before they even began.
*Living with a brain that never stops can be exhausting. In my next essay, I write about what I do when it all becomes too loud, and how I found my own way back to quiet. Read next: Glimmers: The Art of Feeling Safe Again