Unlearning Your Way Back to Seeing — Angus Fletcher's Intuition

MUSIC: 00:00:00

[music]

David Carson: 00:00:01

I want you to imagine you're a salesperson, and you're absolutely terrible at it, like career-endingly bad. Your boss calls you below suboptimal. Your coworkers call you a cautionary tale. One manager says you're like a donkey trying to climb stairs. Your company is done with you because even if you tripled your sales tomorrow, you'd still be in last place. But before they toss you out, they send you to one final training program. You show up, and you're expecting some kind of PowerPoint from hell. But nope, just a blank projector screen. There's no cliched Seven Habits slides, no cheesy handouts. Then the instructor walks in. He doesn't even introduce himself. Instead, he just says, "Sales is about relationships." You nod because, well, yeah. Duh. Obviously. Everyone knows that. Then he adds, "And relationships take time. You can't rush them." Are you kidding me right now? Apparently, you flew across the country for a fortune cookie. Then he stands up and says, "Let's go to a museum." A museum? Not a workshop, not a sales floor, a museum. And you all look at each other like, "This guy is concussed," right? But whatever. You're getting fired anyway, so you go. Inside of the museum are walls of art, weird modern stuff. The instructor points to a gallery and says, "Find a painting that surprises you. Study it. If this were a movie, what would happen if you rewound it? What would happen if you fast-forwarded it?" You stare at a painting. You do the little thought exercise. Ten minutes later, class dismissed. That's it. That's the whole training. Two months later, they check the results. 40% of you still suck, but 60% improved a lot. One guy, the donkey on the staircase, shot from dead last to near the top of his team. His boss said, "The only explanation is someone cracked open his skull and replaced his brain."

SFX: 00:02:22

Ew.

David Carson: 00:02:22

So, what the hell happened in that museum? Welcome to Dumbify. I'm your host, David Carson, and today, we're going to a museum, meeting some spy hunters and discovering why your six-month-old is more intuitive than you are. So, let's do that. Let's get dumb.

THEME SONG: 00:02:45

[music] Dumbify, let your neurons dance. Put your brain in backwards pants. Genus hides a daft disguise. Brilliance wears those googly eyes. So honk your nose and chase that spark. Dumb is just smart in the dark. Dumbify, yelling like a goose. It's thinking wrong on purpose with juice.

David Carson: 00:03:12

Okay. So, when I first read this story, I'm not gonna lie. I rolled my eyes so hard, I saw my own brain because it sounds like every other woo-woo business parable, right? Oh, you wanna be successful? Just go to a museum and feel the art, man. Trust your intuition. The answers are inside you. And then what? You buy some crystals and start microdosing, and suddenly, you're closing deals? But here's the thing. This actually happened. These were real companies desperate enough to send their worst performers to this guy, not for inspiration, not for team building. This was triage, and it worked. 60% success rate on people who were about to be fired. One guy went from absolute zero to legitimate performer. Multiple people made considerable gains. That's not placebo effect. That's not luck. Something actually changed in that museum, and what I want to know is what. What was the exercise? What were they actually doing when they looked at that painting? Because it clearly wasn't art appreciation. These are people who sell refrigerators and insurance. They don't give a shit about modern art. So, what changed? The guy who ran this training, he's not some motivational speaker. He's a researcher who studies how elite soldiers think, special operations, the people who hunt spies and predict wars. And when companies asked him, "What was that exercise? What did you teach them?" his answer is the entire point of today's episode. Because here's what he discovered. Those salespeople didn't learn something new in that museum. They unlearned something. They unlearned the thing that was making them bad at their jobs, the thing that's probably making you miss opportunities right now. And that thing? It's the same thing that makes you smarter than a six-month-old at basically everything, except seeing what's actually in front of you. So here's what we're gonna figure out today. First, what actually happened in that museum? The real exercise, not the hand-wavey trust your intuition bullshit. Second, why your adult brain? The thing you spent decades training to be efficient and smart is secretly terrible at spotting opportunities. Third, how the US Army trains elite soldiers to see things nobody else can see, and how that same technique explains why one guy went from worst salesperson to near the top of his team. And finally, the specific thing you can do this week to unfuck your own perception.... no museum required, because the twist, and this is what got me, is that you already know how to do this. You just trained yourself out of it. And today, we're gonna train you back in. Let's start with the problem, and to understand the problem, we need to talk about a spoon. And to talk about the spoon, we need to talk about the guy who wrote about the museum exercise in the first place. We learned about him in last week's episode. His name is Angus Fletcher, and he studies how people think, specifically how special operations soldiers think, the ones who hunt spies and predict insurgencies before they happen. But this story isn't about soldiers. It's about his six-month-old daughter.

David Carson: 00:06:59

One afternoon, Angus is setting up a picnic in his backyard. It's one of those perfect dad moments, right? Sunshine, lemonade, a little jar of carrot puree for the baby. He's got a sandwich for himself, and he packed a whole box of those cheap plastic spoons, because when you have a six-month-old, you pack backups for everything. He opens the jar of carrot puree, hands his daughter a spoon. She's delighted. Dips it in the carrots, slurps happily. Then she fumbles it. The spoon tumbles into the grass. No problem. Dad's prepared. He reaches into the box, pulls out a fresh spoon, and hands it to her. His daughter takes the new spoon and she just stares at it, suspicious. She dips it into the carrot jar, lifts it up, studies it closely. Then she clenches the spoon in her chubby little fist and starts inspecting it, really inspecting it, turning it over, examining every angle. And then she bursts into tears, not just crying, full meltdown, howling, angry. Angus is baffled. He looks at the two spoons, the one in the grass, the one in her hand. They're identical. Same brand, same color, same size, same everything. Mass-produced plastic from the same factory. Probably stamped out 30 seconds apart on the same machine. So he tries to prove his innocence. He picks up the dirty spoon from the grass, holds both spoons side by side, shows her, "Look, they're exactly the same. Completely interchangeable." His demonstration fails spectacularly. To him, the utensils are identical. To his daughter, they are absolutely categorically not the same spoon. She continues howling until he washes off the original spoon and gives it back to her. Only then does she calm down. Now, here's what Angus realized in that moment. His daughter was upset because he gave her a new spoon. She liked her old spoon, and she thought he pulled a fast one. Took her spoon and tried to replace it with an imposter. But here's the deeper thing he noticed, the thing that made him write about this years later when studying how special operations soldiers see the world differently. His daughter was right. Those spoons weren't the same, not really. Sure, to his efficient adult brain trained to see patterns and categories, they were identical plastic spoons. But his daughter saw the truth he'd forgotten. No two things in this world are actually the same. Every picnic is unique. Every moment is unique. Every person is unique. Even mass-produced plastic spoons stamped from the same mold have microscopic differences, little imperfections, unique variations that might, in some singular circumstance, actually matter. His daughter naturally assumed everything was special while he had trained himself over his entire life to see pattern, labels, and groupings. His daughter was born with intuition, and so was he. But he had trained his out, and that? That's the problem. So here's what happens to your brain as you grow up. When you're born, everything is exceptional. Every spoon is unique. Every face is new. Every sound is interesting. But you can't function like that forever, because if you treated every spoon like a unique snowflake, you'd never get through breakfast. You'd be sitting there, philosophically contemplating the essence of each utensil while your oatmeal gets cold. So your brain develops a shortcut. It's called pattern recognition, and pattern recognition is incredible. It's what lets you drive a car without consciously thinking about every pedal. It's what lets you recognize your friend's face in a crowd. It's what lets you read this sentence without sounding out each individual letter. Your brain learns, "Okay, this thing is a spoon. All spoons are basically the same. Moving on." It creates categories, labels, mental shortcuts, and this is useful. This is how you became a functional adult. But here's the cost. You stop seeing what's actually there. You start seeing what you expect to be there. Think about how you see people now. You meet someone at work and within five minutes, your brain has labeled them. She's creative. He's detail-oriented. They're a type A personality. You're not seeing a unique human being anymore. You're seeing a category. And once you've put someone in a category, you stop discovering new things about them.This is how bureaucracies function. Corporate managers use labels, demographics, personality tests, performance evaluations. They organize people into flow charts based on categories: smart, dumb, reliable, untrustworthy, valuable, worthless. It's efficient. You can make decisions quickly, but you miss everything exceptional about the individual person. This is also how AI thinks. When you interact with a computer algorithm, it's categorizing you constantly. It uses tags and keywords to label incoming data, allowing for fast sorting, analysis, and retrieval. And AI is really good at this, better than humans in most cases. But here's what AI can't do. It can't spot the exception that breaks the rule. It can't see the thing that doesn't fit the pattern and realize, wait, that's not a bug. That's the most important thing here, and that's increasingly what your brain does, too. The more time you spend with computers, the more your brain starts to think like them. You categorize. You judge. You pattern match. "This meeting is boring. That client is difficult. This project is a waste of time." Label, file, move on.

David Carson: 00:13:43

And here's the brutal truth. The better you get at this, the worse you become at innovation, at sales, at relationships, at seeing opportunities, because opportunities don't live in the patterns. They live in the exceptions. The salespeople in that museum, they trained themselves to see patterns so well that they couldn't see individual customers anymore. "This person is a tire kicker. That person won't buy. This type of client always haggles." They'd become so efficient at judging that they'd stopped seeing. And when you stop seeing, you stop selling, because sales, real sales isn't about convincing someone to fit into your category. It's about discovering what's unique about them that they might not even realize, and that requires a completely different way of thinking, a way your 6-month-old still knows, a way the U.S. Army has to explicitly train elite soldiers to do, a way that has a very specific name.

xception. Vincent van Gogh in: 1889

David Carson: 00:22:30

But something feels off. Not wrong exactly, just off. And then the Iraqi says something casual, almost throwaway. He says, "Listen, we could not be more happy that you're here. I am the engineering department head at a university. I lived in Boston for 20 years. I received all of my education at Harvard. We absolutely are glad that you're here. Nobody liked Saddam Hussein. But if you don't get the power back on, and the hospitals open, and the water flowing, the groceries flowing, trade flowing fast, then you will never get control of what's coming." The operator hears this, and something clicks. This isn't a friendly warning from a grateful Iraqi. This is exceptional information, because think about what this guy just said. He didn't say, "Thank you for liberating us." He said, "You're about to lose control." He didn't say, "We're excited about democracy." He said, "You don't understand what's coming." And here's the detail that made the operator's brain light up. This Iraqi's English wasn't just good, it was too good. He spoke better American English than native-born Americans, which meant he didn't just visit America, he'd completely absorbed it, studied it. This was an Iraqi who'd used his US education to engineer cancer hospitals and electronic banking systems in Iraq. This was an Iraqi who'd quietly launched his own American invasion, a more forward-thinking one than the US military's. And now he was standing on a bridge, watching American soldiers occupy a city, telling them, "You're too late, and you're going to fail."The operator reported this conversation back to his command with a warning, "Our plan has failed. We have lost the war." Not, "Might lose." Not, "Could be in trouble." Have lost. Three weeks before the president declared mission accomplished. And here's the thing, the operator was right.

David Carson: 00:24:50

So here's what I want to know. What did that operator do in that moment that most people don't do? Because 99 out of 100 people would have walked past that Iraqi and thought, "Educated guy, friendly, speaks English. Cool." Moving on. They would have seen the pattern. He saw the exception. And that's not magic. That's not some special gift he was born with. It's a technique, a technique the army explicitly teaches, a technique those salespeople learned in the museum, a technique you can use this week. So, let's talk about how it actually works. The technique is called Shift to Narrative, which gets explained by Fletcher like this. Your brain operates in two modes. Mode one, judgment. This is when you use labels to categorize things. "This meeting is boring. She's creative. This project is a waste of time." Judgment mode is fast. It's efficient. It lets you make decisions quickly. It's how bureaucracies think and function. It's also how artificial intelligence thinks, and it's how you've been trained to operate in modern school and business. You label something, assign it to a category, and move on.

David Carson: 00:26:17

We talked about it a little earlier in the show, but what we haven't talked about yet is mode two, which is called narrative. This is when you ask, "Where did this come from? What's the story here?" You focus on the specific behavior, activity, or event. You build a story about what's unique. Narrative mode is slower. It's less efficient. But it's how you discover exceptional information. Here's the key difference. Judgment asks why. Why is this meeting boring? Why is she creative? Why are they being difficult? And why gives you an answer. In sharp contrast, narrative asks what, when, who, where, how. What specifically made you think this meeting is boring? When did she do something creative? What exact moment? Where would they not be difficult? In what circumstances? Those questions don't give you answers. They give you more questions. They keep you curious. The army spy hunters teach this explicitly. They have a classified list of questions designed to surface exceptional information. And Angus Fletcher, the guy who wrote about the museum exercise, he studied their training. He found that more than 95% of their questions are who, what, where, when, and how. They specifically avoid why. Not because why is a bad question, but because why ends the investigation. Why gives you a judgment, and judgment is the end of curiosity. Let me show you how this works in practice. Imagine you're talking to someone and they mention they never eat breakfast. If you ask why, "Why don't you eat breakfast?" they'll give you a generic answer. "Oh, I'm not hungry in the morning," or, "I'm too busy." Judgment, end of story. You learn nothing unique about them. But if you ask what, when, where. "When was the last time you did eat breakfast? What was that like?" Now they have to think about a specific moment. "What would you eat for breakfast if you had unlimited time? Where were you the last time you woke up actually wanting breakfast?" Those questions don't let them give you a generic answer. They force specificity. They force story. And in that story, you discover the exceptional detail. Maybe they reveal the last time they ate breakfast was on vacation in Greece, and they realize they only skip breakfast because their morning routine is stressful. Or they'd eat breakfast if they could have it at 10 AM instead of 7 AM, which tells you something about their natural rhythm. Or the last time they wanted breakfast was after their daughter was born when someone else made it for them, which reveals it's not about food, it's about being taken care of. That's exceptional information. That's the unique detail about this person that she might not have even articulated to herself before. And if you're in sales, that's where the opportunity is. If you're in a relationship, that's where the connection is. If you're trying to solve a problem, that's where the solution is. This is what the operator did on the bridge in Baghdad. He didn't ask the Iraqi, "Why are you here?" He asked, "What, when, where, how?" And in those answers, he found the exception, the too-perfect English, the Harvard education, the warning about what's coming. So that's step one of Shift to Narrative. Stop asking why, and instead, start asking what, when, where, who, how. But there's more to it than that. Because your brain, it doesn't want to do it. It wants to judge, label, and move on. That's what it's been trained to do for decades. So how do you retrain it?This is where that museum story and the salespeople comes in. Remember, those salespeople went to a gallery. They found a painting that surprised them, and they were told to do something very specific. The instructor told them, "If this painting were a movie, what would happen if you rewound it? What would happen if you fast-forwarded it?" Think about what that question does. It forces you to build a story around a specific moment. Not, "This painting is weird," or, "This painting is beautiful," but, "What happened before this moment? And what happens next?" That's how you can easily shift into narrative thinking. You can't rewind or fast-forward a label. You can only rewind or fast-forward a story. And here's the key part. When you're building that story, you have to focus on specific details, not vague impressions. Details like a clenched fist in the painting or the furrowed brow, the way the light hits the wall. Those details are exceptional. They're unique to this specific painting. And when you train your brain to see those details in art, you start seeing them in people. Remember the salesperson who shot to the top of his team? Two months after the museum, he remembered that painting. He remembered specific details about it, like the big, clenched fist of a girl standing alone on a playground. And he could still recall it vividly, with specificity, even months later. That's what changed. He'd reactivated his brain's ability to notice and remember exceptional details, the kind of details his customers were giving him that he'd been missing for years. Now, you might be thinking, "Okay, but I'm not going to a museum this week, so how do I do this in real life?" Here's the principle the spy hunters use. If you're having issues with being able to see what's exceptional, then treat everything as exceptional. Let me say that again, because it's the whole thing. If you can't see what's exceptional, treat everything as exceptional. This is what you do when you're stuck, when you're in a conversation or a meeting and you know you're missing something, but you can't figure out what. Don't try to find the one exceptional detail. Instead, pick anything the person just said and treat it like it's the most interesting thing you've ever heard. If they mention they had a sandwich for lunch, then ask, "What kind of sandwich? Where'd you get it? When was the last time you had that kind? What made you choose that today?" I know it sounds ridiculous. It sounds like you're being weirdly intense about a sandwich. But here's what happens. In their answers, the actually exceptional thing will reveal itself. Maybe they got the sandwich from a deli their dad used to take them to, and they only go there when they're stressed. Boom, exceptional information. See what just happened? You discovered they're stressed by asking about a sandwich. That's why you don't ask, "Why?" Not because you already know the answer, but because the "why" question would have gotten you nothing. The "what," "when," "where" questions got you the real information hidden underneath the surface answer. And hey, I know this is exhausting. You just can't do this all the time. So do it when you think it really matters, when you're trying to close a deal or solve a problem or connect with someone important. This is how you see what everyone else misses. Build stories, focus on details, treat everything as exceptional. But there's one more trap you need to avoid, and it's the trap that feels like you're being a good person, but actually kills your ability to discover anything new. Let me show you what I mean. It's called the empathy trap, and here's what it looks like. Someone tells you something about themselves, a story, a preference, a problem they're dealing with, and your immediate instinct is to connect with them by saying, "Oh my God, I totally get that. The exact same thing happened to me. I feel the same way." And you think you're building rapport, right? You're showing them you understand. You're creating connection. But here's what you're actually doing. You're ending the conversation, because when you say, "I feel the same way," what you're really saying is, "You fit into a category I already understand. I've labeled you. We're done here." It's a judgment disguised as empathy. You're pattern-matching. You're saying, "You're like me. I know this pattern." And the moment you do that, you stop discovering what's unique about them. Angus Fletcher calls this "apparent epiphanies that are actually failures to discover what's unique about the other person." And they seem like affirmations, like you're validating the other person, but what you're actually doing is just interrupting their story with your own story. You're interrupting curiosity with egocentrism. So here's what you do instead. Resist the urge to say, "Me too," and instead, stay curious about them. If they tell you they hate public speaking, don't say, "Oh, man, me too. I get so nervous." Instead ask, "When was the first time you had to speak in public? What happened?" They mention they love cooking. Don't say, "Same. I cook all the time." Instead ask, "What's the first dish you learned to make?"... "Who taught you?" Keep them in the story. Keep them discovering things about themselves, because here's the goal, and this is straight from the Army training. You wanna know something about them that they don't fully know about themselves yet. The spy hunters have a scoring system for this. After you've asked your what, when, where questions and gathered your exceptional information, you make a hypothesis about the person. You say something like, "It seems like you only cook when you want to take care of someone, not just feed yourself." If the person agrees with your hypothesis, you get one point. If the person is surprised by your hypothesis, like they never thought about it that way before, but realize you're right, you get another point. Your goal is two points, which means you've discovered something true about them that they hadn't articulated to themselves, and they recognize it as true the moment you say it. That's exceptional information. That's when you know you've actually seen the person, not just labeled them. This is what those salespeople learn to do. This is what the operator did on the bridge in Baghdad. And this is what you can do when it matters. You don't ask why. You ask what, when, where, how. You treat everything as exceptional. You resist saying, "Me too," and you build a story until you see something nobody else sees, including the person you're talking to.

SONG: 00:38:13

Dumb, dumb, dumb, dumb, dumb word of the day. Dumb word of the day. It's a word. It's dumb. Use responsibly.

David Carson: 00:38:24

All right, it's my favorite part of the show. Not because I'm about to teach you a fancy word, but because I get to explain why having a fancy word for something this obvious proves how far we've fallen as a species. And today's dumb word is noetic, spelled N-O-E-T-I-C. Noetic. It comes from the Greek word noetikos, which means of the mind. In philosophy, noetic refers to knowledge that comes through direct perception or intuition rather than through reasoning or logical deduction. It's the knowledge you get from just looking at something and seeing what's actually there. Not thinking about it, not analyzing it, not comparing it to a pattern, just seeing it, which if you think about it, is the most basic human ability. A six-month-old has noetic perception. She looks at a spoon and sees this specific spoon is very different from that specific spoon. She's not reasoning her way there. She's not building a logical argument. She's just seeing it. But here's why this is our dumb word of the day. Apparently, we need a special Greek philosophical term to describe noticing shit, because we've gotten so addicted to reasoning and logic and pattern matching that direct perception, the thing babies do automatically and really well, needs its own fancy category. It's like if we had a Latin term for using your eyes. "Ah yes, I'm employing ocular data acquisition." No, dude. You're looking at something. But we're so bad at looking at things now, really looking without immediately judging and labeling, that philosophers had to invent a word to remind us it's possible. And here's the part that makes it even dumber. The US Army Special Operations, the people who train spy hunters, basically teach noetic perception as an advanced military skill. They don't call it that, obviously. They call it surfacing exceptional information, but it's the same thing. Seeing what's actually there instead of what you expect to be there. Van Gogh had noetic perception when he saw green and purple clashing more powerfully than the color wheel said they should. Marie Curie had noetic perception when she noticed radiation coming from inside atoms. The operator in Baghdad had noetic perception when he noticed the Iraqi's English was too perfect. They weren't reasoning, they were seeing. And now we need Greek philosophers and Army field manuals to teach us how to do what we were literally born knowing how to do. Let's try using it in a sentence.

"I was having a terrible date, but then I employed my noetic faculties and perceived that she'd been giving me exceptional information for the last 20 minutes. Specifically, that she was bored out of her mind and wanted to leave. Unfortunately, I perceived this noetically at the exact moment I started explaining my crypto portfolio." Perfect. All right, so now that you know what noetic perception is, and now that you know your baby niece is better at it than you are, let's talk about what you're gonna do about it, because I'm not letting you leave this episode without a challenge.

So, here is your big dumb challenge for the week. Pick one situation where you're stuck. Could be a client you can't close, a project that's going nowhere, a friend you keep fighting with, a kid who won't listen, a meeting that feels like a waste of time. Whatever it is, a situation where you feel stuck.

Step one, catch yourself making a judgment about it. "This client is difficult. This project is boring. This person doesn't listen." Notice the label. That's the moment.

Step two. Ask yourself, "What specific thing made me think that?" Not vague impressions. A specific moment. A specific behavior. When exactly did the client seem difficult? What did they say or do?

Step three. Focus on the detail that surprised you, not the stuff that confirms your judgment. The weird stuff, the thing that doesn't quite fit.

Step four. Ask "What, when, where?" about that small detail, not why. What were you thinking when that happened? When was the first time you felt that way? Where else does this show up? How would this be different if something, anything changed? Keep asking until you find something exceptional, something you didn't see before. And here's how you know you've found it. When you have a huh moment, when you see something about the situation that you didn't see five minutes ago.

And if you wanna go full museum mode, find something this week that surprises you, a painting, a building, a weird sculpture at a coffee shop. Stare at it for a few minutes. Ask yourself, "If this were a movie, what happened before this moment? What happens next?" Train your brain to build stories instead of labels.

And that's our show. Thank you for getting dumb with me today. If you know someone who constantly tells you, "I already knew that" before you finish your sentence, who thinks they can read people in five seconds, or who's been stuck in the same job/relationship/problem for years because they're too smart to see what's actually in front of them, send them this episode. They need it, and they won't know they need it, which is exactly why they need it. If you want more dumbness from the dumbified dumbiverse, sign up for the Dumbify newsletter at david-carson.com. This is David Carson signing off. And remember, your six-month-old is better at this than you are. And that's not a compliment to the baby, it's an insult to you. Just kidding, sort of. Stay dumb out there.