Master pattern recognition, and your life will take on a whole new look from this moment on.

Shenyiju is a translation team under 36Kr, focusing on technology, business, workplace, life and other fields, with a focus on introducing new technologies, new perspectives and new trends from abroad.

Editor's Note: The so-called randomness and talent, when stripped down, are nothing more than high-density samples hitting instant feedback; those who cannot see the hidden doors of the game will eventually become fuel for algorithms and cycles. This article is translated.

People are often extremely vulnerable to being deceived, again and again.

This is the weakness of human nature.

You try repeatedly to achieve the same goal, but you keep getting frustrated. No matter how much effort you put in, the results never seem to improve. This sense of frustration is absolutely crushing...

And that's exactly why most people choose to give up.

However, the way to break the deadlock is actually very simple: master "pattern recognition". Learn to insight into the patterns and laws that govern the operation of all things in the world, and use them for your own benefit. Tony Robbins, the outstanding contemporary life mentor, once said: "There are some universal underlying laws in this world."

Tony first came to this realization when he planned to write an investment book. Although he had never set foot on Wall Street nor worked as a hedge fund manager, he conducted in-depth interviews and studies with ten titans in the financial field.

When he finished writing his first investment monograph, he discovered the behavioral patterns that these masters subconsciously followed in common. This book is exactly *Money: Master the Game*.

It is this book that quietly reversed the trajectory of my life — but definitely not in the way you think. I will tell you all about it later.

The skill of pattern recognition can give you the advantage of "dimensionality reduction strike". It allows you to quickly step into a brand new field, or complete the transformation from a novice to a master at a speed far faster than ordinary people. Any skill, career, goal or business territory can be completely cracked through the hidden lever of pattern recognition.

Mastering pattern recognition will revolutionize the trajectory of your life forever.

See through the mystery behind the appearance that others regard as "random": The counterattack of an ice cream truck driver

In 1984, Michael Larson was just an unemployed ice cream truck driver in Ohio, USA.

He had no impressive academic qualifications, no millions in deposits, and no eye-catching specialties at all. All he had was a plump middle-aged man, a sofa and a VCR.

Like a typical loser, he was completely addicted to a game show called *Press Your Luck* on CBS. The rules of the game are very straightforward: contestants press a button to make the flashing marquee cursor stop on the bonus square, while praying not to step on the "Whammy" that clears all bonuses.

Everyone thought the cursor's jumps were completely random.

That's what everyone thought, except Michael.

While audiences across the United States were enjoying the show with beer, Larson recorded every episode and launched an almost crazy in-depth exploration. He held the remote control, paused and disassembled the recording frame by frame, day after day for weeks. Like a data scientist dressed as a primitive caveman, he hunched in front of the TV, searching hard for the law that everyone firmly believed did not exist.

And he actually found it.

The so-called "random" flashing panel was not random at all. It only cycled through five fixed patterns. Only five sets, that was the whole truth behind it.

He even calculated that two specific squares would never have a "Whammy", and each would give an extra spin opportunity. If he could hit these two squares as he wished, theoretically he could clear the game infinitely.

So he memorized all five sets of cycle logic, and trained the trigger timing over and over again until he could stop the cursor at the designated square with pinpoint accuracy like a sniper. Then he spent all his savings accumulated from driving the ice cream truck, bought a ticket to Los Angeles to participate in the show's contestant audition.

A supervisor in charge of contestant review was wary of him and wanted to reject him, but the producer overruled the decision — because Michael looked like a completely harmless hick.

Michael finally stepped onto the stage, stunning the entire audience.

He pressed the pause button dozens of times in a row, without stepping on the "Whammy" even once. The live audience fell into a frenzy, and the host looked flustered. In the studio control room, CBS executives stared at the unknown ice cream driver in stunned disbelief, watching him slowly dismantle their show's rules like a slow-motion nightmare.

When Michael finally chose to stop, he won a total of $110,237. This set the all-time record for the highest single-day bonus on a TV quiz game show at that time.

CBS executives were furious and once refused to pay the bonus.

They launched an investigation, replaying the recording frame by frame to look for evidence of his cheating.

But in the end they found nothing. Because the rules never prohibited contestants from "staying extremely sharp and focused". In the end, the TV station paid every cent in full, secretly rewrote the cursor program, and hid this episode for nearly 20 years to prevent others from following his example.

An unemployed middle-aged man defeated the other party on the home field of a major national TV network, relying only on a VCR. No money, no connections, let alone luck.

All he relied on was a set of patterns that everyone else was too dismissive to dig into.

An easy-to-understand guide to pattern recognition (let you truly master and put it into practice)

Pattern recognition is essentially the brain's ability to penetrate the noisy and chaotic surface noise and see the hidden underlying architecture.

Where others can only see chaos, chance or isolated trivial matters, you can recognize a familiar contour model. You can instantly see its meaning and accurately predict its next move.

But a truth that subverts cognition is: pattern recognition is not an innate high IQ, it is not a talent, nor is it a third eye you are born with.

Pattern recognition is actually highly concentrated experience.

All the geniuses you admire with extraordinary intuition are just running a huge database in the background of their minds.

Take chess as an example. Put a grand master in front of a mid-game chessboard, let them look at it for 5 seconds, then take away the board. They can almost perfectly restore the entire game's moves purely from memory.

Superhuman, right?

However, if the pieces are completely randomly scattered on the chessboard — forming a dead position that can never appear in actual combat — the grand master's performance will not be much better than yours and mine.

Please read this sentence again carefully.

As soon as the established pattern disappears, their "photographic memory" superpower will instantly collapse.

Because they are never memorizing individual pieces. What they see are familiar formations and structures, dynamic combinations that they have deduced tens of thousands of times before. Beginners see 25 isolated pieces, while masters see 5 to 6 tactically meaningful blocks. They are facing the same chessboard.

But the resolution of information they possess is completely different.

This is the core logic. Pattern recognition can distill 10,000 hours of experience accumulation into a glimpse in the blink of an eye. It seems like intuition, but in fact it is the knowledge graph library in your mind. Once you understand this point, an exciting fact is in front of you: the knowledge graph library can be completely built through acquired efforts.

The underlying law that changed my life, helped me become a millionaire and completely bid farewell to the banking industry

Today I am going to share a secret that I have never revealed before.

On the surface, I look like that lucky Australian who won the internet lottery, with millions of fans, living a retired life on the beach in advance with my wife and two children.

But this is just the appearance.

As I mentioned before, it is pattern recognition that rewrote my destiny. Now I will tell you the specific process. As mentioned earlier, Tony Robbins' book in 2014 taught me how to insight into laws. After reading that book, I fell into a state of extreme fanatical excitement about the concept of "pattern recognition".

I experienced an indescribable euphoria, feeling that I had opened a Pandora's box at the cognitive level.

I thought to myself: People spend their whole lives running around for a few coins, and money takes up most of their time. But if money is essentially just a game full of rules, then as long as I can master the routines in it, is there a chance for me to win big?

I know this sounds like a fantasy, but it was indeed my most real thought at that time. In the following years, I read every book on money and Wall Street on the market, and tried my best to search for the underlying logic in them.

Finally one night, I discovered a "loophole" in the system. It goes like this...

The compensation each of us receives is fiat currency issued by the government. And when I looked into history, I found that every empire in human history has, without exception, used currency over-issuance to harvest interests. The temptation is so great that no regime can resist it. So if every government in history is destined to dilute its own currency eventually, what does that mean for wealth?

I realized that I had spent most of my life working my ass off to earn this kind of currency that is destined to depreciate, trading my most precious time for it. Therefore, understanding the pattern of how money operates has immeasurably huge returns.

I finally caught that pattern.

All governments create money out of thin air by turning on the printing press. The more money they print, the higher the prices of all core assets and investment targets will rise. Therefore, as long as I allocate my assets to the right targets, the expansion of the money supply will logically push up the net value of my investment.

I found that different assets have different inflation growth rates. But in any case, the underlying logic is clear. Since 2014, I have made full use of this law, which has accumulated enough wealth for me that I no longer need to work for survival for the rest of my life.

It is undeniable that I have achieved some small success in business and accumulated a certain number of fans. But the core law that really saved my life trajectory is a deep understanding of the nature of money creation.

As long as you are willing to calm down and look for patterns, any seemingly impossible goal, result or business model, you can follow the clues to unlock its underlying code.

The most important pattern in history

The pattern that governs the operation of this world is:

Good times breed weak people.

Weak people lead to difficult times.

Difficult times temper tough people.

Tough people create prosperous times.

Once you understand this cycle pattern, you can calmly deal with all kinds of unknowns and turbulence like a Jedi Knight. Even in the cold winter and adversity, you know clearly that the recovery of all things and the bright and warm summer are already waiting around the corner.

This law can give you a kind of calm composure and confidence that does not show on the face. It is one of the very few underlying models in the world that can sum up the general trend of the world in just four sentences.

This is the supreme power contained in patterns.

They can compress the huge subject of human history, which is full of countless stories and variables, into a thorough insight that only takes 30 seconds to understand. Shocking, right? Me too. Let me go to the bathroom first to calm down (half-joking and half-serious). Let this iron law that "cycles will inevitably return to prosperity" become the driving force for you to move forward optimistically, helping you achieve all the grand plans in life.

Either see the pattern clearly, or become a slave to subconscious patterns

Next, we have to touch on some dark sides of reality.

This is not a warm fairy tale with a happy ending. Before a real cognitive breakthrough arrives, there will inevitably be keyboard warriors in the comment section who take words out of context and rant. In that case, let's be straightforward, and let the trolls be completely blown away.

The highest-level strategies often contain paradoxes. Pattern recognition can rewrite your destiny, but under the surface, passively solidified blind patterns can also completely destroy your life.

Mastering pattern recognition has indeed given me comprehensive freedom in the modern sense. But before that, it was precisely because I turned a blind eye to the patterns around me that I fell into years of internal friction and stagnation. Some people choose to turn a blind eye to the laws, and even clamor that pattern recognition is nothing but nonsense. But everything in the world does operate according to specific laws.

You only have two choices: either actively insight into patterns and sharpen them into core abilities; or let the subconscious mindset dominate your destiny, and then attribute all this to bad luck, racism, discrimination, neurodevelopmental diversity, unhealed childhood trauma or other excuses.

Psychologist Carl Jung once asserted:

"Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate."

You must bring the hidden patterns in your subconscious to the bright side of consciousness. This sounds simple, but it is by no means easy to do. The vast majority of people in the world spend their entire lives as puppets of subconscious inertia.

Various addictions are essentially nothing more than blind unconscious cycles. If you really want to get rid of porn addiction or quit vaping, you can definitely do it — but the premise is that you must first find out the hidden behavior trigger mechanism.

For example, I was once severely addicted to junk food. Later I noticed that whenever anxiety hit, I would subconsciously overeat to relieve stress. So I developed the habit of meditation to calm my mind, and after that I never needed to go to 7-Eleven and chug slush after slush.

It was never a problem with eating habits, it was purely anxiety at work.

When I was in extreme poverty, I saw another hidden cycle: whenever an opportunity came in front of me, I would sabotage myself — I would focus all my attention on all the negative obstacles, be too obsessed with risks, but turn a blind eye to the potential return on investment.

This stubborn mindset trapped me in the quagmire of earning $50,000 a year for so long that I am embarrassed to admit it.

On the surface, this seems to be a problem with the ability to make money, or being trapped by the intergenerational disadvantage of a poor original family. But the truth is not the case.

The real problem lies in a series of deeply ingrained limiting beliefs, which made me see every million-level opportunity in front of me as a hungry ferocious brown bear that was ready to swallow people alive for lunch at any time.

"Victim mentality" is probably the strongest culprit that destroys human potential.

Whenever a disaster strikes or a change occurs, the subconscious pattern of willingly falling into a victim will take advantage of the situation. People will not think "I can turn the tide", but instead lament "Why me, I can't live a good life for the rest of my life".

The former mindset gives you control, while the latter is no different from sentencing yourself to prison — soaking in a quicksand pit, surrounded by a group of gangsters smoking cheap cigarettes and holding beer, taunting you and shouting: "Stop struggling kid, you can't escape!"

This neuroscience trick has been mastered by top players for hundreds of years

I am not a psychologist, nor have I majored in neuroscience.

But when I first came into contact with Tony Robbins' works, I learned the concept of "pattern interrupts" — which is the ultimate solution to break the subconscious inertia cycles that lead to bad consequences.

The core logic is: once you can clearly identify a certain destructive behavior pattern, you can cut it off with your own hands. For example, if a person wants to correct stuttering, every time he feels he is about to get stuck, he can make a completely different abnormal move to interrupt the original link. Here is my personal experience of this trick...

Many years ago, I was extremely afraid of public speaking. I spent years joining Toastmasters to face my fear. I thought I had overcome it. Until one day, my boss at the bank asked me to give a public speech in front of 2,000 bank colleagues.

The audience below included all the leaders I had worked with, and all the potential superiors I might want to work for in the future. To make matters worse, just a few days ago, I just learned that I was about to lose my job because the team was disbanded.

Five years of hard work went down the drain.

The extremely high sunk cost made the situation take a sharp turn for the worse. It was easy to give speeches to strangers before, but the people below made me feel that as long as I made even one mistake, I would be fired on the spot and never get a good job in the industry again.

The moment before I stepped onto the stage, I was scared out of my wits. It's not an exaggeration at all. My palms were full of cold sweat, I felt dizzy, and even worried that I would lose control and make