Have you ever met someone who knew the outcome of a situation before it even happened?
They aren’t psychic or able to see the future. Instead, they recognize and learn from patterns, a skill that highly successful people implement, according to billionaire Michael Rubin.
Rubin is the CEO and founder of sports merchandise retailer Fanatics, a company that’s helped him amass a reported net worth of $11.5 billion. He credits much of his success at building and running Fanatics, which was worth $31 billion following a fundraising round in 2022, to pattern recognition, he recently told life coach Jay Shetty’s “On Purpose” podcast.
“It’s a really important skill in business, because I think it’s predictive of the future,” Rubin said.
As an example, Rubin explained how he vets potential employees — gathering data beyond their resumes and job interviews.
“If I like them, as soon as they leave, I go out and start calling people that I knew that we have in common to recognize patterns. To me, 50% is the interview and 50% is what I learn behind the scenes,” said Rubin. “Someone could blow me away … but you find out people don’t like working with them. Or you can find out that person was a little bit understated, but they’re a beast.”
Whether he’s making business decisions or playing blackjack, Rubin said he relies on the skill to make good choices: “Pattern recognition is everything. I use it in everything that I do.”
A skill for dodging potential problems
The human brain constantly processes patterns, helping you understand information, languages and even your own imagination. Relying on this skill to dodge potential conflicts and negative outcomes can help you think more critically.
Rubin isn’t the only one who swears by the skill. At Berkshire Hathaway’s annual meeting in April 2016, CEO Warren Buffett discussed a decision — driven by pattern recognition, he said — that he’d made to avoid investing in drug company Valeant Pharmaceuticals, which is known today as Bausch Health Companies.
Buffett said he’d been advised to buy Valeant stock: The company used cost hikes to build profits, and investors saw healthy returns as its stock price soared. But despite the hype, Buffett said he saw red flags in Valeant’s “deeply flawed” business model, indicating to him that it wasn’t built for long-term sustainability.
His intuition was right. The month before the Berkshire meeting, Valeant CEO Michael Parsons stepped down from his role. Lawmakers soon accused Valeant of price-gouging patients, and within 30 days, the drugmaker’s stock dropped by 85%.
“If you have an intelligent guy pursuing a course of action that will put you on the front page, that will eventually get you into trouble … Patterns that frequently come to a bad end, but look extremely good in the short run,” Buffett said.
How to read between the lines
There are several ways to improve your pattern recognition skills. You can play games like chess and checkers, or simply practice collaborating with people who have different perspectives and insights.
You can also take a more analytical approach, as leadership coach Ganes Kesari recently posted on LinkedIn.
“Identifying patterns is both art and science. First define the business goals and challenges to solve. Then comes data sourcing. Collect diverse data sets and apply statistical and/or advanced analytical tools, like AI algorithms, to process this data,” Kesari wrote.
Afterwards, get an expert to look over the patterns, “ensuring they are not mere coincidences, but useful insights that can be acted upon,” he added.
Nobody becomes a pattern recognition whiz overnight, but finding ways to practice it every day will make you more successful, Rubin said on the podcast.
“You’ve got to recognize patterns in everything that you do,” he said.
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