Pattern Recognition: How To Find More Of What You Love
And avoid the crap that you know you don’t like
Allow me to start at the beginning. I am coming up to the two-year mark on this newsletter. And I am super pleased that so many of you have come along for the ride. Thank you. Perhaps it is a fool’s errand, but I want to paint a complete picture. A complete picture of what? Why the-comprehensive-argument -of-why-we-need-a-non-dependent-cinema-ecosystem-prioritizing-the-artist, as well as a strategy-on-how-to-have-a-sustainable-and-generative-creative-life (despite all the barriers to it in this crazy world), of course!
This is not an easy mission. Nor is it a quick one. Each post is connected to the others. Sometimes I impress myself with how well it fits, but sometimes I surprise myself at what I neglect. You know I like lists, but perhaps in emphasizing my neglect, you can see the many reasons why.
Amongst those many reasons are that the bullet points on the lists work for me as subject headings for the posts I still need to write. I need to write them because without them I don’t know how else to give you both the comprehensive argument and the strategy. It is what I wish someone had tried to give me sometime along this journey, but ideally from the start. Seems to me that is what film schools should all be about – you know, training students to be changemakers, as well as great artists and entrepreneurs, as in my book such change is part of either description.
I think you can imagine my disappointment, when I looked at this post and saw that I had no essay yet to back up the point of “Pattern Recognition”. This post is to now right that wrong that has gone on far too long. Point #9 on that list is going from black to red, with a new link to this post to back it up. Now that’s what I am talking about. Getting things done!
I’ve raised pattern recognition in many of these posts previously, and certainly when I have given lectures. People nod their heads in what seems like understanding, but I often wonder if they’ve stopped to consider why pattern recognition is so important. I think instinctively people chalk it up to wanting to make decisions faster, and hopefully better decisions at that, but I think the need for developing pattern recognition is even far more basic.
We need to see what we want despite all the fog or exhaustion — and pattern recognition skills work as a sort of corrective lens. In a cacophony of noise, we need our north star to ring out loud and true. In order to see, we need to know what to look for. We need to know what to avoid. If we can train ourselves to just recognize those two things a bit better, we’ve done well and will do well in the future. I am going to help you do so now, or at least try.
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to Hope For Film to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.