Primal Intelligence: You Are Smarter Than You Know by Angus Fletcher tells the story of the training that Project Narrative and Army Special Ops created. The training is simple, not easy. It is a different way of using your brain. It will activate intuition, imagination, emotion, and commonsense, awakening the powers of van Gogh, Tesla, Jobs, and the rest. It will let you use the know how you forget you knew. This book is very cool. Be sure to get a copy.
Introduction: Your Lost Nature
- In the early 2000s, The US Army Special Operations saw trouble coming as recruits were underperforming at decision-making, strategic planning, and leadership. In 2021 they brought in Angus to help design a new training system. Students were doing well on standardized tests, but had difficulty with real-world tasks. Traditional class activity caused declines in independence, adaptability, and resilience. The new training focused on volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity.
- They discovered four primal powers. 1. Intuition that perceives the world’s hidden rules. 2. Imagination that makes the future. 3. Emotion that knows the path of personal growth. 4. Commonsense that decides wisely in uncertainty. Drilling students to think like computers will not help them improve the natural cleverness that AI can’t replicate. The human brain is real-life smart because it thinks in story.
Part I: Primal Activation – 1. Intuition: Spot the Exception Like Vincent van Gogh and Marie Curie
- Intuition means to know without consciously thinking. It arrives as a flash of insight. Its source is exceptional information that results from an extraordinary event. Identifying exceptional information requires initiative. It detects a rupture in a standard narrative and runs ahead of data. The potential reward for acting on the information can be enormous. No human environment ever stays the same. The better we get at detecting the exceptional, the more our brain can intuit the possibilities.
- There are stories here about Vincent van Gogh, Marie Currie, Steve Wozniak, and Steve Jobs that illustrate the power of exceptional information. If you can’t see what’s exceptional, then treat everything as exceptional. Unfortunately, our brain’s default tends to be assume that you’ve seen everything before when it should be assume that everything you see is special. Try to immerse your brain in a totally new environment. That will jump-start your child way of thinking. Try to turn off logic and turn on imagination. Ask who, what, where, when, and how, but try not to ask why, which involves judgement. Focus on surprises that catch your eye.
2. Imagination: Go Low Data Like Ludwig van Beethoven and the Special Operators
- Imagination means “to see things that the eyes don’t see.” We do it constantly and it can be accurate. It comes from the part of our mind that produces mental images. Stories are the source of imagination. We are born to understand stories. In order to convince early juries, lawyers wove facts into stories and they have been doing it ever since. Children naturally think in stories and that doesn’t stop as they become adults.
- While logic computes what is probable, stories create what is possible. Story performs better than logic when it comes to life problems. The way to train imagination is planning, as planning is its main use. Plans often fail because they don’t consider enough possibilities. A good plan has one long-term goal (strategy), and many possible paths (tactics). Don’t try to climb two mountains at once. Your life story is your plan for life.
3. Emotion: Self-Assess Like Antigone and the Singletons
- Emotional intelligence lets you identify your emotions in other people. This is empathy. It relies on biology rather than logic. Fear is an ancient emotion. It’s smart enough to let you know that you have no plan. It represents our brain’s backup plan. If you clarify your strategic objective, it will help you take the next step to help your plan get better.
- Fear can help push you towards your primary purpose. Fear’s ancient partner is anger. Anger can fuel you in critical situations. Too much can elevate stress, which is bad for your health. Treat it as a signal to pause and develop flexibility. Reflect on when you made new plans under pressure and tell yourself you can do it again. This is an emotional reset. Two basic stories are the world is good and I am good. When one breaks down, lean on the other. Beware of grief and shame as they can weaken your forward momentum. Emotion should tell you when things are wrong and point you towards a fix.
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