Patterns matter…in investigative work and in your own life. Over the course of my career, I responded to many reports of missing persons. One thing you quickly learn is that an investigation often begins not with where the person might be, but with understanding what is normal for them—their baseline.
Where do they usually go? Who do they normally speak with? What does an ordinary day look like? What are their routines, habits, and relationships?
Because before you can understand the significance of what is different, you first have to understand what was normal. Establishing an understanding of a pattern gives context. Have you ever read Patrick Van Horne and Jason A. Riley’s Left of Bang? You should. One of its central ideas is simple and useful here: establish the baseline, recognize the anomaly, and investigate what changed. A deviation doesn’t automatically tell us what is wrong—or that anything is wrong—but it gives us something worth paying attention to.
What I’ve also noticed over my life is that we are naturally more curious and able to create distance, compare observations, and ask causal questions about other people than about ourselves. Didn’t you hear that Mike quit his job? When did that happen? What happened with his boss? Wasn't he just passed over for a promotion? Didn't his wife just change jobs? I thought he was unhappy there for months? A rudimentary investigation, at best, but the questions are an attempt to construct a timeline, retrieve prior observations, and compare current behavior against a baseline to propose an explanation. We do this to organize observations, establish expectations/baselines, reveal regularities and deviations, and direct further inquiry. But when that sort of situation happens to me, I know those questions aren’t necessarily at the forefront of my own curiosity. I tend to conclude—I’m just being lazy, undisciplined, or just stressed. When it’s someone else, that psychological distancing allows us to more easily consider the patterns. Call it curiosity. Call it gossip. But notice what you're doing. You're investigating change. But when that concerns ourselves, self-protection matters and so conclusions are easier than evaluating the evidence that concerns our own identity and behavior.
Most of us may understand this but still underestimate the consequences of such across our health, habits, relationships, and performance. We may be solving the wrong problems, making judgments about behavior, or just missing the accumulation of pressures. We start to normalize the drift from our identity and miss the opportunities to intervene.
Recognizing a change earlier gives us a better chance to understand what is happening and decide what to do about it. That is the intent behind What’s Pressing.
Each week, I want to take something we experience in ordinary life—a change in our behavior, performance, relationships, habits, or how we handle pressure—and get curious about it.
Not everything needs a label and not every problem needs an immediate solution. Sometimes the better place to start is simply paying attention to what is different, looking at what might be connected, and asking the better questions.
This week, that question is a simple one:
What changed?
This week, notice one thing about yourself that has changed—a habit, reaction, behavior, relationship, or part of your performance. Before explaining it or trying to fix it, ask: When did this change, and what else changed around it?
The families of those missing persons wanted us to be curious about every change, every pattern, and every detail that might matter. Maybe we owe ourselves some of that same curiosity.
Let’s be curious so we can live with Fidelity to our unique identity.
