Your Primal Intelligence for Placeholder
A fan letter to Angus Fletcher, who wrote about innate capabilities of humans that can help you navigate your Placeholder, in his book, Primal Intelligence.
Dear Angus,
It’s an understatement to say I love your book, Primal Intelligence. I am having a hard time to come up with the right words to express my admiration and gratitude for your work and this book.
Since I was little, I always felt conflicted between the stories I believed in about myself and the stories I was told to believe at school and in society. My childhood hero was Anne of Green Gables. She went through so many painful events in her life but she always dealt with them with ultimate optimism in herself and other people around her. When I shared my love for Anne, my mom cautiously warned me that I couldn’t live like Anne in the real world. She called her “unrealistic.”
In turbulent teenage years and early 20s going through my parents’ divorce, and my family’s financial difficulties and many other unfortunate events, I escaped to the world of stories created by so many great writers: Herman Hesse, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Ernest Hemingway, Toni Morrison, Jane Austen, Karen Blixen, Thomas Pinchon, Virginia Woolf, Doris Lessing, Pak Kyungni, etc. They were great comfort for me and also dared to imagine different stories I could live.
However, in school and society, the most popular version of stories was “Be an A student, go to a great college, get a good job, and everything will be fine.” Although I loved and wanted to believe so much in the unlimited possibilities told by those great writers, I bought into this version and became an A student, went to great schools and got good jobs at respectable companies.
Only in my mid 30s, I realized the promise that this story made was empty. Sure, it drove me to achieve a lot, but it was at the cost of negating my own innate abilities, which you call Primal Intelligence: intuition, imagination, emotions, and commonsense.
We perceive the world’s hidden rules through intuition.
We make the future with imagination.
We know the path of personal growth through emotion.
We discern and decide wisely in uncertainty with commonsense.
Instead, what I was told to capitalize on was my logic and rationality. I excelled at it and got “successful” by the society’s standard but I was utterly miserable. “Miserable” because I was always anxious and worrying, constantly comparing myself to others or kept measuring my current self to the hypothetical future self. According to the “success” narrative that emphasized logic and rationality as the way to go, the theme of life was nonstop competition and self-improvement. It was exhausting and I found it empty of any meaning. I started asking myself “For what am I working and living?”
That’s what prompted me to explore many ideas and experiment with them too. I started reading a lot of books on neuroscience, contemplative practices and psychology. I started practicing meditation seriously. I interacted with many people who shared the same curiosity with me. And eventually it was that curiosity led me to enter my own Placeholder period to create my own Noble Work.
It was not about just “finding” the next great job but “creating” the work that I found truly meaningful. In the context of Primal Intelligence, this was about “being aware of what kind of stories we are telling about our life now and being able to freely imagine a different story guided by our intuition, emotion and commonsense.” Going through my own Placeholder and writing a book about it was a process of restoring the hidden path to my primal intelligence. The sincere and deep trust in myself was a great bonus that came along with it.
Reading your book, I realized what everyone I interviewed for The Placeholder shared in common was their access to their intuition, imagination, emotion, and commonsense. That primal intelligence was what made them possible to be “naturalists” to observe themselves, synthesize critical insights about themselves and create their own meaningful works.
This restoration of trust in ourselves is particularly critical now, in the age of AI. There are so many debates and discussions now that compare human intelligence to AI, spewing out so much pessimism about humanity. Your book guides us with what it means to be human with primal intelligence, because it is uniquely human and not programmable in AI. Instead of the futile comparison between humans and AI, we get to reclaim our humanness through Primal Intelligence.
What also fascinated me so much was how you showed the extensive application of primal intelligence in various areas such as innovation, resilience, decision-making, communication, coaching, and even leadership. Not only the depth of your research on narrative cognition but also your actual experience of applying primal intelligence with US Army Special Operations, corporations, education institutions, and creators of the world got me so excited about the unlimited possibilities of human potential.
In the last chapter of Primal Intelligence, you shared how Primal Intelligence helped you grow through your own personal stories of painful experiences. You wrote,
“I stopped being a fake savant and became a true teacher. I learned, at last, to do for others what Shakespeare had done for me: pass on a method for activating the brain’s primal power to create new plans that work. With that method, you can adapt to change and win in chaos. You can create the future by seeing the possible faster. You can carry on the mission when the unexpected bullet comes.”
In Hamlet, Shakespeare wrote, “We know what we are, but know not what we may be.” Primal Intelligence is such a gift for all of us, as you are reminding us of the innate potential we always carry in ourselves, which guides us to uncover what we may be. I am forever grateful that you took a chance on yourself to pursue PhD in Shakespeare instead of neurophysiology intuitively 25 years ago and kept marching on this path of studying how we think in stories.
THANK YOU SO MUCH for bringing this book to the world and reminding us to tell so many untold stories we have in ourselves.
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To learn more about Angus Fletcher’s work, visit Operation Human and his home page.