How I transformed from thinking my brain was broken to realizing I had a superpower

Malcolm Gladwell’s book “Blink” changed my life.

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I am a quintessential “thin-slicer,” a personality trait that Malcolm Gladwell thoroughly explored in his book, Blink.

Thin-slicing describes a person’s ability to find patterns in events based only on “thin slices,” or narrow windows, of experience. The most interesting aspect of thin-slicing to me is that thin-slicer’s conclusions can be as accurate, or even more accurate, than judgments based on significantly more information. Thin-slicers can provide rapid inferences about the state, characteristics, or details of an individual or situation with tiny amounts of information.

Thin-slicing is effectively a super, highly honed, very accurate instinct. All good, right? Where could this possibly go wrong? Turns out, lots of places.

In technology, the ability to thin-slice can be an incredibly powerful problem-solving tool when it is recognized for the incredible…