Big Idea Daily | Primal Intelligence
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You Are Smarter Than You Thinkby Angus Fletcher |
“Primal’s four powers are stronger together: Imagination makes commonsense nimble; commonsense makes emotion effective; emotion makes intuition purposeful; intuition makes imagination perceptive. That combined strength lives inside all of us, waiting to be awakened.”ANGUS FLETCHER |
BIG IDEA
The Four Powers
FROM THE BOOK“In this chapter and the three previous, we’ve covered four interconnected ways of thinking in story:
As I put it in a report to U.S. Special Operations Command:
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Brian's Notes
That’s from the concluding pages on Part I in which we get introduced to the “four powers of our Primal Intelligence.”
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Angus tells us: “Once you go full Primal, you can incorporate your whole intelligence into everything you do. To get you started, part II will translate imagination, intuition, emotion, and commonsense into six practical applications: leadership, resilience, communication, coaching, decision-making, and first of all, innovation.”
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Let’s recap those four Primal Intelligence powers then we’ll look at some practical ideas on how to implement them across the most important domains of our lives.
First, we need to step back and talk about how we think about INTELLIGENCE.
Angus tells us: “My theory is that the modern world has incorrectly defined intelligence.”
He continues by saying: “The logical view of the brain is absurd. It defies basic biology. It seems sensible only because it is repeated endlessly from the moment we set foot in school. We are brainwashed to believe it, to our own detriment. ...
The brain has nonlogical intelligence that isn’t arbitrary. That intelligence evolved millions of years before AI’s data-dependent circuits, investing our primordial ancestors with the ability to succeed in the unknown. At first, the ability was simply accepted as the way of life. But as our ancestors self-reflected, using their intelligence to examine itself, they parsed it into four primal powers: intuition, imagination, emotion, and commonsense.
- Intuition perceives the world’s hidden rules.
- Imagination makes the future.
- Emotion knows the path of personal growth.
- Commonsense decides wisely in uncertainty.”
Big Ideas
01: THE FOUR POWERS
02: INTUITION
03: IMAGINATION
04: EMOTION
05: COMMONSENSE
“My theory is that the modern world has incorrectly defined intelligence.”ANGUS FLETCHER |
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