Archive:

Sharpen your pattern recognition here → 🧭 At the Center

Quick suggestion: copy and paste this essay into Claude/ChatGPT. I do it with everything I read. If you’re not going to read it that’s totally fine, but the least you can do is train your AI and build your own “Pattern Library.”

Across the first four essays of 🧭 At the Center, I have been naming patterns, one at a time:

Each essay demonstrated that these patterns centered around meaning, and that they recur across multiple scales and domains. Most importantly, I have been asking you to recognize, remember, and apply what these patterns reveal.

But no essay has yet named why these patterns recur at all.

🧭 ATC_005 answers it.

↓↓↓

Today’s Edition:

↓↓↓

Let’s get into it.

In 🧭 ATC_004, I walked you through the cascading hierarchy of the NCAA:

The pattern of heaven and earth necessarily organizes itself into heads and bodies (hierarchy) when a collective forms, I said.

But this example does more than I originally let on.

What I drew was not merely an organizational chart of authority flowing downward, but rather the same shape repeated at every scale, with each scale carrying the meaning of the scale above it. 

The NCAA is not only a hierarchy; it is a hierarchy of hierarchies, each one structurally identical to the one above it and the one below it.

At each level within the hierarchy, everyone was a ‘head’ to someone, and a ‘body’ to another. From the top down we mapped one head/body after another.

This pattern, as you are about to see, is called a fractal.

Reality is fractal, and the architecture of reality is the reason the patterns I have been naming keep showing up no matter where we look.

A fractal is a recursive structure whose parts resemble the whole at every scale you observe. Zoom in, and you find the same form. Zoom out, and you find it again. The shape at the smallest scale is the same shape that defines the largest.

The cleanest mathematical expression of this is the Sierpinski triangle. 

The picture that emerges is not three levels of triangles, nor thirty, but a single structure whose geometry is identical no matter how deeply you descend into it.

A variation on this is the L-system, which illustrates the same principle in motion. 

Begin with a single trunk, and from that trunk splits two branches. From those two branches split two more branches. So on and so forth until, miraculously, you watch the recursion of a single rule apply at smaller scales.

The result is, of all things, a tree.

Benoit Mandelbrot named this family of structures in his 1982 book, The Fractal Geometry of Nature, but the structure was there long before he named it.

↓↓↓

This structure (like everything else we study here) repeats across time and domains:

In biology: the same fractal architecture that organizes the branching alveoli of a human lung organizes the actin cytoskeleton within a single neuron.

In cosmology: galactic arms spiral according to the same logarithmic proportions that also govern the chambered shell of a nautilus.

In mathematics: the Fibonacci sequence and its limiting ratio, the Golden Ratio (φ ≈ 1.618), organize the seed heads of sunflowers, the petals of lilies, the spiral of a fern, and the proportions of the human body.

Fractality is not one phenomenon among many, but rather the geometry by which material reality is organized. 

Everything, and I mean everything, is fractal.

Consider the maple tree.

Just like our L-system trees, the maple tree in your backyard is fractally ordered. 

Leaves, bushels of leaves, and branches are just mini-trees.

🧭 At the Center’s logo, the tree, is an icon of fractal recursion because the tree itself is literally fractal.

But let’s take the physical structure out of it and focus on something more ethereal, categories:

The singular sugar maple tree in your backyard is not a reduction of the fractal pattern. It is simultaneously both totally unique from all the other trees that share in its same pattern while also participating in all of the patterns that preceded it. 

Each scale narrows and specifies, but at no scale is the collection of patterns lost. The particular tree in your backyard is both vegetation, tree, maple, and sugar maple, but it is also completely and only itself, all at once.

↓↓↓

But for our purposes, fractals are not about shape or even categories.

They are about meaning.

🧭 ATC_002: The pattern of heaven-and-earth (spirit and matter) shows up at the scale of the couple, the team, the franchise, the league, and the civilization.

🧭 ATC_003: The pattern of time-and-space (separation and unification) shapes institutional decay in exactly the same way it shapes your personal burnout.

🧭 ATC_004: The pattern of hierarchy (head and body) doesn't just structure the NCAA as a whole, it also structures the hierarchy of hierarchies at each level, binding each level and the collective together simultaneously, all ordered unto the chief governing principle.

I posit here that meaning itself is fractal. Let’s see why.

The ancients did not think of fractals primarily in terms of math, biology, or physics. They had no Mandelbrot and no Sierpinski triangle.

What they did have, however, was an intuitive understanding of the patterns we have listed above, and how they could be visualized as ‘wheels within wheels’.

Let’s attempt to superimpose 1) the heaven-and-earth pattern, and 2) the pattern of hierarchy into a visual aid.

Thus far, these patterns have been visualized as either the union of two halves or a triangle:

Both 🧭 ATC_002 and 🧭 ATC_004 described how spirit descends downwards to inform matter, and matter ascends upwards to express spirit. When collectives form, that takes the form of a hierarchy.

But these same patterns can also be visualized as an orbit:

If heaven is the governing principle, spirit, purpose, or meaning that animates earth, then it would make sense to visualize that idea by putting heaven at the center with earth (expression, matter) orbiting around it. 

This is what we mean when we say something is “central” to the idea of x, y, z thing.

This idea can be further stretched and understood visually as a wheel:

The main point here is that there are multiple ways that earth can express heaven – key word: “multiplicity.” Example: if I want to lose 10 lbs, there are hundreds of ways to do so.

Each point on the wheel represents a unique expression of heaven that is distinct from the other expressions elsewhere on the wheel.

But we must understand that some expressions of heaven are better than others. Example: if I want to lose 10 lbs, then I should workout more and eat healthy, not starve myself in a disordered way.

In all visualizations: heaven is the unifying purpose toward which everything is ordered; earth is the multiplicity of expressions of that order; and hierarchy is the necessary organization of that pattern from best-to-worst or closest-to-furthest from heaven.

↓↓↓

So how do you know which expressions are better than others? How do you orient yourself within the multiplicity?

You need a fixed point; something that does not move.

You have to put yourself 🧭 At the Center.

You stand at the center of the compass rose. You connect heaven and earth. You need the world organized into direction in order to act.

But the compass only works because it is oriented toward something above you. The compass does not center around the one holding it; it centers on the stars above.

You are the one who has to hold it, find it, and order the multiplicity of life around it.

This is what it means to "orient yourself": to have found your fixed point, your “North Star,” and to have ordered everything around it.

Not around yourself. Around the axis.

Side note: The compass rose was literally made not from looking at the earth but by looking at heaven — tracking where the sun rises and sets, and finding the stars that do not move.

By observing that there is a coherence above, you can impose a coherence below.

The question 🧭 At the Center keeps asking is not where you are standing. It is what you are orienting around.

What are you putting at the center?

↓↓↓

In light of that context, the following visualization should (hopefully) make sense:

Combine the heaven/earth wheel with hierarchy and you get a wheel (earth) whose vertical axis (heaven) runs through the center. The wheel can progress up or down, signifying that the multiplicity wheel can be closer to or further from the heaven axis.

But more than this, along the wheel and axis, there can be a fractal hierarchy of hierarchies, as illustrated below.

The point here is that the higher you are in the axis, the closer you are to the very purpose of the whole hierarchy itself. This wheel and axis is actually a ladder.

The wheel at the top is smaller, just like President Charlie Baker is “closer to” (and a singular embodiment of) the governing principle of the NCAA.

But even this is not the whole picture.

Every axis of the wheel is a connection between heaven and earth that has on it all these wheels that are also little versions of the same pattern that goes up into the ultimate heaven.

Little purposes embedded in larger purposes, all the way up.

A center within a center within a center within a center.

Ezekiel saw reality as wheels within wheels within wheels, moving in every direction simultaneously, animated by a single central spirit.

The ancient prophet saw that the structure of the world is not a wheel but a fractal of wheels: each one a complete instance of the same pattern, each one nested within a larger instance, each one ordered toward a purpose that is itself ordered toward a higher purpose.

↓↓↓

The world is made this way, and there is no limit to how far the pattern extends. You can separate reality into as many beings, institutions, or relationships as you need to, and all of them will have this structure.

Every team is a wheel: a gathering of multiplicity around a governing purpose.

Every league is a axis: a connection between that purpose and the broader civilization it serves, with its own hierarchy of teams organized along its length.

Every franchise owner, every commissioner, every athlete who steps into that structure is not just a participant in a game. They are a wheel in a wheel in a wheel, ordered toward something larger than any of them can see from where they stand.

This is what I mean when I say meaning itself is fractal.

It is not just that the pattern repeats at different scales, but also that the relationship between purpose and expression — between axis and wheel — is the same relationship at every scale, all the way up and all the way down.

The question has always been the same one: what is at the center?

↓↓↓

The compass emoji is a brand mark of 🧭 At the Center. Honestly, I chose it before I had the vocabulary for what it was actually encoding. I chose it because it “felt right.”

And what I now know is that the compass is not just a symbol that “guides me” on my journey to find out what is at the center of sports, culture, and capital; the compass itself is a fractal, and we are at the center of it.

By examining a single football play, you can see this fractal pattern of meaning operating in something small, immediate, and concrete:

Each layer contains the meaning of the layer above it, and each layer passes that meaning down to the layer beneath it.

Let us walk through the common ‘two-minute drill’:

Rules → Situations:

Situations → Scheme → Play:

Play → Assignments:

The WR running the corner route is not ‘just running a corner route,’ nor is doing his own thing. He is executing his assignment, which is executing the play, which is executing the scheme, which is executing the situation, which is executing the rules.

And all of this ordered unto the chief purpose that binds the team together: victory.

That victory is the heaven that governs everybody in the huddle. The WR’s corner route is a body expressing a heaven, and the heaven he expresses is the meaning of the whole team.

But meaning (in this case, victory) scales infinitely upwards:

That is the question the fractal is always asking.

Our actions are constantly participating in a fractal hierarchy of meaning that is ordered unto the ultimate center.

Every scale of meaning is pointing upward toward something it cannot itself contain.

Every action is ordered unto a higher meaning, which is ordered unto an even higher meaning, all the way up until you either arrive at an ultimate center or you don’t.

This is Jacob’s ladder: angels ascending and descending from heaven to earth.

I can’t answer what that ultimate center is for you, all I can do is demonstrate that the fractal keeps pointing toward one.

Wheels within wheels.

↓↓↓

In capital: A fund's thesis is the principle pattern. The thesis scales into the mandate; the mandate scales into portfolio construction; the portfolio scales into the individual deal; and the deal scales into the specific terms embedded inside it. 

Each scale carries the meaning of the scale above. A term in a deal that violates the mandate is a pattern-break whose consequences propagate upward through every scale above it. 

I assert that the success of a fund is dependent upon the principle pattern cascading downwards through the fractal in a cohesive manner. If the smallest scale (individual terms at individual deals) does not match and carry the meaning of the largest, the largest will eventually fail.

In culture: Sports, live events, and the modern day experiential economy are all modern rituals, which are fractal. The liturgical calendar of sport carries daily rituals, weekly rituals, seasonal rituals, and quadrennial rituals. More on this in 🧭 ATC_006.

In institutional design: What I called a cascading hierarchy in 🧭 ATC_004 is more precisely a fractal under strain. The pattern of meaning at the top of the NCAA – the protection of the student-athlete experience and preservation of the academic-athletic mission – no longer matches the pattern of expression at the bottom.

Professional-style commercialization at the unit level, NIL, the transfer portal, and direct revenue sharing collapsing the distinction between student and athlete are all emblematic of the fractal hierarchy of the NCAA no longer sharing the same pattern.

Fractals are the architecture of reality.

The same patterns that occur on larger scales repeat on smaller scales and extend across domains. This extends to meaning itself, which is scale-invariant.

If this is true, then cross-domain pattern matching (pattern resonance) is a skill that leads not just to analogies for us to learn from, but a recognition of the way things are actually ordered.

The pattern recognition, remembrance, and application I champion in this publication becomes a lens by which you interpret the world as it actually is. 

Training this lens will give you an edge as an investor, operator, or executive.

↓↓↓

Here is the beat that I believe matters the most in this entire essay:

What binds a team together is a shared fractal.

Every player on the field is operating at a different scale of the same pattern, and that same pattern is what makes the team a team.

Every scale is the same structure, and every scale carries the meaning of the whole.

When a team breaks down, when someone ‘doesn't execute,’ it is because someone at one scale of the fractal is acting in a pattern that does not match the scale above him.

A blown coverage is the byproduct of the scale at the level of the DB operating outside the meaning of the defensive assignment, within the play, within the scheme, within the situation, within the rules, within the purpose of the game.

The whole team could fracture at the singular location of one mismatched scale, because in a fractal there is no peripheral scale.

Every level carries the meaning of the whole, and any one level that breaks the pattern breaks the structure at every level above and below it.

To participate at any scale is to participate at every scale. Nothing you do is peripheral, because in a fractal, there is no periphery.

↓↓↓

A note on the publication itself, which I do not think I can leave unspoken:

🧭 At the Center is meant to be my latticework: a framework of interlocking mental models, where each model reinforces and clarifies every other. 

Each essay to date has named a pattern, and each pattern belongs to the larger fractal that the whole publication is slowly making visible. The publication’s self-referencing is not a stylistic tic, but my method.

The tree, the compass, the examples I pull through multiple publications; the pattern of essays builds the lattice, and the lattice is the thing.

↓↓↓

If you take nothing else from this essay, take this.

You live at every scale of the fractal you are embedded within: your family, your team, your firm, your industry, your nation, and your moment in history.

Each scale carries the meaning of every other.

Each scale is asking something of you.

Each scale is asking whether you will carry its meaning or fracture it at your location.

Recognize it. Remember it. Apply it.

If you are still reading this, thank you.

Hopefully you have a better understanding of what 🧭 At the Center is, why the patterns I’ve named thus far have been what they’ve been, and what this publication is actually building over time.

If you enjoyed reading 🧭 ATC_005, please consider subscribing.

If you know someone who might enjoy learning the patterns shaping sports, culture, and capital, please forward it to them using the link below: