The Insight that Changes Everything

Have you ever seen the movie The Sixth Sense? Okay, I’ve actually seen only a few clips…but the movie has so permeated popular culture that even people who haven’t seen it know about the twist ending. This supernatural thriller is about the relationship between a little boy named Cole Sear (played by Haley Joel Osment) and Dr. Malcolm Crowe (played by Bruce Willis), the psychiatrist enlisted to help him. Cole has a secret ability to communicate with dead people. As Dr. Crowe teaches Cole to release the ghosts that scare him by offering them help, he learns that maybe he wasn’t summoned to help Cole. Perhaps it’s the other way around. In a surprise ending, we discover that Crowe has been dead from the beginning.

It explains why his wife won’t talk to him, why she doesn’t even acknowledge his existence. For two hours, viewers are led to believe that she is ignoring him because their marriage is awful, but it turns out she can’t even see him. With the big reveal, our minds reel as we mentally flip back through the movie to incorporate this key piece of information into our understanding, which casts the film’s events in a whole new light. Once we know Crowe is dead, the narrative shifts and everything makes perfect sense. We think, Oh, of course, even though while we were watching the movie the first time, we never perceived anything was amiss.

Try this for a more relatable example. Have you ever had a really bad day? A day when nothing seemed to be going your way and you were tired and moody and agitated and nobody liked you and you didn’t like them either and you couldn’t put your finger on what was going so terribly wrong? Then you ate a sandwich (or, better yet, took a nap) and felt like a brand-new person, and you realized that nothing was horribly amiss, you were just hangry. Or maybe slangry. (You can figure out what that means, right?) That little insight completely reframed the way you felt about the previous few hours.

If you’re a parent, you’re acquainted with the phenomenon when your two-year-old is having a really terrible afternoon and won’t eat their snack and won’t keep their clothes on and won’t say anything but no and screams for no reason and you fear that you’re a terrible parent who has ruined everything, until your child finally wears themselves out and collapses on the sofa, snoring, three hours before bedtime, and you realize, My child isn’t possessed; they were just exhausted. Personality insights can be like this. One key piece of information shifts our whole paradigm—and the world suddenly makes a lot more sense.