Normally I would've used this post as an opportunity to reflect on the last week — the shitshow that is currently Ed Sheeran's tour or how I feel like I'm turning into my mom because I suddenly care about DWTS or maybe even the literal Hyrox shitshow. But one of my favorite special interests got an update this week that's too big to go unaddressed.

I've always loved animals, but evolution is a newer fixation. It started because I was so deep in the trenches that I started watching North Korean documentaries to self-soothe ("My life is bad, but at least I'm not mining cobalt in North Korea.”). Eventually that project finished (thank god), but I'd moved on to a more existential question: how did I even get here?

Evolution is a weird one because most of us think of it as… finished? Like we're the final form– the perfect template for life. (We're not BTW. Crabs and cats and anteaters have us beat by a LOT in terms of "peak life form".) But life is still changing in the background, all the time, whether we're paying attention or not.

Enter: a three-pound spotted cat in Bolivia.

Some guy in La Paz found a kitten and took it home. Fed it noodles, rice, and eggs for about a year. Normal DINC lifestyle… except the cat wasn't just an ordinary housecat. He eventually brought it to a wildlife sanctuary, where biologist and National Geographic explorer Paola Nogales-Ascarrunz took one look and immediately noticed something odd about the cat’s spots. 

Whole genome sequencing confirmed what Bolivian locals had apparently known for a while — this cat was different. They'd already given it a name: Tilcayo. The species wasn't new. It had been there the whole time. It just hadn't been formally recognized by the people with the authority to make it official.

We would’ve never known if these two people hadn’t done a double take. A guy who almost just had a weird cat. A biologist who almost didn't question the spots. A local population who'd been living alongside this species long before science caught up.

The Tilcayo wasn't discovered. It was finally named. The difference matters. That's probably why it resonates with me as a strategist (other than the whole human instinct to go PSPSPS). Insights aren't invented. They already exist — in the data, in the behavior, in the culture. The job is recognizing that something everyone else is looking at is actually different from what they think it is, and then articulating WHY it's different clearly enough that other people can see it too.