Too Fast to See

You're the last to know.

Jun 09, 2026

For more than two thousand years, every artist who painted a galloping horse got it wrong.

Look at the old paintings. The horse stretched out flat, front legs reaching forward, back legs flung out behind, like a rocking horse frozen mid-leap. Géricault painted it that way in 1821, and that canvas hangs in the Louvre. The Greeks carved it that way. For centuries it was simply how a running horse looked.

Here’s the strange part. Horses had been galloping in front of human eyes the whole time. Every day, for all of recorded history. The truth was right there in broad daylight, and not one person had ever actually seen it.

A horse at full gallop moves too fast for the eye to catch. Forty feet a second. By the time your brain registers a leg, the leg has moved. Your eye does what it always does with a gap. It fills it with a guess. And the guess was wrong.

In 1878, a railroad baron and horse breeder named Leland Stanford got tired of the argument and hired a photographer, Eadweard Muybridge, to settle it. Muybridge lined a track with cameras, each one rigged to a tripwire. A mare named Sallie Gardner ran through and tripped the shutters one by one.

The photographs ended the debate in an afternoon. Yes, all four hooves leave the ground at once. But not splayed out the way everyone had drawn it for centuries. The horse goes airborne only when its legs are folded up underneath its body. The exact opposite pose. Every painter in history had been confidently sketching a moment that never happened.

Nobody was lazy. They drew precisely what they saw. The artists weren’t the problem. The instrument they trusted was. The naked eye is a beautiful tool, and it cannot catch the thing moving fastest and closest to it.

Which is the whole problem with trying to see yourself.

You’re the horse. Always in motion, always right in front of you, always a half-step ahead of your own attention. Your brain does what it did with the horse. It fills the gap with a confident guess. And you spend your life mistaking the guess for the photograph.

Ninety-five percent sure

The research here is worse than you’d guess.

An organizational psychologist named Tasha Eurich spent years on this question. Her work found that while about 95% of people believe they’re self-aware, only 10 to 15% actually are. Most of us are walking around sure we can see ourselves clearly. The same confidence those painters had, right up until the cameras fired.

And the part that should stop you cold if you lead anything: it gets worse with power, not better. Senior leaders are less likely to land in that self-aware group because the higher you sit, the harder it becomes to gather the honest, continuous feedback that builds self-awareness in the first place.

You don’t go blind because you stopped looking. You go blind because you ran out of people willing to show you.

Direct and warm

I worked with a leader once. Senior. The kind of company you’d recognize the second I said the name. In our first session he described himself in two words. Direct and warm. He was proud of both. He’d built his whole identity on being the rare executive who could tell you the hard thing and still make you feel held while he did it.

We asked his team. Anonymously. The eight people who worked closest to him.

They used different words.

Direct, yes. They didn’t say warm. They said careful. As in, you were careful around him. You learned what set him off and you steered around it. The warmth he felt on the inside, the real care he absolutely had, was landing on the other side as something closer to weather. Something you checked before you walked in.

He went quiet for a long time. Then he said the thing I hear in that chair more than any other.

“That’s not who I’m trying to be.”

Of course it isn’t.

Nobody’s blind spot is who they’re trying to be. That’s what makes it a blind spot.

The gap was never between him and a better man. It was between the self he felt and the self he showed. And he was the one person in the building who couldn’t see the second one.

Borrowing the lens

What do you do, if your own eye keeps filling the gap and you can’t trust the picture it hands back?

Ask a question that has somewhere to go. “How am I doing?” gets you nothing. Too big, too kind. Try: “What’s one thing I do that makes me harder to work with?” Then listen.
Pick two or three people who have proven they’ll tell you the truth and have nothing to gain from flattering you. Tell them I need you to be the one who says the thing. Then thank them when it stings.
Hit record. A meeting, a talk, a hard conversation. Then watch it back, which you will hate. The distance between how you thought you came across and how you actually did is the most useful thing you’ll learn all year. Muybridge needed two dozen cameras and a railroad fortune. You’ve got the same machine in your pocket.

You will never outrun your own eye. It fills the gap whether you ask it to or not. That won’t change.

But Muybridge didn’t make the artists smarter. He just handed them a view they could never have produced from the inside. A camera, pointed from the outside, fast enough to catch what they kept missing.

You can spend your life being loved by everyone and known by no one.

Stay human
- Bryan

P.S. If someone in your life tells you the truth when it would be easier not to, send them this. They’ve been doing the most underrated job there is. :-)

BEing Human

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