I used to think intuition either didn’t exist or that I didn’t have any of it. Lately I’ve been living in a way that could be described as intuitively guided, and it’s been working well. This video is how I’d explain that to my younger, skeptical, rationalist self.
In this video
- I had good reasons to be skeptical. Cognitive biases, especially confirmation bias, make it easy to fool yourself, and I still take that seriously.
- Malcolm Gladwell’s Blink got me to trust gut feelings that come from deep expertise. But expertise can also blind you to the next big thing.
- The first realization: I was waiting for “yes” signals while strong “no” signals, felt as tension and constriction in my body, were there all along.
- In relationships I tend to self-abandon. Now rising tension tells me something needs to change, even before I know what.
- The second realization: the “quiet voice of knowing” is calm and more like a feeling. My thinking mind is loud and frantic.
- When I ask “what do I think about this?” and then “what do I know about this?”, I usually get two very different answers.
- Navigating like this probably doesn’t maximize money, but it lets me run my business in a way that feels better right now.