Intuition as a Superpower in Entrepreneurial Decision Making
Have you ever had one of those moments where you “just know what to do“ as an entrepreneur? For me often these things come after struggling with certain problems for a long period of time, searching for clarity, and then finally getting that lightbulb moment where I know which actions to take.
If prayer is you talking to God, then intuition is God talking to you.
The more I’ve gotten these God shot intuitive moments the less I attribute them to “me“ and more to some higher outside force that acts as a guide. I think for a while I used to like to take credit, but really this was just my ego taking credit for things it didn’t understand.
When I’m making my “own” decisions, I tend to be brought down the wrong path, have the wrong timing, and fail to consider every option. When I’m making decisions from my intuition or “gut” as most people call it, then I rarely (never) make missteps and am often executing at my peak. When building anything (companies, relationships etc) the biggest barrier is lost time—not money or resources. Intuition acts as a shortcut that helps you make the right decisions at the right times to make the right calls.
When you discover this, it becomes imperative that you’re always making decisions from the position of your intuition instead of your rational mind. My mind has trained me that it is most likely wrong, whereas my intuition is almost always right.
The Impact of Feelings and Emotions
I used to not like certain emotions. I thought I wanted to be “happy“ or in some way more free. More recently though I’ve started to think about emotions as “raw intuition“ that hasn’t been fully processed. Most often, when I process those emotions, at the end I find myself receiving some form of intuition that ends up benefits me, helps me solve some previously unsolvable situation, and helps me avoid the pitfalls that would take more time or be exhausting.
For a long time I didn’t think I wanted to feel fear, sadness, or disappointment. The truth is that these serve me quite well! The problem is when I avoid them and let them fester because it delays getting to the right action that comes at the end of letting that intuition be fully formed.
It’s actually great to have fear or anxiety, it means you’re on your way to getting the piece of intuition you need to move beyond that problem. Where things get sticky are when you avoid or deflect and try to not feel that feeling. Often times avoiding it leads me to taking some defective or self serving action. The point is to feel the feelings to help you get to clarity! The more you lean into feeling it and understanding it the sooner you can get to a resulting correct action.
I spent a long time in life trying to not feel feelings rather than understand them, strongly to my detriment. This is understandable! Especially in critical situations these feelings can be overwhelming. The best way to work with feelings is to note them, get curious, and process them thoroughly so you can find those intuitive decisions at the end of the tunnel.
Reactions and Responses
When I first started working on companies, I would have emotional reactions to everything. Some concrete examples of things that are emotionally reactive:
Firing an underperforming employee before finishing a PIP
Lashing out at a lead investor for saying that we should have raised at a higher valuation
Firing a cofounder for being on Twitter too much
In these moments where emotion meets rationality, it is easy to make the wrong decision with the right inputs. This is reactivity. The same feelings though when processed can become a superpower. When you’re afraid of that employee impacting the team, that investor not having the company’s best interest at heart impacting a board, or the cofounder’s ego getting in the way
Sometimes these might be the right actions but the wrong reactions that led to them. There are valid reasons for responding differently:
Firing the employee can be the right decision, but it’s also important to send the right message to the rest of the team
Flagging that investor might not have the companies best interest at heart
Resetting team culture to be low ego and high ownership
Conclusion
Intuition or gut based decision making is a superpower when it comes to building companies and many things in life. There’s a key to working with it that requires you to love and lean into feelings with curiosity rather than aversion or fear. The end result too is not running from feelings like I was but actually using them as leverage and tools to level up how you make decisions and navigate the world.