I’ve been thinking a lot recently about what happens when you simply trust your gut and where that actually leads you in life.
I first started wrestling with this idea in the context of building companies. Time and again, I’ve realized that an entrepreneur’s gut intuition is usually the right call. The most common mistake founders make, and something I’ve certainly been susceptible to in the past, is letting outside noise, current trends, or other people’s opinions derail that internal compass. As I’ve gotten older and spent more time around different businesses, one truth keeps standing out: trusting your gut is the most critical factor in building anything meaningful.
Yet, there’s a subtle dynamic here that took me a while to uncover. Trusting your gut isn’t about prescribing every single step of the journey. Over the last couple of years, I’ve started writing down the overall course I want to set, while intentionally letting go of the exact playbook to get there.
When you get overly prescriptive, insisting you must raise a specific round from a specific investor, hit an exact customer metric by Friday, or force a rigid product rollout, you exert too much artificial control. Things don’t grow under tight fists. The popular narrative tells us that visionary leaders are the foundation of everything, but it’s actually much closer to gardening. Great leaders plant the seeds, get out of the way of whatever grows, and do the work to protect that environment.
This isn’t exclusive to entrepreneurship. It applies to your health, your marriage, your family, and your personal habits. Set the course, but don’t micro-manage the path. Nobody actually knows every move upfront anyway.
Instead, progress happens in tiny moments. You make hundreds of micro-decisions every week, and that is where compounding takes over.
If you let fear drive you, you’ll try to control every variable and end up flatlined. But if you trust your gut to make the pragmatic call in any given moment, those tiny decisions compound. Getting just 1% better a week feels invisible in the short term, but over a few years, that trajectory diverges completely from staying stagnant. Trusting your instincts to do what makes sense in the present, rather than clutching for control, is the primary mechanism behind compounding returns.
Set the direction. Rely on your instincts for the daily calls. Protect what builds, and let the math do the rest.