As summer has unfurled its days, I have found myself lost in conversation and contemplation, considering life, luck, and the ineffable nature of intuition.
There's a certain magic in those moments when you simply know – a gut feeling, an inexplicable certainty that tugs at the edges of consciousness. I've spent hours chasing these elusive whispers, attempting to bottle that lightning of prescience.
I think about building the right things at the right moments, months before they exploded into the zeitgeist. What was that intuition — excitement, a hunch, or something more?
How can you nourish that inner voice, learn to trust those nudges that guide you toward unseen opportunities? When accurate, intutition can obviously be a force of immense power - but how can we discern true insight from wishful thinking? The signal from the noise?
The decisions that brought me to prescient projects were rarely intentional, certainly not born of meticulous career planning. So what unseen current carried me? And how might a person recognize its pull again?
At Prod, people speak of the "time traveler's mindset" – living with one foot in a potential future, eyes fixed on a horizon only you can see. The best builders embody this ethos, driven by a vision they aim to make manifest. To do this, they need both extreme conviction and the ability to suspend disbelief.
One of my favorite book series, The Stormlight Archive, finishes each mega-long novel with an epilogue musing on some aspect of humanity. The first is called Of Most Worth, and grapples with what humans find most valuable.
A character philosophizes, considering intellect, aesthetic achievement, and innovation. That we most esteem our brilliant researchers, artists, and inventors.
These ideas are discarded. In the end, they conclude, humans value novelty. We are drawn to the unprecedented, reserving our greatest esteem for those who go for it first – that initial brushstroke on a blank canvas, the debut performance of a world-changing invention.
Does that mean it's all a mirage; is intuition simply great timing? Jobs popularized the idea of connecting dots in retrospect, but I wonder if true visionaries glimpse those connections before they fully form, tracing ghostly outlines of a future unborn.
I think of brilliant friends, the passion projects that light up their eyes. Their enthusiasm is contagious, hinting at possibilities.
Intuition, I've come to realize, is ultimately a combination of confidence and excitement. It can be hard to do something when nobody else thinks it's worthwhile. You have to be fine with closing your eyes and listening to what excites you. If you make decisions based on what you're excited about (and you're positive its not others' excitement that you're confusing for your own), you're likely on the right track.
Saying “trust your gut” like that typically isn’t helpful, but ultimately, following intuition requires trust in yourself, even and especially when you cannot see the whole path.
Are you certain that regardless of what other people think, what you’re doing is the right thing to be spending your time on? That you can’t imagine yourself doing anything else, and you don’t understand why most other people don’t see what you see? That what excites you “feels right”?
Then it probably is.