Trust Your Intuition
In business, decisions based on intuition are often superior to those based on analytical reasoning.
Opening Case Study:
The One who Trusted Intuition: Steve Jobs
Steve Jobs has been our generation’s quintessential entrepreneur. Visionary, inspiring, brilliant & mercurial. Perhaps the most astonishing fact about Jobs was his view that market research and focus groups only limited your ability to innovate. Asked how much research was done to guide Apple when he introduced the iPad, Jobs famously quipped, “None. It isn’t the consumers’ job to know what they want. It’s hard for [consumers] to tell you what they want when they’ve never seen anything remotely like it.” Instead, it was Jobs’ own intuition, his radar-like feel for emerging technologies and how they could be brought together to create, in his words, “insanely great” products, that ultimately made the difference. For Jobs, who died last year at 56, intuition was no mere gut call. It was, as he put it in his often-quoted commencement speech at Stanford, about “connecting the dots,” glimpsing the relationships among wildly disparate life experiences and changes in technology. It’s a safe bet to assume that none of Apple’s blockbuster products, from the Macintosh to the iPod and iTunes, from the iPhone to the iPad, would have come about if Jobs had relied heavily on consumer research. Fittingly enough, on the day Jobs launched the Macintosh, a reporter from Popular Science asked him what type of studies Apple had conducted to ensure there was a market for the computer. In a nearly offended tone, Jobs retorted, “Did Alexander Graham Bell do any market research before he invented the telephone?”
Intuition is a secret weapon that an entrepreneur possesses to make his business flourish. Entrepreneurship demands risk taking and frequently foraying into the area of the unknown. Not knowing where your next paycheck will be arriving from, assembling your ideas out into world, and facing “make it or break it” decisions on a day-to-day basis are all circumstances that entrepreneurs face. Developing and channeling your intuition is significant to your entrepreneurial victory. At times it’s all you’ve got.
Listening to intuition is a proficiency that can be developed and fortified, and it is an ability that is chiefly important in the most chaotic, fluid business environments. On occasions when high-pressure decisions must be made at a moment’s notice, intuition can often beat a thoughtful, rational analysis. By having faith in their gut feeling, entrepreneurs are encouraged to carry out original, unproven ideas and ventures, even when nobody else has faith in them. Intuition is all about observing the need for a product or new service and just having the impulse to know you can make it happen.
Entrepreneurs increase their intuition to make the several business decisions they face daily. They are frequently in the position of nee to plan and create products or services way in advance. Their instinct can aid them to ‘know’ which ideas are most prone to succeed. Actually intuition can repeatedly offer them with novel, innovative ideas to use in their business.
Successful, independent-minded entrepreneurs are aware when to have faith in their gut. An increasing number of researches from a variety of fields — including economics, neurology, and cognitive psychology — substantiate that intuition is a real form of knowledge. You may not have ready money at hand to carry out a market study or conduct a focus group, but you’re still enthusiastic to stake your reputation and money on that idea. Why? Because that’s what your gut tells you to do.
Following Your Intuition
Intuition means knowing something without being in a position to illustrate how you arrived at that conclusion rationally. It’s that strange “gut feeling” or “instinct” that over and over again turns out to be right, in retrospect. When you’ve marked upon your options and are trapped at a crossroad, getting in touch with your intuition can lend a helping hand. Learning how to take apart the wheat from the chaff is complex but intuition can be developed, principally by following some of these ideas.
# Trust your instincts. It can be complex to rely on something that you cannot comprehend, and you most likely shouldn’t base each of your decisions on intuition. For instance, if you’re hiring someone, you should consider qualifications primarily, or else you might accidentally discriminate. But when you’ve reflected upon all the viable options and there is no clear, rational choice, intuition is really all you’ve got. Think about the following:
- Devoid of intuition, you’re no different than a computer. You simply make decisions derived from facts, and you don’t all the time have all the facts. So except you’re performing like a computer, you’re already making decisions based on various factors other than logic…why not learn the art of using your intuition as well?
- Even many of the world’s greatest scientists, the most rational academicians of all time, have made their supreme discoveries based on flashes of intuition. Take example of Newton. Apple fell on his head and he discovered the law of gravitation. Archimedes shouted “Eureka!” in his bathtub when water displaced.
# Ask yourself questions: Raising questions and listening to the foremost answer that flashes into your mind is a good way to become aware of your intuitive abilities.
# Meditate: Emptying your mind of recurring thoughts and fears will make it easier to pay attention to your intuition. Discover a meditative technique you are at ease, using and practicing.
# Take note of your gut: There’s a motive why it is called a “gut feeling”. Time and again, a decision that you “know” is wrong makes you feel discomfort in your stomach.
# Listen and communicate: Listening and communicating with the multiple thoughts in your brain is a good exercise. It clears the clutter and offers lucidness.
# Prepare an intuition journal: Every day, pen down your intuition to make a guess about your business practices. As you discover further regarding how to recognize your intuition, and you see it leading you in the right direction, your self-reliance will grow and so will your intuitive power.
# Exercise your right brain: As intuition is drawn from the right hemisphere of the brain which is the same side that controls nonverbal, holistic thought and expression, exercising it will increase intuitive thoughts. Some ways to “work out” your intuition are creative thinking, visualizing, and brainstorming.
As Steve Jobs said: “Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma – which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition.”
How to Trust Your Instincts?
Playing the role of a business leader, you persistently are required to discover new ideas. You’re weaving a vision for tomorrow of a world that doesn’t exist yet and in this journey your greatest resource for getting it right is your instincts.
Many of today’s successful entrepreneurs attribute their success to their intuition, Bill Gates says, “you cannot ignore your intuition.” Oprah states, “My business skills have come from being guided by my intuition”, and Donald Trump admits in his book, “I’ve built a multibillion dollar empire by relying on my gut instinct”.
Here are five ways to assist you in trusting your instincts and building a successful business.
1. Follow your interest. When you are obsessed with an idea in your head and can’t get it out of your mind, your gut is telling you it has merit. If you are spending every waking hour on something you want to do, then you should surely go ahead with the idea.
That instinct fuels your drive and work ethic. Instinct is simply said passion disguised as an idea. When you act on ideas you truly are keen about, you are more liable to be right and more likely to work hard enough to succeed.
2. Dedicate yourself fully. Mere intuitive thoughts do not meet with success. They have to be backed up with a lot of dedicated work. When you are willing to put the required efforts; that faith helps you to trust your instincts because you know you’d find a way to follow through.
To give that kind of commitment, live in the moment and focus on doing the best you can today
3. Engross yourself: You must indulge fully in the world around your idea. None of us is born with business instincts — we learn them over time. When you engross yourself in a subject or group, your mind pulls on all of that knowledge with very little effort. Your instincts become informed choices.
Instincts come from deep knowledge of the industry — a connection that comes from getting your hands dirty and knowing every aspect of your business.
4. Follow your own rules. Entrepreneurs who are leaders will trust their instincts and will be the ones who set the new rules — the ones who anticipate and solve tomorrow’s problems.
When you’re bucking the trend, even if you fail, use it as an opportunity to hone your instincts by noticing what mistakes you made that ultimately killed the idea. It will sharpen your business acumen.
5. Allow your idea to evolve over time. When taking action based on your instinct, be flexible about the implementation. What you start out to do is going to change over time. The basic instinct remains intact, but the idea changes and evolves.
As you expand your business, observe how people counter and amend your idea accordingly. You will have an easier time having faith in your instincts when you give yourself the freedom to adapt.
After all, intuition is the highest form of intelligence, transcending all individual abilities and skill.