Follow your instincts

There is always an internal conflict between what our gut feeling tell us and what our reasoning reveals. Normally, people choose to follow their reasoning, because its logical and probably supported by others around.

I called up one of my team members and informed him that in he could have added a few more details in the status report he sent to the client. He immediately responded, “Yes, I even typed that information in the report, but then removed it.”

When he typed the required information, he actually followed his gut feeling – “I should mention this here”, but his logical mind somehow was not convinced and he deleted those two sentences. My immediate response was, “Why din’t you go with your intuition?”. “May be, I was not sure”, he replied.

Seth Godin over his weblog writes a fantastic post “The intuition vs. analysis conundrum“.

“The analysis, based on past events, certainly seems sound. But your instincts are the only way you’re going to do something unsound.

And unsound things become hits. Sound ones never do.”

As Seth writes, gut feelings need to validated. Blindly following intuitions might lead to problems. The most important thing is to listen to your internal voice, think about it, validate it and then go for it. He says –

“The challenge is not to somehow persuade those in search of soundness to change their minds. The challenge is to do enough of a gut check to decide whether you should defend your instinct. And then do it.”

Any further ideas ?