My best friend says that the reason I’m an investor and not just a writer is because I really like being right. She’s right, but I’d add that I especially enjoy being right about decisions that I made by following my intuition. These are the kind of gut feelings that you feel in your body before you can explain why with words.
I credit this variety of gut feeling for all the best decisions I’ve made in my life: my best investments, career moves, and marrying my husband. It’s no coincidence that all of these decisions were about people — I strongly believe that all of the most important choices are.
For these reasons, intuition has been of interest to me for a long time. A few notes I’ve collected:
Intuitive decisions at their best draw on the sum total wisdom of your lived experience, usually felt as a sensation in your gut or heart. This is distinct from a rational decision (slow, purely cognitive) and an emotional one (fast, reactive, often shows up as FOMO in investing). The main reason people avoid making intuitive decisions is because failures of intuition feel more crushing and personal.
It seems that you can’t credibly talk about intuition in investing until you’ve proven yours can make a lot of money. Yet that doesn’t mean intuitive decisions aren’t being made all around us — they’re often hiding in plain sight any time an investor passionately waxes poetic about how talented a founder is.
What’s interesting about intuition is that it’s inherently anti-memetic. Unlike taste, which you can see the direct products of in the world and therefore emulate, intuition is something only one person feels in their body and is thus non-transferable. It won’t earn you cool points to talk about in Silicon Valley, but it could very well be the reason you win.
Focusing on building your intuition is the closest thing I’ve found to a cheat code to high slope growth. You do this by making a lot of decisions and deeply internalizing a sense of what worked, what didn’t, and why. Creative practices are great starting places to get a hang of this process.
I believe that there’s a great deal of power in openly expressing your intuitions about a person and speaking from that place. As onlookers we metabolize others’ intuition as authenticity.