What’s This All About?
Have you ever wondered where intuition comes from? Have you ever had an intuitive thought and ignored it, only to find out (perhaps painfully) that your intuition was spot on?
About six years ago, I worked full-time at a government agency in Iowa. I shared a cubicle — a tiny 8×8 space — with a coworker who, by either necessity or proximity, became a close friend. Once, in the middle of January, on a day where the temperature stayed below 0 degrees, I had been too lazy to pack a lunch for myself. Having no food, I had to trudge out into the frigid weather to get take out five blocks away. I asked her if she wanted anything, and she said no. But when it came time for me to leave, she was bundling up as if to go outside with me. “What are you doing?” I asked. “I’m going with you so you don’t have to be cold alone,” she said.
Eight months later, she decided to move home to Minnesota to be with her family. We were walking out to the parking lot together for the last time and had agreed to see each other in a month when I would be in Minnesota to visit my own family. We hugged goodbye. As we did, I had the distinct feeling that this was the last time I would ever see her.
It’s easy to ignore intuition when it arises, and that’s what I did. I ignored it, shrugging it off uncomfortably.
We tried to get together the next time I was home in Minnesota, and for whatever reason, our plans fell through. Next time, we said.
A month later, her parents called to tell me she had taken her life.
What would I have said if I had shared the feeling I had in the parking lot? Would it have made a difference? And what would I have said? I’ll never know the answers.
Fast forward five years, and I found myself at a post-conference dinner in Las Vegas. I was seated next to a successful business man with an impressive knack for dressing well. He was everything you would consider to be conservative: well-dressed, well-mannered, polite, Catholic, married with three kids, and a successful entrepreneur. To my surprise, the conversation veered toward the topic of intuition.
At the time, I was living in California and seemed to be surrounded by people who felt that everything was intuition — even when it blatantly wasn’t. In my recent experience, intuition was so vague and overused it had lost all meaning and credibility in my eyes. But not only did he use intuition in his business, but he was aware of exactly how he used it. To him, it was just like another tool. Like sight, or the latest web app.
These experiences and so many others throughout my life leave me wondering where intuition comes from, what it means, and how and when are we to act on it.
Is intuition a function of experience and pattern recognition?
Is it a wisdom within?
Or does it come from somewhere else entirely?
And how can we use it to make better decisions, reliably?
In the past year, I’ve had conversations with some of the most fascinating people in my network about this topic. I’ve spoken with dozens of entrepreneurs, speakers, doctors, therapists, ex-military personnel, software designers, and more about their personal definition of intuition and how they use it in their daily lives. A number of times, the conversation ended and I thought “Damn, that was so interesting we should have recorded it.”
Well, I started recording them. The result is a series of interviews in video and audio format that get to the heart of those questions above. But this isn’t just another podcast or video series. This is an experiment — a way of gathering information in a way that will help us see the universal patterns in how we use intuition. And hopefully, that will benefit us all.
