Trust Your Intuition

Most people overthink intuition, but it’s your internal compass. Trust it, act on it, and treat it like a startup idea: test, iterate, and let it guide your path.

People tend to treat intuition like a wild animal that needs taming. We're taught to second-guess it, argue with it, and prefer rationality over gut feelings. Intuition, the narrative goes, is a fallback, something to consider only when all else fails. But that’s wrong. Intuition isn’t some flaky impulse; it’s a deep, subconscious alignment with the world. And when it’s working right, it’s less like a fallback and more like a superpower. The ideal isn’t to fight your intuition but to align with it so seamlessly that it becomes a reliable, almost inevitable force in your life.

The Big Misconception

The biggest misconception about intuition is that you need to wrestle with it. We’re told to be skeptical, to analyze it to death, to make sure it passes some test of reason. But here’s the contrarian view: the best state isn’t questioning your intuition; it’s being so synced with your subconscious and your environment that you don’t have to question it at all. You just know. Intuition becomes a compass you can trust completely, and the real challenge is less about understanding it and more about getting yourself to a place where you don’t have to.

Life’s Maze and Intuition as a Shortcut

Think of life as a maze. Most people wander through it, bumping into dead ends because they think they need to collect every piece of the puzzle. They think they have to slog through experiences, gain the right credentials, endure endless trial and error. But that’s the hard way. The shortcut is knowing yourself so well that you don’t need to gather every piece because you can bypass entire sections of the maze. Intuition is like a secret map that lets you skip the parts that aren’t necessary for you.

When you’re truly aligned—when you know your strengths and weaknesses and how to compensate for them—you start to see these shortcuts. You find the hidden paths because you’re not just navigating based on what’s visible, but on what feels right. Intuition isn’t just a tool; it’s the meta-tool that tells you which tools to use and when.

The Cost of Ignoring Intuition

The thing about intuition is, it doesn’t just go away when you ignore it. It sticks around, like background noise, and it can mess with your perception of reality. I’ve been in situations where I knew I needed to make a change, like leaving a job or ending a relationship, but hesitated. Intuition was clear: get out. But rational thought, obligations, the need to prove something—they all got in the way. Ignoring that inner voice didn’t just keep me in place; it turned everything sour. When you go against what you truly feel, your subconscious doesn’t just let it slide. It fights back, often in subtle, insidious ways that can turn your reality into a kind of waking nightmare.

This isn’t meant to scare anyone, but it’s important to understand: ignoring your intuition isn’t neutral. It’s actively harmful. It’s like trying to walk north while your compass points south. Your inner alignment is off, and until you correct it, nothing really fits.

The Hacker’s Approach to Intuition

So how do you work with intuition instead of against it? You treat it like a hypothesis. In startups, you don’t debate endlessly whether an idea is good; you build a minimum viable product and test it. You launch and see what happens. Intuition works the same way. When it suggests something, try it. Don’t just sit there reasoning about it—act on it. See where it leads. If it tells you to make a move, make it, but do it like an experiment. Be curious about the outcome.

This approach turns intuition into something actionable, something you can iterate on. The more you act on it and see the results, the better you understand how your intuition works and where it leads you astray. It’s a feedback loop. And the biggest mistake is to not enter the loop at all, because intuition, like any muscle, needs to be exercised. The more you use it, the stronger it gets.

Making Intuition Second Nature

Ultimately, intuition isn’t about having a perfect answer every time. It’s about building a relationship with your own subconscious so that it becomes a reliable guide. It’s like having an internal GPS that’s always recalibrating based on your actions and experiences. The key is to trust it enough to act, even when you don’t have all the answers. Because the truth is, no one ever has all the answers. But intuition, if trusted, can be the closest thing we have to an inside track.

So stop treating intuition like it’s second-rate. Give it the first-class status it deserves. Trust it, test it, and most importantly, act on it. Because in a world full of overthinking and second-guessing, intuition isn’t just a tool; it’s an edge. And in the end, having an edge is what makes all the difference.