Iconic Entrepreneurs Use Their Intuition to Succeed

“Have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.” — Steve Jobs

Every week, I write an article to share my learning or discovery during my startup journey. Here is the link to my reasons for penning these articles for myself and for many others like me.

How does an entrepreneur use their intuition? Do they completely take critical decisions based on intuition, or do they collect the data and then make informed decisions? I feel it would be a personal style or choice of every entrepreneur. There is no right or wrong way about it.

I feel I am more on the logical side if I look at myself. I gather a lot of data to evaluate and then make a decision. But, I have sometimes noticed a little voice in the form of your intuition keeps on popping inside your head. To satisfy my data conscious side, I keep on collecting data, but subconsciously I keep on looking at the data that coincides with my intuition. So, I am also going by my instinct rather than by reasoning. Not sure how it goes with other entrepreneurs. I would like to know about it too.

Last week, I encountered two such situations where my intuitions played a significant role.

First instance- I was looking for a co-founder role to get some hands-on experience running a company. It will help me learn some new skills that I could apply in my own business. I found an opening for a co-founder role and applied. The owner reached out to me. We had a conversation where he explained the position and the share of equity for the new co-founder. Unfortunately, his contract terms looked too much in favor of the owner. I felt that his co-founder would be working like another employee who needs to fulfill all the responsibilities of a co-founder but with meager equities and zero salary. My intuition quickly advised me not to take this offer. Without any second thought, I emailed the owner about my inability to join this role due to other commitments. I was also surprised by my quick response. At that time, I did not know about the right way to share equity between the co-founders.

Contrary to my usual self, I did not wait to gather more data before deciding. One positive side of this incident is that I have started learning more about the responsibilities and equities shared between the co-founders. In this case, I just followed my heart or intuition and did not allow my mind to take over with more data.

In the second instance, I have registered on a meetup application where we get to meet strangers who want to or are already on the entrepreneurship journey. The goal is to network, brainstorm, and share information. This application runs an algorithm to find your match based on the areas of interest that you have specified in your profile.

This week the application matched me with an intern. After reading her profile, my intuition told me to cancel this meeting. This match does not fit well with my network preferences. This time my mind opposed by telling me — “This is impolite- This is rude-You will not look good if you decline this-You also started your career as an intern.”Amid all this self-talk, I accepted the meeting invite.

On the meeting day, I received an email from this intern. She mentioned how she was looking forward to connecting with me and learning from me as she is just starting in the same field. But unfortunately, there was a personal emergency at her end, and she wants to reschedule the meeting. Her email massaged my ego, and it expanded like a balloon and completely overshadowed the feeble voice of my intuition. I readily accepted the new invite.

Today when I logged in for the online meeting, my new student did not turn up. Maybe she missed it because of a long weekend. I emailed her about setting another appointment if she still wanted to talk to me. Ten minutes after sending this email, I received a message from the application that she had rescheduled the meeting to another time of the day. This is unprofessional behavior by my standard. First, she failed to inform me in advance, and second, she did not check my availability while rescheduling. My ego has started shrinking now, but I had to see some more ego deflation. Again, she responded to my email. This time the tone was very dry, no apology for her no-show in the meeting. She asked me to set up another meeting at her suggested time. I replied about my unavailability at that time and suggested scheduling it for another day. This time her response got even more authoritative. She would be busy for the entire week and expected me to check with her next week for the new meeting time. She sounded to be the busiest person in the world, and I needed to put in efforts to get her available for a meeting. But I never wanted to have the meeting in the first place. It was she who wanted to learn from my experiences. With my deflated ego, the intuition was banging loudly in my head — “See, I was right.”. I had learned enough by not hearing it earlier, so I did not reply to her message and ignored it.

Lessons learned from this instance:

• Listen to your intuition
• Keep your ego in check. Other people can use it to manipulate you.
• Stick to your goals that you had set for interaction, do not accommodate things that compromise these goals

Wishing everyone a great week and hope your intuitions make your entrepreneurship journey successful.

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