Accidental Entrepreneur: Basic Instincts (Building Better Intuition For Success)

Hi Everyone,

Welcome to my 41st weekly article as this week is called “Basic Instincts (Building Better Intuition For Success.”

In this article, I discuss what are some of the basic instincts and how successful people learn to improve these over time to make better decisions to propel them forward.

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“அறிவுடையார் ஆவ தறிவார் அறிவிலார்

அஃதறி கல்லா தவர்”. — திருக்குறள் (427)

“The wise are those who know beforehand

what will happen; those who do not know this

are unwise”. — Thirukkural (427)

We are all born with some basic instincts for survival, growth and adapting to our environments. While these are rudimentary characteristics, successful people learn to improve these features and find ways to apply those intuitions to make good decisions.

People tend to tell me that I was lucky to be in situations where I made right choices to leave bad situations to associate me with successful people, or drove the team to make some difficult choices to succeed at the end. As I looked back at those scenarios and situations, I made the right choices because my instinct was right. Then the question comes: how did I acquire those “right” instincts or how did I build this “good” intuition. Here are a few things which helped me become a better person with good instincts.

• Follow Your Instinct: All of us need to listen to our internal voice as we are born with some instincts and develop additional things over time. One would see that more than ever that one’s instinct would be right compared to the actions that came after so much delay and discussions.
• Train Your Instinct: While some decision making is fundamental to each of us, we can train it to make better decisions. We can train ourselves by learning from both successes and failures, followed by developing a process to analyze them to improve our approach based on the results. Training brings out two factors which are improving the analytical ability and response time. Others may say that this person is always making good decisions, but this doesn’t happen accidentally. It is the training over a lifetime which makes it better.
• Flashes of Ideas: Even with the training, sometimes a person comes up with a brilliant idea, and we wonder how he or she thought of it. Some people get these flashes while sleeping, walking, relaxing and even while taking shower. When these situations arise, make sure to follow up by taking notes and thinking back.
• Energy Level: One other factor to observe is the energy level. When a person is coming up with a unique or instinctual idea to solve a complex problem, the person’s energy level fluctuates and normally rises to a very high level. For me, this is a sign of something interesting happening and working with the people to follow through the thought process.
• Emotional Intelligence (EQ): To me EQ is another version of an instinct based problem solver. Emotional intelligence is the outcome of internal buildups and knowledge gathering. As our bodies get trained and learned from the surroundings, we train ourselves to make efficient decisions quickly. This process, for other people, appears as the person having “good’ instincts.

In my experiences, people with good instincts or intuition make good decisions and become leaders that go on to be successful in their life. While it has something to do with risk taking and other skills, the most important factor is having good instincts. What is your take on instincts and making better decisions? Have you seen people succeeding with it?