Product & Startup Builder

Spidey Sense

Added on by Chris Saad.

In my most recent post on the Touchstone blog I write about 'Making the right choices'. I thought that here I might write a little more about my personal experience with choices - particularly as they relate to people (and my choice to trust them or work with them). In one of our recent discussions I mentioned to someone that I have no 'spidey sense'. What is spidey sense? Well for those of you who know the comics, or the cartoons or the blockbuster Spiderman films will know - spidey sense is the ability to sense danger coming. Or more broadly, in context of the real world, sense the good people and the bad people or circumstances intuitively.

All of my decision making comes from a place of intellect - not gut feelings. I read, I watch and I listen to others around me and I try to detect the patters and intellectual processes that go into good outcomes. And then I try to apply those lessons intellectually to the decisions I have to make.

Most recently though, I have had to make decisions that are outside of the scope of my previous experience and based on my gut feeling about things.

In these circumstances, the people around me (my partners and friends) make claim to having 'a good feeling about this' and a 'bad feeling about that' while I sit totally unaware of any gut feelings at all.

I have found that if I can't make an intellectual decision about something, then I am working in the dark. And in these cases the intellectual debate is often impossible. There are equal for and against arguments each way. In the end we need to do a gut check and my gut has very poor communication skills.

So perhaps this is something I can learn over the next 12 months. Or maybe it's something you are born with and I will just have to rely on some trusted friends and partners to fill in the gaps.