Episode 340: Trust your gut, then double-check

Solo

Sep 29

This episode of The Art of Entrepreneurship is for founders who follow their gut and want to know when it's instinct and when it's just bias.

We’re on episode four of eight in my lessons to live by series, and this one is less of a mantra and more of a tension I've never fully figured out: following your gut versus leaning into what the numbers say. Listening to my gut isn't woo-woo; it's a tool based on a couple of decades of marketing experience and thirteen years of pattern recognition as an agency owner, which is why my read on people is the thing I trust most about myself. But I've also learned the hard way that once you've made the call, research can quietly turn into building the case for it. It looks and feels exactly like due diligence, and that's what makes it so dangerous.

In this episode, I share the three questions I use to step outside myself: where my gut or my data actually came from, what it would take to change my mind and who is going to tell me this is a bad idea. I also get into why great companies assign someone to argue the other side, and how you can use that same exercise to avoid groupthink when you're making decisions on your own. The rule I keep coming back to is that your gut is great at direction and bad at magnitude; it can point you where to go, but it won't hand you the map.

Tune in if you're ready to follow your gut on the what and do the work to validate everything else.