The coin in the air.

I've made almost every important decision of my career against someone's advice. When I left a stable product job to co-found a fintech, when I joined a company of seven people that nobody had heard of, there was always a reasonable person, someone who cared about me, explaining why it was a bad idea. They had good arguments. I didn't really have any. I just knew. And looking back, the feeling that made me go has never once let me down, which is more than I can say for most of the spreadsheets I've built since.

For a long time I was a little embarrassed by that. Product is a job where you're expected to justify everything. You walk into a meeting, someone asks why you made a choice, and the right answer is a number, a test, a chart that goes up. "Because I felt it" is not something you say out loud in front of an executive committee. So I learned to do what everyone does: I'd make the decision first, quietly, and then go and find the data that would make it presentable. It took me years, and one book (The Creative Act), to admit that the order mattered, and that the feeling was not the weak part of the process. It was the process.

One of the ideas that stayed with me is that creative people work a bit like antennas: the ideas are out there, all the time, and the job is less to invent them than to be tuned well enough to pick them up. When nothing comes, it's rarely because the source has dried up; it's because the channel is cluttered. That matched something I had felt for years without having the words for it. My best ideas almost never come while I'm sitting in front of a screen trying to have them. They come on the road, when I'm driving somewhere and arrive without remembering the trip, or while I'm walking, or doing something mechanical that keeps the conscious part of my head busy and leaves the rest of it free.

They also come when I talk. It has happened more times than I can count: I tell someone I have a feeling about a product, they ask me "ok, so what would you actually do?", and I start explaining, and the whole thing builds itself as I go, one idea pulling the next, as if I'd spent hours on it. I hadn't. People sometimes think it's preparation. It isn't. It's closer to taking dictation, which is probably why I've never felt entirely comfortable taking credit for it.

If you want to see intuition in its purest form, watch a child. A child has no trouble making a decision. They're moved by an instinct they were born with, a kind of ancestral wisdom we're still trying to understand. They live in the moment, I'm hungry, I'm thirsty, they value play above everything else, and they move from one emotion to the next without dragging the previous one along. Then we grow up, we gain experience, and experience quietly builds walls around us. It teaches us the rules, it teaches us what's risky, and without noticing we start protecting ourselves from exactly the kind of naive moves that produce the most original work. When I started my fintech I knew almost nothing about banking regulation, and I'm convinced that ignorance is the only reason we tried some of the things we tried. The best creators I know are the ones who managed to keep some of that innocence, the ability to look at a problem as if it were the first time, and to be surprised by it.

Then prove it

Trusting your gut doesn't mean refusing to check. It means not letting the check come first. When I hesitate between two options, I sometimes use a very simple trick: I flip a coin. While it's in the air, you almost always feel a slight preference for one side, a small hope that it lands one way rather than the other. That's your answer. The experiment is over before the coin even touches the table. I find it a more honest test than most of the A/B tests I've seen run in product teams, which almost never compare two things with everything else truly equal, and which are too often used to settle an argument rather than to learn something.

What I do instead is put the idea into the real world as fast as possible, and let reality answer. An idea on its own is worth nothing, and no description ever does it justice; it has to be seen, tried, touched. With AI this has become almost absurdly easy. If you want to know whether people want an unusual product, you don't need a market study or three months of debate. You can put a convincing site online in an afternoon, and when someone clicks "add to cart", simply ask for their email. In a week you'll know more than any meeting could have told you. Intuition decides where to look. Reality decides whether you were right. And the faster you can get from one to the other, the less you have to persuade anyone of anything.

I apply the same thing to people, which surprises some of my colleagues. When I recruit, I meet the person alone first. If the feeling is good, they come and spend a full day with the whole team. And if one person on that team says no, it's no. Even if they can't explain why, even if all they can say is that something felt off. That's enough for me. Over the years I've learned to trust that kind of signal much more than a perfect interview, because it comes from the same place as my own gut: the animal in us, which notices things long before the mind has found the words.

Looking back, the people who advised me against those choices weren't wrong to worry. They were reasoning, and reason is built on what has already happened. Intuition is built on what hasn't happened yet, which is exactly why it's so hard to defend in a meeting and so often right. I don't think it's a gift, either. It's more like a muscle: the more you listen to it, the more precise it becomes, and the more you ignore it, the quieter it gets, until one day you can't hear it at all. So the next time you feel it, that small certainty that arrives before the arguments, don't rush to bury it under a spreadsheet. Write it down. Then go and prove it.