A Wise Egg and Intuition
Wednesday, August 2, 2006 at 07:55AM by Charlie O'Donnell Matt Sanchez of VideoEgg came and spoke this morning to the SEMI program--a group of young college students interested in finance and business that I run.
He said something that stuck with me... that there are two types of knowledge: experiential knowledge and intuitive knowledge, and that entreprenuers are successful when they have the latter. Basically, those who can only see and understand something if they've seen it before are going to struggle in a startup, whereas those who can hypothesis and logic out systems of behavior that are completely new will achieve much.
I think often times, people take a very passive approach to intuition--imagining that you either have it or you don't, but I don't think that's true. "Gut feelings" often come quicker to some people than others, but a lot of times, putting in some solid effort into thinking from the other side of the table or in someone else's shoes has the same effect. Sometimes, you get good enough at that where it seems to come automatically, but that takes time. A good "gut feeling" can come from a well thought out attept to figure out what you would do if you were someone else. Intuition isn't a gift of luck... it is the result of mental training... a mode of thought.
Reader Comments (1)
A different way of looking at it is to assume there are two types of entrepreneurship: opportunistic and evangelical (or at least that's how i think about it).
Opportunistic is execution oriented - getting down a path faster than the next guy because you're a better operator, have a better vision, a better team, etc. But at the end of the day you're running towards a destination that is broadly agreed to be valuable. You can be experiential in this category.
Evangelical is the "you might be crazy" - you have a vision, you see something that others don't. And every day it's your goal to bring others to your vision - to sell your idea to employees, partners, investors, the media, your users, etc. This favors the intuitive.