Intuition Is Trained, Not Innate

I’m a heavily left-brained analytical person. When there’s a problem, I’m equipped and enjoy analyzing the heck out of it. It brings me satisfaction and joy.

Because being analytical is a natural strength, I was always mystified by intuition. It seemed…weird. Where does it come from? How come some people seem to be born with it, and other people, like me, aren’t?

I also heavily discounted intuition. Why would I trust someone’s “gut” instead of going through a logical reasoning process? That’s _ir_rational

What I’ve come to realize is that thinking of intuition as a mystical, magical, natural force is incorrect. It’s not mystical at all.

It’s your brain recognizing patterns faster than you can explain them.

As you see something more and more over time, your brain no longer needs to consciously process it. It comes subconsciously. That’s intuition: Compressed experience.

If intuition isn’t magic, where does it actually come from?

Intuition’s source: exposure plus pattern recognition

Intuition is built.

And it reminds me of the quote, “Do you have 10 years of experience, or one year of experience 10 times?”

The point is that living life and going to work isn’t enough by itself to build intuition to its full capacity.

You need exposure, variation, and feedback - all repeated over time.

That means you can’t be intuitive in a domain where you have no experience. If you start investing after never having done it before and try to do it intuitively, you’ll be in for a rude awakening.

You also can’t be intuitive when hiring your first employee. You haven’t had the reps and the closed loop to have built intuition. You need to hire lots of people, having hundreds of interviews - plus all the calibrations, performance management, and eventually promotions, stagnation, or exits. Then, after having all that experience and reflecting on the closed loop, you’ll begin to become intuitive in hiring.

As intuition is developing, you might start by literally naming the pattern. You’ll promote someone and say, “That was just like when we promoted [so and so],” or you’ll exit someone, and say, “This went down the same way as when we had to fire [so and so].”

Later you might meet someone, or be in a situation, and you’ll start to feel - hey, this pattern is happening again. Only now you’re starting to see it in advance.

This is great! You’re getting smarter and smarter, and your subconscious helps you by bringing the awareness forward without requiring the annoying labor of conscious thought, or needing to go through the full cycle.

But here’s the problem: Cognitive biases feel exactly the same.

The overlap between intuition and cognitive bias

Intuition and cognitive biases operate in the subconscious. Thoughts derived by either method will arrive automatically without conscious effort. Both can give a sense of confidence and may seem obvious.

This is why intuition can get a bad reputation. You may feel like you’re operating on intuition, but it’s really a cognitive bias coming through the same pathway. Your subconscious doesn’t tell you why it produced the answer; it just produces an answer.

Your job is to determine whether that answer came from trained pattern recognition, or a cognitive bias hijacking you.

Confidence is not a good proxy. Your subconscious will produce confidence regardless of source. Feeling “sure” is not evidence of being right.

To differentiate you’ll need to inspect the intuition. What experience do you have in this domain? Have you seen this pattern play out before? Do you have a closed loop to know how different paths turn out? Would I have this same feeling if some of the details changed?

Intuition isn’t an excuse to stop thinking. It’s just a data source, and one that must be interpreted.

Ignoring it throws away information, but blindly obeying it risks putting bias in the driver’s seat.

So how do you develop intuition?

Developing intuition deliberately

To develop intuition: increase exposure, close the feedback loop, and think in abstractions.

Increase Exposure:
You need the reps across a variety of domains and experiences. That lends itself to saying “yes” to opportunities when they come up. Take on the project. Serve on the committee. Do the thing!

Your lived experience is really important, but you can also generate experience second hand. Read books, listen to podcasts, and have conversations with experienced people.

If you know me, you know I recommend books the most as they’re the easiest and highest density source. Biographies, specifically, can be really helpful because they’ll go through the detail of someone else’s lived experience.

Close the Loop:
Going back to our interviewing concept, if you interview 1000 people, but don’t actually hire and work with them, then you’re not developing effective intuition. You might see patterns from repeated exposure, but you don’t know how to interpret them as good or bad.

If you have the exposure without the closed loop with feedback your confidence will increase, but your accuracy and effectiveness won’t.

Make sure you see things through to the end. Make sure you’re getting feedback in order to interpret the patterns.

Think in Abstractions:
When developing intuition, be careful not to be too literal. Small, inconsequential details don’t break a pattern. If you’re governing a team project and things start to feel off, for example, don’t discount it because the team members are different, or the exact product/service your building is different.

You’re building a pattern library, and patterns are fuzzy. You need to think in a level of abstraction to get above the weeds.

But even trained intuition needs to be handled carefully in real decisions.

Intuition as decision input, not output

Intuition is often thought of as an output - you get a sensation and stop working because you’ve figured it out.

That’s wrong. Instead, intuition should be thought of as an input.

In decisions, intuition will show up first. That’s makes it valuable - and dangerous. Leaders are at risk of stopping the work once their intuition speaks. They consider it the end, when it’s actually the beginning.

Instead of sharing your intuition and shutting down the conversation, treat it as data for your decision process.

Even with intuition, you still need to interrogate your decision. You need to seek disconfirming evidence and invite a challenge.

If you treat intuition as an input, then it informs a hypothesis. It becomes a prompt for investigation and a flag worth examining.

See the difference in these two statements:
❌ “Something feels off, so no.”
✅ “Something feels off, so let’s figure out why.”

Intuition can influence the process without dictating the outcome.

Call to Action

Intuition is a helpful complement to deeper rational thought and analysis. It’s something you earn through a life of experience, reflection, and pattern recognition.

Since intuition can look the same as cognitive bias, the goal isn’t to “trust your gut,” but rather to know when your intuition is trained versus just guessing.

Listen to your intuition this week. Where is it coming up and serving as a warning (or encouraging) signal? Where are you - like me - suppressing it in the name of conscious evaluation?

Kevin