So far we've spent five entries in this arc asking questions. Time for a few answers, don't you think? I mentioned that the impetus for this arc was people contacting me about starting a business and being asked for help on business plans, the questions coming from several different directions at once. I also hope I've managed to convince a few people along the way that I'm not the correct person to be asked about these things because I'm sure I don't know how to do any of it.
What I am sure about is that I'm learning along the way. I'm not necessarily a fast learner, but a learner I am. Like my mentors, I know I'm going to make mistakes so I might as well take notes. Hopefully I won't make the same mistakes again.
This installment picks up with questions about who to trust.
The first person you've got to trust is yourself. You need to learn to go with your gut right from the start and out of the gate. Trust yourself or you're not going to succeed.
This is not just something that applies to me. Dan Sobotincic, NextStage Global's CEO, calls it his "spider sense". One of my other mentors calls it "that funny tingling in my toes". I've heard Lee Iacocca, Jack Welch, Steve Jobs, Michael Dell and others speak of the same thing. This isn't something that only appears in business. Generals throughout history have described this "sixth" sense.
Is this sixth sense always accurate? History demonstrates that sometimes it is fallible, but even then the evidence is illusory at best. Neuro- and cognitive-science have this sixth sense falling into the category of intuition. The concept of intuition is studied as everything from an energy flow to a kind of non-conscious mathematical savantness. Business studies often view intuition as a form of knowledge management. Elements of NextStage's research go into "expert intuition" points me towards two possibilities and not in an "either-or" configuration but in a "both-and" metaphor.
- The ability to non-consciously access accumulated knowledge via non-directed memory access.
- The ability to both access and accept information from a non-obvious knowledge source.
Anyway, I think there's a mixing of the two, sometimes all of one and none of the other and at all times a blend at work.
(more to follow...)
» Thoughts on Building a Business, part 7 from BizMediaScience
Adventures in Small Business Management across the 8th Dimension, Part 7 [Read More]
Tracked on: December 30, 2006 8:31 AM | Permalink to Trackback