Lex Fridman: belief

Transcript context

…That’s a big part of it; trying to give more people the permission to trust their own instincts and their own gut and realizing that developing that supercomputer in your stomach is actually the work of a career and that you should not discard those feelings in preference to over… or not even complicated; to analytics, to intellectualism. Very often when we look at the big decisions we’ve had to make, they’ve come from the gut, where you cannot fully articulate why do I think this is the right thing. Well, because I’ve been in this business for 20 years and I’ve seen a bunch of things and I’ve talked to a bunch of people, and that is percolating into this being the right answer. A lot of people are very skeptical about that in business or unable to trust it because it feels like they can’t rationalize. Why are we doing something? Well, because I feel like it, damn it. That’s a great privilege of being a bootstrapped, independent founder who don’t owe their business to someone else and doesn’t have to produce a return because I feel like a lot of the bullshit really creeps in when you’re trying to rationalize to other people why you do the things you do and why you take the decisions that you do. If you don’t have anyone to answer to, you are free to follow your gut, and that’s hell of an enjoyable way to work, and it’s also and very often the correct way to work. Your gut knows a lot. You can’t articulate it, but it’s spot-on more times than not. Yeah. Having to make a plan can be a paralyzing thing. I suppose there’s different kinds of brains. And first of all, I can’t wait to read that book if it materializes. I often feel like in the more interesting things I do in my life, I really don’t know what I’m doing upfront. And I think there’s a lot of people around me that care for me that really want me to know what I’m doing. They’re like, “What’s the plan? Why are you doing this crazy thing?” And if I had to wait until I have a plan, I’m not going to do it. They have different brains on this kind of stuff. Some people really are planners and it maybe energizes them, but I think most creative pursuits, most really interesting, most novel pursuits are like, you kind of have to just take the leap and then just figure out as you go. My favorite essay in Rework is the last one, and it’s entitled, “Inspiration is perishable.” And I think that captures a lot of it, that if you take the time to do a detailed plan, you may very well have lost the inspiration by the time you’re done. If you follow the inspiration in that moment and trust your gut, trust your own competence that you will figure it out, you’re going to get so much more back. You’re going to go on the adventure you otherwise wouldn’t have, whether that’s just the business decisions or life decision. You have to seize that inspiration. There’s a great set of children’s books written by this Japanese author about chasing an idea and trying to get a hold of it, and it’s beautifully illustrated as an idea is something that’s floating around, as something you have to catch and latch onto, that I really feel captures this notion that inspiration is perishable; it’ll disappear. If you just put it back on the shelf and say, “Well, I got to be diligent about this, I got to line up a plan,” you may run out, and then there’s no steam to keep going.…

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