INSTINCTIVENESS

By permission from veer.com Excellent site for inspiration.

Everyone has instincts. Just a matter of how often they come, how strong they are.

Instinct = perception, intuition, gut feel, senses, a strong feeling that you cannot backtrack to logical facts on the reason why. It just is.

In the prehistoric world, instinct was used for survival. To know when to strike in hunting, to know how to defend when being hunted. To smell the weather and know what to prepare for.

 Today, instinct is even more precious. In BLINK ( the book that hits unnecessary research down used to justify a decision/ conclusion), Malcolm Gladwell tells a true story of how The Getty Museum, after 14 months of research and money spent to check the facts and validity of a Greek statue ‘kourous’ almost paid USD10million for a fake. Despite all the correct scientific analytical validation done by legal documentation and scientific experimentation, the art curators took one look at it and felt it wasn’t right.  One curator couldn’t explain why she said it’s just not right.  Another looked at it and the first word that came into his head was “fresh” – which you don’t say when you see a statue from the 6^th century BC. Another said he felt there was a glass between him and the statue, as if it wasn’t real or it was trying to hide something. 

They all felt their instincts within a blink of the eye (therefore the book title: Blink) And then it was discovered the statue was a forgery – done in the 1980s in Rome. It shouldn’t have taken them 14 months to discover that.  

As a planner in the marketing world, i’ve seen the most successful marketing directors go on the path of success or failure.. all dependant on whether they have the marketing instinct. Companies that rely on unnecessary countless research on consumers with less specific briefs to get an answer on what product to launch, how to launch it, etc.. are really using all their money to go round the mulberry bush. While their competitors beat them to the chase and launch the right product faster.

I’ve seen clients who know their instincts so well they can tell the right decision from a taste, a blink or hearing an answer to a question.

I’ve seen 8 months of validation by research to test what they’ve been told.

I’ve seen a company that refused to trust a human insight given on urban Muslim women and their insecurities at having to handle husband, work, children and themselves until they stumble upon it again by research after one and a half years, where the opportunity flew by.

I still see examples today where people want facts, logical facts to explain a decision.

We all use our internal computer in our brains, that come from the gift of being a human being. To be able to think, feel, sense and perceive. We collect all sorts of data and information and store it somewhere in our brain. Being instinctive means you naturally pull out data from all parts – not necessarily from the same compartment that we normally neatly store it in.

Being instinctive means you are using more of your brain. And it doesn’t mean you have to try and not trust things you cannot explain.

Trust your instincts. I’ll continue to use mine, it’s served me well.  (As tiring as it may be sometimes around people who need validation.) Btw – this means trusting people who you think have instincts if yours isn’t strong enough – yet.

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