Steve Jobs once remarked, “Intuition is a very powerful thing, more powerful than intellect, in my opinion.”
What is intellect? What is intuition? Although there is no definition that completely encapsulates the meaning of these words, everyone understands on some baseline level what is implied by them. Intellect, or intelligence, is something based on a rigorous, often testable and quantifiable framework. It’s something logical. A toolkit that you can use to make certain extrapolations, whether that’s figuring out how best to save money for an upcoming purchase, the shortest route to a spring break destination or how to solve that unsolvable question on the problem set. Intellect is grounded in some sense of realism: there is a tangible conclusion you reach as the result of using your intellect.
Intuition is more subtle, much less tangible. Call it a gut feeling, almost like instinct. There is no clear logical process that precedes moments of intuition and the feelings that come with it. It’s that welling fear in your stomach as you watch your rival soccer team attacking, and then scoring a goal against you in an important final. You saw it coming but can’t explain how. It’s the same intuition which makes you hesitate from taking the shorter, less lit path back to your residential college at night. Intuition comes alive in uncertainty, when making logical extrapolations is not possible. It’s also astoundingly quick, arriving instantly without warning. It’s what Lionel Messi and Michael Jordan have used to dribble out of impossible situations when their reaction time is barely a few milliseconds.
Life in college can often be hyper rationalized and focused solely on intellectual development. Classes require you to learn and memorize set frameworks to be tested on exams. This whole exercise is beneficial when it comes to learning useful information, however it does not really contribute to the development of strong intuition. Therefore, it is important to continue to nourish our intuition by actively listening to it and trusting it when navigating uncertain waters in life and college. It is important to trust the gut feeling that brews ever so often, letting it guide us to some destinations we don’t yet even know are the correct ones.
Some are quick to point out that intelligence and intuition are linked, intellect is a product of intuition and vice versa, but that doesn’t quite do justice to the concept at large. Surveying history, you see that humans have survived on intuition and gut instinct much longer than on pure intellect. This is not to say that the development of intellect has not led to the greatest advancements in human history; but without intuition, a lot of the potential of that intellect could have remained unrealized. Einstein’s famous insight into the nature of gravity for formulating general relativity is what he recalls as, “the happiest thought of my life.” A classic example of intuition, that last hump that intellect couldn’t cross alone. Where and how did that happy thought come from? I speculate that even Einstein wouldn’t have been able to tell us.
This is where the benefits of strong intuition become clear. In real life, information often isn’t available and there aren’t always neat frameworks that allow us to make confident projections into the far future. That’s where intuition comes into play, waiting silently and built up over years of life experiences. Intuition is the best guide in times of uncertainty, when decisions often need to be made in limited time with limited data.
The most apt example is of current Apple Chief Executive Officer Tim Cook. Before joining Apple, Cook was a senior executive at Compaq, one of the leading technology companies of the time. Apple was struggling, with Steve Jobs recalled as CEO to captain a seemingly sinking ship. Jobs reached out to Cook with an offer to join Apple. The rest is history. Cook puts it best himself, “Any purely rational consideration of cost and benefits lined up in Compaq’s favor, and the people who knew me best advised me to stay at Compaq … On that day in early 1998, I listened to my intuition, not the left side of my brain.”
It is no surprise that Cook became Jobs’ eventual successor.
SAYYED HAIDER HASSAN is a sophomore in Morse College. Contact him at haider.hassan@yale.edu.