What is Intuition, how to develop and trust it

“Your intuition knows what to do. The trick is getting your head to shut up so you can hear.” — Louise Smith

“The intuitive mind is a sacred gift and the rational mind is a faithful servant. We have created a society that honors the servant and has forgotten the gift.” —Albert Einstein

We have this popular notion that success in life requires depth. Understanding things in depth, attempting deep breakthroughs. And indeed in fields such as science, engineering and technology significant depth is very much needed. We train our brains in logic and abstract thought via our (dysfunctional) education system in order to support depth.

But in doing so we forget that the defining characteristic of the modern world is actually its unimaginable width. The amount of possible choices, jobs, business ideas and ways to make the world better (or worse) is almost beyond the capabilities of the human brain. Almost.

The brain has two separate decision-making mechanisms working at all times:

Logic, based mostly in the left brain hemisphere, very good at depth
Intuition, based mostly in the right brain hemisphere, very good at width

Logic only handles boxes, Intuition also handles flows.

Logic is about the exact, Intuition is about the fluid – at first.

The problem with logic is that it’s a very local tool. Evolved at first in order to find, catch and eat food, it has a narrow direction and when focused in it, all width is instantly lost.

Intuition is a global tool which instantly sounds better and more powerful. And it is. It’s critical to know that logic and intuition are not two sides of the same coin.

Logic is evolutionary new, undeveloped and prone to errors, called fallacies.
Intuition is evolutionary old, developed over 100+ million years into an almost perfect decision-making tool.

Comparing the two in evolutionary terms is like comparing a baby’s science skills to the ones of a university professor.

While logic can be accumulated and systematized by the whole of humanity for the great benefit of all, intuition remains a private, individual tool. But make no mistake, it’s in you and is insanely powerful.

The most important pieces of the puzzle of intuition is how can we train it, how to learn to trust it and what is the connection between our ancient intuition and the width of the modern world.

Intuition emerges from the buildup of experience over our biological intellectual basis. The key difference between logic and intuition is that with logic you have to understand and be able to explain the workings of a system to get a correct answer. With intuition you may not be able to explain or even provide reasoning. But you have an answer regardless. It’s a shortcut. Nature loves shortcuts.

Intuition is strongest when facing binary choices. Is my gut feeling good or bad about this option or person? Does this causal relationship run one-way or both-ways? Is this quantity when cooking too little or too much?

However, on some level life is made of binary choices – as we know from computer science, everything can be represented by a collection of zero-s and one-s. If we see and feel the value of width, compared to depth, intuition improves and eventually develops comparison hacks that can compare not two, not ten, not hundreds but millions (!) of options without even considering them one by one – a truly astonishing power! Intuition at its best feels like a quantum computer, somehow exploring options simultaneously rather than sequentially like normal hardware. It just seems magical how it can consistently suggest great solutions without you knowing how it got to them.

Of course magic or quantum effects are not how this works. Nothing mystical is required to explain intuition. It’s just nature at its best decision-making efficiency. Given the huge width of life’s choice tree and potential outcomes it’s useful to explore how computers tackle similar choices while playing games such as chess, where the width quickly scales to billions of billions of variations and potential outcomes to compare. Basically they use a mix of micro calculations, results comparison and critically (improving efficiency by orders of magnitude), optimization of the resources used by using smart hacks such as alpha-beta pruning. In other words – shortcuts!

The brain is a biological neural network, not so different from the ones used to train LLMs like ChatGPT. The brain has 3 massive advantages though:

More connections – Yes, a single human brain has ~100 trillion synapses, much more than the huge datacenters that current AI is trained at! The miracle of biology.
Parallelism – The brain processes information in a massively parallel way, while GPT models operate on digital hardware that processes data sequentially or in limited parallelism.
The energy efficiency difference is just mind-boggling – The brain uses ~20 watts of power, while the training of ChatGPT 4 required many megawatt-hours (!) of energy.

Not even the immense operational speed of computer hardware can compensate for the above. This is why this book is not written by AI – I’m still better at this.

We talk about brains and computers for a reason. The best way to understand our difference in power between intuition and logic is this:

Chess is a logical game. It’s based mostly on calculating variations, although position evaluation in the end of the variations is another critical component in which humans are much better than machines. This is why humans were better at chess up to about year 1997 (for a comparison in strictly logical tasks like code-breaking computers were already better than humans at the end of World War 2!) when for the first time a computer beat the reigning world champion. However, today the computers rule the game. On your phone with its tiny CPU you can install software that will not just beat the world champion, it will obliterate him.

On the other hand even though ChatGPT 4 was trained for months on an enormous amounts of data in an enormous datacenter, it gave this answer to this question:

So ChatGPT 4 has almost unlimited memory, has learned a huge amount of human knowledge but is still very far away from exceeding the best humans in any field. Even though it was given megawatt-hours of energy and millions of times more powerful hardware than the phone in your pocket. All while knowledge/language is just somewhat more intuitive than chess (far from totally as both have logical and intuitive components).

Let’s recap and compare. Better > Worse; Much better >> Much worse.

Phone + chess software >> World chess champion brain (total annihilation) | (Mostly logical game!)

World chess champion brain > Average human brain (at most intellectual challenges as chess is brutally hard)

Average human brain > ChatGPT 4 at simple problems about clothes drying in the sun | (Logic + intuition required!)

Even though:

ChatGPT 4 hardware and software power & cost >> Phone + chess software power & cost

So the worlds best logical chess brain loses by a mile to a $300 phone running any off-the-shelf software.
Meanwhile your average intuitive brain beats by a mile the world’s billion dollar best proprietary intuitive AI.

Are you starting to see why logic and intuition are not two sides of the same coin?? This comparison to tech products clearly shows that your intuition, if properly developed and trusted, is millions of times more powerful than logic!

We can make another tech analogy that is very helpful to understand the difference. The following is an oversimplification but it’s highly illustrative:

In computer terms our logical brain has lots of hard drive data (eg. language and formal education) and enough RAM memory but a very tiny lousy CPU, prone to errors. So it’s good to store information but not to take decisions. Then how did logic emerge to be as valued as it is today? At the scale of humanity logic becomes stupendously better. With storage and knowledge transfer not being a limitation, the lousy CPUs unite into a giant “hive” computer with a great error-correction mechanism (The Scientific Method). But our lousy CPUs started us at a level so low that this admirable progress is still slow and often imperfect.

We have to be thankful that for 2300 years our lousy logical CPUs (with massive help from the intuition of individual brilliant people!) barely got us from Aristotle to high-end technology. Because if you were born 370 years ago (and a whopping 1930 years after Aristotle!), your life would have been much more similar to his contemporaries than to ours in the 21st century. In 1650 we didn’t know biological cells and bacteria existed. It took our billions of lousy logical CPUs 1930 (!) years of watching billions of people live and die, including from bacteria-caused plagues and they still had no idea that bacteria existed. This is how slow logical progress is!

As a comparison, Japanese sword making was already at its best in 1650 before we knew about cells and bacteria, because the process, while complex, is highly intuitive – you bang on a piece of steel all day long and reach insane levels of mastery after doing it for 30 years 🙂

Our intuitive brain has the same vast hard drive data (data points for the intuition) and unlike logic has a super powerful CPU with a more parallel structure (similar to the GPUs used for machine learning and AI) but… it has almost no RAM. It generates great decisions on the fly but there are no logs as to how they are reached – the memory is already overwritten to handle the next pending decision, perhaps because such logs would be too complex to be useful.

Since it all works great, the right answer to all the “Why?” questions should be “Who cares!? It works!“. Evolution prepared us to survive in a complex environment, not to ask “Why?“. But people in sheep mode, whose lives are dominated by box thinking, have such a need for control, for reasons and logic that they just… can’t skip the “Why?“. They refuse to trust their intuition and in result enter the desicion-making arena severely handicapped. Even worse, when not trained or trusted, intuition fades and its whispering voice becomes ever harder to hear. Logical thinking is also way more exhausting.

At the scale of humanity things cannot improve that much as without RAM memory we are just black boxes that cannot share their reasoning between them. But don’t forget we started at a much higher level. This is why great scientists like Einstein still shine with intuition, not just logic.

The asymmetry goes on. You can influence your life (and the others around you) with good choices directly while contributing to our shared body of knowledge is a slow, indirect way of contributing – this is why most of us are not scientists. Direct effects are more predictable, stronger and cause faster positive feedback loops which instantly means that if intuition helps you here and now, it’s usually more valuable than your hypothetical contribution that may or may not take place in the future.

You surely need intuition in order to live a rich life, full of possibilities. The question is rather… do you need logic apart from basic math skills and science concepts? Do you need logic in your everyday life?

In order to answer this, three clear questions emerge:

Do you make decisions that affect humanity by contributing to our common body of knowledge? Are you a scientist, innovator, engineer, unorthodox entrepreneur?
If so, you need logic so you can collaborate and communicate in the common language of science.
Do you work as a (non-primary) teacher or mentor to help other people develop the logic with which *they* will affect humanity by contributing to our common body of knowledge?
If so, you need logic so you can teach in the common language of science.
Does your work require logic because of too many rules? Lawyers, accountants, police, the military and some other employees cannot escape logic at they serve as cogs in our social machine and cannot just freestyle it.

But what if the answer is “no” to all three questions? As it is for at least 50% of humanity?

In that case I’ll make the controversial claim that you need almost no deep logical thinking in your life. Every time you make the leap of faith to replace it with intuition, amazing things happen. Believe me, I was in the logical thinking (and overthinking!) trap all the way. Life is much better without this. I’m here to help you trust your intuition and let go.

What your intuition is NOT – an emotion

Fear and other negative emotions are NOT intuition. Though they are both subconscious and may tell you the same thing (eg. I don’t like this person, avoid them), they come from a very different place, are differently formed and vastly differ in their ability to nuancedly assess a situation.

Fear comes from the amygdala and is an extremely primitive primal instinct. It completely lacks nuance and any form of self-correction. In the modern world most common fears such as rejection are so overblown that the failure of this outdated mechanism is the single greatest root cause of mental health problems.

Intuition on the other hand is complex, involves many areas of the brain, has all possible nuance and constantly improves and self-corrects.

How to differentiate between the two?

While your fear screams, your intuition whispers.

Fear is an unwanted giant wave that splashes onto everything, giving you zero credible information. Intuition is the gentle ripple pattern in the sea, that subtly but consistently tells you all you need to know about the water and the wind.

Hype and euphoria are also NOT intuition. They feel great but are not sustainable. Intuition is a part of you, it never goes away. It simply may become quiet if it’s noisy. But you can learn to listen.

In summary, intuition is not directly related to your emotions. Intuition is an intellectual process for which your emotions (and your “gut feeling”) do provide very valuable data points. But it’s not an emotion. It’s a decision-making tool and the most powerful one that you have got. It needs data points and time to develop and the astonishing pattern recognition capabilities of your brain will take care of the rest.

How to develop your intuition?

This depends a bit on the exact type of intuition you want to develop. Still, there are some basics valid for all of them.

In the boxes and flows framework of I Grow Younger we classify intuition as a flow as it’s not easily definable. And what is the best way to develop flows in general? Get rid of boxes (barriers) that stand in their way.

The boxes that directly interfere with intuition are the following:

I need to be right, here and now;
I need to know if and when I’m right, same for others;
I need to be able to prove to myself that I’m right, same for others;

This may sound ok, after all we must strive for truth, right? Yes, but when you push hard on things in such a “box” way, they usually backfire. The direct result of the above is the following effect:

4. Not knowing if I’m right is so much out of my comfort zone that I’d rather potentially lie to myself than live in such uncertainty.

The problem arises because:

We never evolved to prioritize complex objective truth, there were much more important factors for our survival, such as conforming with our tribe and saving calories, which our brain uses a lot of.
We cannot comprehend time well and the processes that take a significant amount of time (like forming intuition) don’t feel attractive due to not bringing dopamine now or in the near future.

Therefore we are all biologically preprogrammed to lie to ourselves (cling blindly to the most black-and-white, emotionally attractive version of reality, be it positively or negatively simplified, to match our current coping mechanisms) rather than live in uncertainty for a prolonged period of time.

The problem is that this “lying to ourselves” phase involves us buying into “alternative facts” and really messes up the data points we use for both logic and intuition. Certainty also gives us the signal that we need not develop anymore in this intellectual area, deprioritizing intuition forming via the emotions that set the priorities for our brain.

It takes some rewiring to overcome the biological programming and feel fine without conviction, so that intuition has the time to form in a clean environment. Most scientists are especially good at knowing how little they know and avoiding certainty because they are trained specifically at this. The love and respect for actual truth is a flow in itself and helps us destroy the “I need conviction to feel ok” box.

Flows help each other so love, energy, responsibility, motivation, creativity, curiosity and meaning all help create the space for intuition to form by removing various boxes.

So do speed and scale. The more you have lived through, the more helpful data points there will be for patterns to emerge. This is vastly underestimated by most people. Speed has a huge correlation with success. The main reason is exactly that deeper intuition is formed.

Now that we covered the basics, let’s see how intuition looks like in real life.

What types of intuition are there?

There are deep biological types of intuition that we as animals are all born with – a feel of our body, kinetics, space orientation, nature and weather etc. These are important and worth developing but let’s leave them aside for now and focus on intellectual intuition – our quest for the truth and understanding the world in intellectual terms.

We may crudely divide the world into humans (possibly including other conscious creatures) and systems (structures that are not conscious – like McDonald’s corporation or an oak tree) and say we have an intuition about humans and intuition about systems. This is marginally helpful and we use such a model sometimes in I Grow Younger. The main differentiator is that you have moral obligations to humans/creatures but not to systems. Destroying a human/creature is always bad; The system cannot suffer though. Destroying a system may benefit more humans/creatures than it will harm and in this case it’s arguably moral.

However, our interactions with humans are different from one another because humans are not only different but also behave very differently individually vs in groups or hierarchies.

Our interactions with systems also largely differ as systems can be many types – emergent (not designed at all but rather born under evolutionary forces), designed poorly, designed well, they can be thriving or dying – every system is essentially different.

So this distinction is not so helpful for intuition as nuances really matter here. We need some basic, low level classification of all mental processes that always holds. After all we only have neurons that form structures, what can such structures output? Well, two main things, structures and quantities. So there are the two basic types:

Intuition about structures (includes all “boxes”, causal relationships and the possible tree of consequences of any action)
Intuition about quantities (includes all “flows” and comparing them, money, time and the breaking points to trigger any possible changes)

What is intuition about structures?

If we have to describe the world in one word it would have to be this one. Structure.

Everything is structure. Mathematics and physics have the structure of the forces and equations that govern reality. Atoms, structured in their behavior by their electron shells, give rise to molecules and chemistry. Complex molecules like DNA are the structures needed to replicate and thus preserve life. When genes engage in time with the chaotic, yet working principle of evolution, we have an explosion of diverse life forms, all of them being structures of cells, organs and systems that are somehow fit to survive.

A human being is an unbelievably complex system. But still a system made from many levels of structures.

The world that humans built is also based on structures because they preserve complexity and thus value – otherwise The second law of thermodynamics would not allow high complexity to emerge and even it if does by chance, it will be short-lived.

How do we understand structures? The logical brain is good at understanding structures that we know everything about, like how to play optimally at Tic-Tac-Toe. This is why science and logical reasoning are a great match – you use the empirically verified knowledge of other scientists to form a basis and then start to experiment on your own and develop this knowledge. Once you discover something new, the others challenge it but if it turns out to be correct, it becomes part of our shared body of knowledge. And just like that, you contributed something to the whole world.

However, outside of exact science, life is messy. We have invested billions in the field of economics and millions of the smartest people on the planet work in it and after Covid they were not able to agree if inflation will remain high or not. Because economics is not just numbers and mathematical models – it also incorporates the decisions of irrational human beings who are employees, employers and consumers. The “vibe” they are in and which is so contagious is an economic factor.

How do we understand complex messy structures to the degree that it is possible? We develop an intuition about the missing parts. The brain can simulate the scenarios about them in the background and only give you answers.

For dynamic systems like economics, where the system objects influence each other a lot, building an intuition about the causal relations is the key.

Some causal relationships are one-way, for example immigrants usually boost the economy but if the economy is boosted that will hardly attract much more immigrants – they mostly come due to other factors like poor conditions in their countries of origin.

Some causal relationships are two-way though. For example many people will emigrate from a very corrupt country because they cannot handle the corruption. But when only corruption-tolerating people remain, corruption will only grow stronger. Such (positive or negative) feedback loops are key to understanding dynamic structures.

Intuition about structures and the causal relationships that create and change them are vital for understanding the motivations of people, the behaviors of systems and life in general.

However, whenever there is any influence, any one or two-way relation, a flow of any type of value between objects, apart from the fact that it exists and the causal relationships it’s a part of, there is always another question. How much?

What is intuition about quantities?

Life is a mess of structures and quantities, united by a universal principle:

Quantity changes lead to quality (structural) changes when a certain threshold is passed.

Knowing where the threshold is is a quantity question which makes intuition about quantities extremely important in life.

For example if you meet a small cute house cat in the wild, it will probably say “meow”, rub along your body and ask if you have any food with those big “I can has cheeseburger” eyes.

However, if you meet a hungry tiger in the wild, it won’t ask you for food. You are the food.

Anatomically the house cat and the tiger are very similar. Same skeletal and muscular structure to make them perfect ambush hunters. The only major difference is size. A quantity.

Somewhere between the size of the house cat and the tiger is the threshold above which you feed the feline with yourself, rather than with Royal Canin. This shows how a quantity affects a structure – the food chain.

There are often two thresholds – upper and lower one. Most quantities that are too low of too high will trigger some structural change. Make phone calls cost $0 and endless bot spam calls will make the phone unusable. Make them cost $10000 each and the result is the same. Only in the golden middle is the structure working as intended.

The thresholds are often known as “breaking points”. To feel what the breaking point is in a certain system is an extremely valuable skill. And nowhere does it help as much as when dealing with other humans.

Humans are generally cooperative. However they are also emotional and irrational which means that once you hit a breaking point of theirs, they may turn against you in an instant. Cooperation turned into hostility is a big net loss for relationships of any kind. Typical breaking points for the cooperation of most people are various quantities of inertia, fear, guilt/shame, envy, (perceived) disrespect/unfairness/immorality and others. These vary among different people. Some are generally wary and their first breaking point is fear. Others have a “hero mindset” and react very strongly to injustice. If you don’t feel people’s cooperation-killing breaking points, it’s impossible to navigate complex relationships and situations.

Hope is never lost though – there are also positive breaking points. Radical selflessness, courage and kindness may turn around relationships that seem hopeless. This is why extremely ambitious initiatives like World Peace Day actually have a chance of working – since they start hitting positive breaking points.

The other quantities that are worth feeling are flows. You cannot measure a flow, but you can compare it to the same flow in the past. For example you cannot measure you current creativity, but you can say whether it’s high or low compared to past times. These are valuable data points for your intuition so you can understand yourself better – in this case to understand what makes you more and less creative.

Money is also a flow, the blood of our economic system. Feeling the quantities of money (and its precursor – value) is a must-have skill when you run any type of business.

Freedom is also a flow and estimating your future Long-term freedom in case of different choices helps you make better choices in life.

And finally, time is a quantity built into everything. We are biologically not well suited to feel longer periods of time and have massive problems with gratification delay, which turns out to be an important predictor of success and happiness.

Building an intuition about time or “Time understanding” is a key to live a life full of the right priorities. Trying to guess what the time is is a simple, yet working way to develop it.

Everything we talk about in the Numbers article is highly relevant to your intuition about quantities, including being able to guess probabilities.

Ok, so we have structures and quantities, it all sounds simple, then why cannot people become self-aware, develop the intuition that tells them how to kick boxes (such as their phone and social media scrolling) out of their lives, embrace flows, make hunter moves and be happy and successful?

The main reason is, so far we haven’t taken high complexity systems into account.

You’re a system, just like any other human being. A very complex one. We’re also living in a much more complex world than we have evolved to handle. Too many structures and quantities would be fine but there is one more key problem. They all influence each other.

Imagine you get fired from work due to cost reductions in the company. One data point, literally one tiny “me-have-job” bit changes from 1 to 0. At the start. After a day you already have anxiety whether you’ll be able to find another decent job, you doubt your self-worth, you ruminate over past work performance, you wonder whether sucking up to your boss more would have changed anything, you don’t know whether to tell your parents and have already run in your head 17 different scenarios about telling your girlfriend that she may have to be the main breadwinner for a while. One bit of change took over your entire brain! How the hell does this happen?

It happens because human beings are extremely interconnected. Everything influences everything else.

In such systems it’s no longer useful talking just about structures and quantities. The ripple effects go in circles and the many positive feedback loops become the most important structures. They “vibrate” with the positive or negative food we feed them with. This is why we call these complex systems “vibe systems”. They are networks where everything is connected to everything, directly or indirectly.

In vibe systems the low level structures and quantities entangle so much that they lose meaning by itself, being too many to feel or analyze. The only questions that matter are about the positive feedback loops triggered.

Will the ripple wither and die out or will it go viral and explode with energy, borrowed from the system itself? This is the main question of vibe systems. A question of environment and momentum. The Hunter/Sheep dynamic and the Box/Flow dynamic are all about momentum. Can you create and keep one in the right direction while killing the opposing ones? There is intuition about this too. The intuition of network effects, momentum and positive feedback loops. Vibe intuition.

You are a complex vibe system. Self-understanding simply means having vibe intuition. You don’t lack data points about yourself, you live your life after all. The framework to analyze it all, to lay down the data points with no emotional bias – this is what most people are missing. And this is where “I Grow Younger” comes into play.

I Grow Younger is all about building an intuitive framework about you and your life.

You already have the data points but they are confusing if you don’t have a reliable framework to lay them onto. How should we build it?

If we have a very simplified (static) framework, we miss the all-important nuances of how everything changes in time, potentially causing positive feedback loops. This is a problem of many psychological models like personality tests. They ignore the fact that the direction you’re heading in is potentially more important than your current state.

On the other hand how can we evaluate everything happening in our rich subconsciousness in real time? This is clearly impossible. So we shouldn’t go overboard with trying to mirror reality or the complexity will quickly become impossible to handle.

This is why I Grow Younger takes an optimal middle ground – we ignore small events like random thoughts and momentary emotions but we do use all actions we take as data points for our intuitive framework. Actions are the real deal. Positive feedback loops almost always involve actions and actions tend to cause positive feedback loops of the good or bad kind. So, although we ignore a lot to reduce complexity to a manageable level, we never miss any of the up/down spirals that make you who you are.

This is reflected in all I Grow Younger advice. We don’t tell you what to think or how to feel. Although they might be helpful, especially in therapy, we use no notes, diaries or affirmations – basically no homework. We’re not in school. This is real life. You’re already living it. We just help you understand what the driving forces are and how to influence them. And given that you’re a vibe system, almost everything we do comes down to one simple skill:

We teach you to feel which actions trigger upward spirals and which trigger downward spirals. Once this feeling becomes a part of you, your first sufficiently high “flow” (self-love, empathy or meaning) moment will give you the spark to start using the feel, catching the wave of constant improvement, joy and vision.

Most of our framework cornerstones are spectrums which are universal and very simple to pursue. You want to have Self-Love, Higher love, Flows, Freedom and Money. You want to be in Hunter mode. You may just don’t know where to start. What domino push will cause the desired virtuous cycle? This is where vibe intuition will help you choose your first move.

This is what the I Grow Younger framework will ultimately help you achieve. Vibe intuition is the best tool for self-improvement.

But the benefits don’t even end there. If you can feel your vibes very well, then you can also feel the vibes of other people to a degree. We are more similar than we are different. Some of our past periods may have been even more similar to the present of another person. When I talk about being trapped by the boxes and sheep mode it’s because I have been there myself.

It turns out all complex systems can be understood much better with vibe intuition. Group behavior and the psychology of the crowd are all about vibes. Society is a vibe system. Geopolitics is the ultimate (most complex) vibe system because it’s a vibe system made of vibe systems (countries), who are in turn also made of vibe systems (people). This is why it’s so chaotic and unpredictable.

If you don’t understand yourself, you cannot understand society and the world – they are made of people much like you!

But it’s not that hard to understand yourself. You just need to dial down the noise, coming from the craziness of the world. Unlearn myths. See through the fog. Use your intuition.

As a vibe system, ignoring everything but feedback loops, turning the direction you’re going in into the key to understanding yourself… complexity is finally manageable.

The world is very complex. You – not nearly as much.

You can understand, handle and improve yourself. While enjoying it.

The components of vibe intuition

This type of intuition is all about how structures and quantities evolve over time in closely interconnected systems like a human being. While assessing structures and quantities is more or less static, assessing how vibes propagate is very dynamic. Here are the key questions to build it:

What made you you? (why do you feel what you feel, why do you do what you do) – an honest understanding of the push a pull forces of the past that forged the current you.
How you change? – what signals do your actions send to you and how they change your internal stories/identity. What changes stick and are you changing fast or slow.
Where you’ll end up? – how would the future version of changing you feel in a any environment that you can pursue.
What do you really want? – often we are so pressured between external and internal (identity-driven) responsibilities that we don’t really know. It’s sometime even helpful to flip a coin for a decision just to see how you feel about the result. (Then follow your feel, not the coin!)

However, any hypothetical honest answer to these questions changes you instantly (changes the answer for real):

If your understanding of what made you you evolves, you change your identity;
If you start believing an action changes your identity, it starts to change even before the action;
How you imagine future you is part of your identity;
What you really want is part of your identity;

If you believe you change slow, you change slow; If you believe you change fast, you change fast. If you believe you change hard, you change hard. If you believe you change easily, you change easily.

With a few medically diagnosable exceptions The Game of Self is one big self-fulfilling prophecy.

This is a good thing and a bad thing at the same time because you’re highly susceptible to both upward and downward spirals.

But it still gives you a lot of power to change positively. You just need to be on the right side of some key spectrums:

More flows, less boxes;

More love, less fear;

More self-love and self-worth;

More higher love, less attraction;

More hunter moves, less sheep moves;

More and more of the precious long term freedom;

More chaos, less self-discipline;

More meaning.

and of course…

More intuition, less logic.

Being on the right side of those is what causes the virtuous cycles of mental health and wellbeing. Vibe intuition simply tells you which spectrums are the critical ones for you at this very moment.

Is a hunter move desperately needed because you’re stuck in sheep mode? Have you only been in attraction-based relationships and discovering higher love can change your life? Or do you need to destroy your people-pleasing problems by flow-running between people in a crowd of strangers? Is your long-term freedom in danger because you’re starting a business in a tough industry with no backup plans?

Feeling all of those vibes requires self-love. Why? Because honestly admitting where you are and where you’re going along all of the spectrums requires self-acceptance. Otherwise instead of truth, intuition and progress, you get coping mechanisms and the left part of the brain will drown you in overthinking and logical rationale about how things are black-and-white (which they never are) and totally distort the picture of what’s really happening.

Once you have a life framework, corresponding to reality and at least some self-love, your intuition will whisper when you lose your path along any spectrum.

This makes the following common question mostly irrelevant:

How to trust your intuition?

If fact, you can be in two states, with a middle ground highly unlikely:

Low self-love state which leads to a lack of self-acceptance and a distorted picture of yourself. In this state you’re susceptible to sheep mode and boxes, potentially addicted, distracted and not a lot of intuition is built. So you don’t have the self-love and self-trust to trust it but you probably don’t have much intuition to trust at all since you didn’t have the right experience that forms intuition.

High self-love state which leads to unconditional self-acceptance and a clear picture of yourself. In this state you not only have the real original data points of your experience but your experience is much more valuable – in hunter mode you do more and more diverse stuff. More flows and less boxes don’t make you a slave to high dopamine spikes, making you unpredictable and resulting in rich, nuanced experiences that form loads of intuition. Here you trust your intuition but it’s partially because you feel its strength – you have something powerful to put your faith in.

This is of course simplified because our lives go though stages and you may hypothetically build an intuition during a High self-love period and then it would still partially help you during a Low self-love period – now trusting it, rather than having it, will become the core issue. Still it largely holds true because self-love is so powerful and spreads so widely in a vibe system like you that decreasing self-love is rare – people usually steadily increase it. Also intuition is one of those things that has to grow and improve all the time. You change and your vibe intuition should change and improve along, otherwise it can quickly fall behind and lose its touch.

The deeper our intuition, the more self-trust and thus self-love it requires. Making a major life decision without having a logical explanation is a serious leap of faith. But these ideas and decisions are what separates us from the crowd. Everyone can copy and rationalize but the world rewards the brave and the original. Be one of them!

We naturally got to our conclusion – why does I Grow Younger put such a huge focus on intuition, not just in its content but also in its format and language with which we invite you (without any personalized help from our side!) to connect the dots between the structures of reality and your unique life? Because never in the history of mankind has intuition been a more important factor of success!

Why is developing your intuition especially important in modern life

Many people think success in life is like running a marathon – you have a fixed path and need consistency more than anything. In a marathon it helps being analytical (like analyzing and managing your tempo).

But in reality success in life is more like the life of a javelin thrower – you have thousands of separate important tries that require peak effort and a non-determined path (just a general direction). In the other time you advance but still mostly train and gain experience for these important moments.

Let’s have a look at the greatest javelin thrower of all time – Jan Železný, whose world record of 98+ meters is unbeaten since 1996. If you watch 6 minutes of his best throws you will see something rather peculiar – a person who spent half his life throwing a javelin, after hundreds of thousands of throws in training still throws it a bit differently every time, trying to get the most insane peak power – you see a much more intuitive approach to the throw than you would expect from a sport that seems so insanely repetitive.

Again, if you don’t believe me, see for yourself – Jan Železný never throws the javelin in exactly the same way.

This shows how much we are prone to underestimating variability in life. The analytical part of our brain wants to reduce everything to patterns but… if you cannot do this with a simple javelin throw… after hundreds of thousands of throws… can you really expect this approach to work in the mess of life?

In fact, if you want the shortest, easiest to remember and most important fact about life, it’s this one:
“Things are always different”

When we talked about the width of choices in modern life and how intuition is great at covering this width, there is a specific reason for this. Most people don’t aim high enough in life. They don’t know what they are missing and settle for less. For these people there is a golden principle.

If you’re not saying “HELL YEAH!” about something, say “no” – Derek Sivers.

I know this is controversial but only because people apply it for the wrong things, such as relationships and marriage – some of the few areas in life that do require compromise. Or they apply it when other things in their life are not yet in place. But if you’re living according to the I Grow Younger principles, this becomes great advice. Even more if you have developed a strong intuition and trust it.

In I Grow Younger we strongly support your personal quest for freedom. This usually happens when you manage to scale some kind of business. Scaling a business idea does require depth but once you have the right business idea, it will be easy and fun. What do you need to choose the right one? Width. The width to feel all possible business ideas so you can explore the ones you have the right resources for and the ones whose time may have come.

This width is possible only thanks to a developed intuition that you trust

Not only that, when you have millions of potential business ideas floating in your subconscious mind, it’s easy to say “yes” to the wrong one. And here is where intuition will help you decide which is the “HELL YEAH!” one. Because otherwise it should be a “no”.

Business is a complex field where your structure, quantity and vibe intuitions solve different parts of your challenges. It has never been easier to start a business, thanks to unprecedented access to free/cheap education and information combined with the low ambition of most other people, who are struggling under the weight of the boxes and distractions of modern life. Yet your final, critical advantage can be the unlimited power of your combined intuition.

To summarize what you need to develop your intuition

Self-love and other flows that will help you get rid of boxes in your life;
Accept that you may do things without knowing why. It’s no longer scary if you see it works; The dots may be connected later;
Ditch logic except for primarily logical challenges, it’s tiring and very ineffective for most life choices;
Live your life to the fullest in terms of speed and scale. The more and more diverse experience you gather, the better;
Use a framework like I Grow Younger and/or mentors to have a structure where the data points from the experience go;
Share, teach and help others all along – this helps develop yourself intuitively too!

And finally…

“I only know what I know I know” thinking… created no individual greatness ever. Leaps of faith are not optional.

You’re already unconsciously using 100% of your brain. The problem is without intuition you only hear the advice of the least-capable part of it. Just change that and I’ll see you on the other side of endless possibility!

This article is invaluable for overthinking people. Share it with the ones you know.