still do.
The first problem you identify may not lead to a winning business idea. Or the second, third, or fourth. Yet over time a pattern will emerge. Some things will make your blood boil more than others. In that pattern is the seed to a winning idea.
Find a Winning Solution: Tap Your Intuition
Of course, identifying a problem is only half the battle. Discovering what makes you mad is only one side of the coin, and relatively speaking, it’s easy. What’s harder is coming up with an ideal solution, and what’s harder still is turning that solution into a practical business. However, once you’ve identified something in the world you want to change, your next task is to figure out how to fix it. The winning idea is a problem-solution package.
Finding a winning solution requires accessing your intuition. This may not sound practical, but every successful entrepreneur I know does it. Analysis will only get you so far. Ultimately, you’re seeking that famed lightning bolt of inspiration: the solution no one has thought of yet. People access their intuition in different ways, and some people are more comfortable with it than others. However, it’s possible to cultivate your intuition in ways that invite inspiration, and I have developed tools that have helped me harness this power. While the process is still a wonderful, mysterious thing, the easiest and most effective ways I’ve found are through meditation and immersion in nature. Whatever methods you use, developing your intuition is essential for success in business.
The Power of the Feminine
In most cultures, intuition is considered a feminine trait. While it’s something all people possess, women tend to be more open to it than men. Whatever the case is for you, the goal is to access and enhance your intuition so that it becomes a powerfully complementary, interconnected, and interdependent part of your intellect, or your ability to analyze, which tends to be considered a masculine trait.
I have been blessed in my life to be surrounded by determined women with powerful intuitions. I credit all my business success to the lessons they taught me when I was younger, even though they often had no idea I was paying attention. My wife, Lyn, is one of those women. Lyn “just knows.” She is the only female in my soccer fantasy league, and she has won every year since she joined. I have come last on several occasions. Some of the participants spend hours studying form tables and injury lists. What they don’t know is that my wife makes her predictions at the last minute and without any thought, and she still wins by a mile.
Lyn often ends her pronouncements with the phrase “I just know.” Being male, it drives me to distraction. A typical conversation goes like this:
Me: I’m going to invest in Bob’s startup.
Lyn: Don’t, he’s bad news.
Me: How can you say that? You’ve never met him.
Lyn: I just know.
Me: How can you just know if you’ve never met him and have no idea what his business is?
Lyn: I just do. It’s up to you, but if you want my advice, I wouldn’t do it.
Today, I take her advice, but it wasn’t always that way. I had to learn the hard way. The first few times I ignored her intuition, it cost me, financially and mentally. Now I know better. I also know that my wife is not unusual. Many women have powerful intuitions, while many men ignore their own. Some people dismiss intuition because they think it isn’t “logical,” but that doesn’t mean it isn’t valid and real.
Who else trusts their intuition? Bill Gates. Steve Jobs believed intuition is “more powerful than intellect.” Warren Buffett only makes decisions based on it. Richard Branson prefers it to “stats and data.” Albert Einstein called it the “only real valuable thing.” In a 2016 study, only one-third of the CEOs surveyed said they trusted their data and resulting analytics, while in another study, 59 percent of decision makers said that “the analysis they require relies primarily on human judgment rather than machine algorithms.”
At Cornell University, Dr. Daryl Bem oversaw a decade-long series of experiments involving a thousand participants that showed humans do indeed have the ability to “sense” future outcomes. Because of the intuition study’s paradigm-shifting implications, Dr. Bem waited until he had reached a “74 billion to 1” statistical certainty before releasing the results. By anyone’s standards that is statistically significant. Dr. Bem said, “It violates our notion of how the physical world works. The phenomena of modern quantum physics are just as mind-boggling, but they are so technical that most nonphysicists don’t know about them.”
Yet the implications for business of embracing the power of the feminine goes beyond just intuition and coming up with winning ideas. This approach should inform how every business is run. For instance, one 2013 study concluded that women’s abilities to make fair decisions when competing interests are at stake make them better corporate leaders. The study found that the more cooperative approach to decision-making translated into better performance for their companies. “We’ve known for some time that companies that have more women on their boards have better results,” explained Professor Chris Bart. “Our findings show that having women on the board is no longer just the right thing but also the smart thing to do. Companies with few female directors may actually be shortchanging their investors.”
The researchers found that male directors preferred to make decisions using rules, regulations, and traditional ways of doing business. Female directors, in contrast, were less constrained by these parameters and more prepared to rock the boat.
Several other studies have shown that gender equity in senior management and at the board level brings many tangible benefits. In 2016, Forbes said, “Today’s corporate world may be male-dominated but companies should take note: Hiring women is actually good for business. It’s not just about equality, it’s a business case with measurable success. Companies with more women onboard tend to outperform companies with more men onboard.”
My own experience matches this data. While startups don’t usually have to worry about hiring lots of employees or contractors and the composition of an executive board, it’s a good lesson to remember. Strive for gender balance in hiring in the same way you strive to balance the feminine/masculine attributes in yourself.
Meditation: Training the Mind
Meditation is called mindfulness training because, like practicing a sport, it improves us in measurable ways and increases our mental and emotional skills through focus and repetition. If you want to improve your intuition, meditation is one of the best ways.
According to University of Iowa researchers, the brain’s so-called “axis of intuition” is the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, which sits in the middle of the forehead. This is what gets depicted in cartoons of superheroes or spiritual gurus — a power emanating from the forehead. Further, a 2014 Wake Forest University study looked at the brains of fifteen volunteers before and after four days of mindfulness training. What did they find? In addition to a host of other wonderful brain enhancements, the freshly minted meditators seriously increased the “activity” and “interconnectivity” of their ventromedial prefrontal cortex. The ventromedial prefrontal cortex has been shown to play a key role in the extinction of conditioned fear responses and, importantly, in the maintenance of fear extinction over time. Fear is known to kill intuition.
Meditation can change your brain by eliminating fear for short periods, like thirty minutes, to create winning ideas and make better decisions. Every good idea I have ever had in business or life has come shortly after a session of meditation. I might feel fear before I sit in meditation
