For a long time, my job was straightforward: show up, set goals, hit them, repeat. Structure and discipline felt like the foolproof way to will great execution into existence. But as I pursue my entrepreneurial ambitions, I’ve realized I was missing a key ingredient: instinct.
When you work on a new idea, there’s no playbook, no data to prove it works, and little feedback to guide you. All you have is conviction. You move forward on feel.
You expect useful feedback to arrive shortly after, but often it doesn’t, or it lacks the clarity you need to iterate, so you keep going on instinct.
Learning to trust myself long enough to reach truly useful feedback has become a skill, and it’s the perfect complement to my corporate work. I used to rely on data, customer input, or my manager to make quick iterations. Now I’m increasingly comfortable taking bigger bets.
By “bigger bets,” I mean committing confidently despite limited feedback. Before, I might have pursued a project that took three months to ship; now I’m willing to invest in one that could take a year. Before, I might have spent a fraction of what I’m ready to invest today.
I don’t yet know which bets will pay off, but leaders have pushed me to think bigger, and I feel more capable of rising to that challenge.
For me, the missing ingredient has been learning to trust my own instinct.