What is that frequent intuition telling you?
From The Geoffrey Letter: December 15, 2024
As we come to the end the year, I tend to look back and try to assess my most important personal revelations. I’m sure I am not the only one who does this. And no, I’m not going to bore you with mine. But I do want to point out what to do when you encounter what I call “frequent intuition”. People also call it a nagging thought, an intuitive feeling, a hunch, a bee in your bonnet, a notion, a signal, an inkling.
Do you listen and act on your intuition or let it pass by as just an ephemeral insight?
An intuitive life
The weight of this question came to me after listening to the audiobook, Barbarian Days, written by William Finnegan. I was blown away by this powerful book on the author’s surfing life. What does a surfer dude know about writing powerful books?
I found Finnegan’s book because of his other book, A Complicated War – The Harrowing of Mozambique that I used to research my thriller, A Fado for the River. I needed to revisit the history because I was about to be interviewed by Teri M Brown for her podcast, Online for Authors—catch it below…
Is there an
intuition-action-payoff
cycle?
The realization of frequent intuition came to me after I listened to Barbarian Days, brilliantly narrated by the author and delivered with a droll wisdom. I am not a surfer, but Finnegan helped me get to know the intricacies of the “path”: the mindset, the technical knowledge required to make a wave, and the philosophy of the surfing life. I pondered Finnegan’s decades of surfing, always acting on a hunch that he could find better waves elsewhere around the world. This is typical of acting on intuition, where zigzagging activities are integral to the process.
His life is an extreme example of the intuition, action, payoff cycle. He turned the hunch itself into an intuitive skill. The operative concept here is frequency: how often did he hear the waves roaring in his ears, so to speak? Well, he’s been doing it since he was eight and by his own telling the waves never stopped luring him. But was that all there was to it? Was there no benefit, no payoff, apart from the thrilling ride down a glistening surface?
Meanwhile...
During his world-wide travels Finnegan was assimilating his experience, expertise and understanding not only about surfing, but also the surroundings, the people and the culture. When he wasn’t on the water, he spent his time entering his observations into a journal and wrote several novels that ended up in a drawer. You might think he had squandered his time on a self-indulgent pursuit. Recognizing, reacting, being open to change is required when you’re on the road; writing about it is journalism. He listened, and eventually turned to long-form journalism, memoirs, and literary non-fiction.
Barbarian Days won the Pulitzer Prize for biography and autobiography in 2016.
Finnegan is also the author of Cold New World, A Complicated War, Dateline Soweto, and Crossing the Line. He has twice been a National Magazine Award finalist and has won numerous journalism awards, including two Overseas Press Club awards since 2009. He is currently a staff writer at The New Yorker. Needless to say, I added my own rave review of Barbarian Days to the thousands of positive reviews already posted.
No science,
only a hunch
Acting on intuition is finally being recognized as a tool to use in decision making. Some claim it to be the older, wiser, and perhaps greater part of human intelligence. But the science is still vague, empirical at best. And acting on “instinct” and hunches can be, at worst, ill-advised, irresponsible, and even unsafe.
Ultimately, intuition is not a replacement for considered thinking but is a useful tool. Consideration is appropriate after the action, but it does not exist in the moment of realizing a hunch. In that moment there is no time for thinking or laborious logic. The moment presented is a decision point: act on that hunch that keeps returning, worrying you, pestering you to make up your mind.
Or pass…
Intuition is not only a tool for creators. Mathematicians, physicists, and scientists have always embraced intuition. Psychology Today ran a 1993 article written by the psychologist Daniel Cappon entitled, The Anatomy of Intuition, in which he points out that “Einstein was intuitive and said so. I interviewed Nobelists Linus Pauling, Albert Szent Gyorgyi, Lord Adrian, and Jonas Salk. They said, ‘Of course, we have hunches. We know the answer before we work it out.’ Science, at its best, is the working out of things out later.”
My own example
My own experience acting on intuition resulted in writing A Fado for the River. For years I had told the story of how in 1973 a friend and I drove three hundred miles from Johannesburg, South Africa to Lorenzo Marques, the capital of Mozambique. What we did not know was that we crossed the border ten months before the Carnation Revolution in Portugal. Its colony, Mozambique was a country on the edge of massive human disaster. To get away from the heavy military presence in the city, we drove north to the Limpopo River to take a river tour to see the hippos, and a few days later drove back into South Africa.
The hunch came back to me frequently, urging me to write a thriller that asks: what if these two students got caught up in the conflict between the army captains who were conspiring against the Portuguese army loyalists, and then were captured and forced to make a deal with the Marxist-backed freedom fighters, indigenous people longing for, and willing to fight for their self-determination? The image that kept coming back to me was the moment of decision in the story: a hippo, gaping in the river. I memorialized it on the cover–see the audiobook cover below. I listened, and eventually my writing about that short trip turned into a short story, then a novel, then turned me into a novelist…
Decision-making involves a complex interplay between intuition and rational analysis, and the effectiveness of intuition-based action depends on the conviction behind the hunch. I believe that the attention paid to persistent intuition does pay off, provided of course there is rigorous consideration given to the results and evidence.
