Principle: Write down principles, values, and decision-making heuristics

A bunch of years ago, I found I’d reached a ceiling on my personal and professional growth. For most of my life, I’d relied on instinct, gut-feel, intuition, call it what you like. This got me so far but I was at a point where it was holding me back.

Learning and growth require failure, and failure requires taking risks. When you run on instinct, you can leave a lot of decisions until the last minute. This increases the likelihood that you will be successful, but mostly because you’re choosing the least risky option. You can see the problem.

Learning and growth also require feedback, and feedback requires being wrong. When you run on instinct, you don’t need to make explicit commitments ahead of time. This reduces the likelihood you will be overtly wrong, and it’s being overtly wrong that causes reflection and introspection and long-term pattern matching.

For the past few years, I’ve been attempting to capture my implicit decision-making principles in as close to realtime as possible. This has forced me to introspect and try to understand why I’m making the decisions I am. As someone who has a lifetime of running on instinct, this can be challenging to do. But, I’ve found that as with any practice, the more I do it, the easier it becomes and the more value I derive.

Periodically reviewing and reflecting on them helps me internalise things I still believe, and challenges me to rethink things I perhaps no longer agree with. This in turn helps me learn from my mistakes, helps others understand what I’m thinking, improves the feedback and input I receive, and improves my ability to support others to develop and grow.

Being explicit about my principles makes it easier for me to hold myself accountable, and for others to hold me accountable, by making sure my words and actions are consistent and coherent.

That’s not to say that I don’t still use my instinct, I absolutely do. The difference today is that I try to be more deliberate about how I use my intuition, and more explicit about how I make decisions.