Choose to Take the Journey

For the most part, I subscribe to the philosophy of Look Before You Leap. Experience has shown that a single-minded focus on speed tends to result in many small achievements in the short term, while the achievement of long-lasting change is often quite time-consuming. However, there are occassions when we must instead pay homage to the maxim of Ready, Fire, Aim! Time may be scarce and you may only have a very small window with which to land an opportunity or evade certain disaster.

I used to know an emergency physician. He ran around the hospital like a maniac, making split-second decisions that determined the fate of dozens of patients a day. Frequently, there was no time to ponder every potential ramification arising from each decision. He quickly had to form an impression and act on his clinical instinct, from exigent surgery to resuscitation.

Even if we are not emergency physicians, everyone inevitably encounters clutch moments throughout their life–moments when there is no time for careful reason and thorough rationale. You may have to act on nothing more than a gut feeling to seize business prospects, edge your way past competitors, or even capture the heart of your lover-to-be.

Modern society likes to remind us of the superiority of logic over intuition. But the intrinsic linearity of logic takes time to think through, while your intution encompasses your values, your desires, and all of your past experiences in an instant. In critical moments, it is intuition that should be placed above logic, instinct before thought. If we have no choice but to leap, let us place our faith behind it.