Intuition Matters

Yesterday I cooked my favourite chicken breast recipe.

I picked a hardy steel pan and heated it until the olive oil gave off a faint wisp of smoke. There was my cue to begin.

SsSsSsSsSsSszszz...

The meat sticks and the oil spits -a sign of a good sear to come.

Minutes later, I flip the chicken to reveal a beautiful brown crust. So far so good, but we’re not home safe yet.

If I tried to finish the cook on the stovetop, the heat would be too aggressive and dry the chicken out.

We suffer enough in life.

There’s no room for the added misery of dry chicken.

The trick is to move the pan into a preheated oven right after the first flip. That way, both sides get seared and the inside stays juicy.

After a quick pan sauce of garlic, thyme and chicken stock, you have yourself restaurant-quality breasts.

But you didn’t open this email to eat, and I’m not a TV chef.

You seek an idea that can help you learn, and I promise it's here.

If I perfected this recipe in writing and gave it to someone who lived off instant ramen for the past few years, they’d still find a hundred ways to screw it up.

Extremes aside, we both know this feeling.

You follow the recipe with all the effort you can muster, obedient to each and every word.

And yet, the sauce splits, the rice burns and the meat gets dry.

The reason behind this result can explain why you struggle to learn in any interest of yours, and why it’s so damn difficult to get started.

What a recipe, course or guidebook can’t teach you is intuition.

Intuition is the invisible feeling behind every expert’s hands, and it’s impossible to pass on in any lesson or piece of content.

No recipe can teach you how to manage the heat from your burner.

No number of driving theory lessons can get you comfortable behind the wheel.

No mailing list can make you a competent reader (not even mine -shocking)

Only you can.

Everything I just listed offers you the rough path ahead and some of the tools you'll need along the way, but not the experience that fine-tunes it to fit with reality.

The only reason I can execute that chicken recipe well is because I’ve messed it up more times than I can count.

Over the years, as I grew my skills in the kitchen, I began to better understand the craft.

I learned how heat transfers, how moisture affected my cook and how flavours married together.

None of that came through written word, but once I had it, I could apply it to every recipe thereon.

But I’m not in the clear.

If you told me to cook that on an induction stove, or maybe for 6+ people, I’d start to panic a little. My bank of experience is near empty there, so I lack the intuition that comes with it.

If Gordon Ramsay broke through my kitchen window and took over, he’d do a perfect job right off the bat.

He’s got the masterly intuition I lack, the expert’s eye that can adapt to any situation and do a good job.

Why? Because he’s done it a million times, in every situation you can imagine.

There’s a brilliant example of this in How to Take Smart Notes by Sönke Ahrens (technically, in a 2001 paper by Flyvbjerg, but that’s behind a paywall so I’m rolling with the book’s description.)

In an experiment, two groups of paramedics were asked to perform CPR.

One group were the expert paramedics with years of experience under their belt.

The other group were new paramedics who had just finished their training.

Their CPR procedures were filmed and shown to other paramedics, both beginners and experts, as well as their teachers. Their job was to guess whether the paramedic in the video was a beginner or an expert.

The expert paramedics did a great job of recognising those equal in skill to them, with a ~90% success rate.

Beginners struggled to pluck out the experts from the noobs, and ended up choosing them more or less at random, at a ~50% success rate.

Skill recognises skill. Nothing crazy there.

But the shock result came from the teachers who watched the CPR -they were wrong most of the time.

The teachers “systematically mistook the beginners for experts and the experts for beginners.”

In their judgements, they looked for whether the CPR matched up with how they taught it and not necessarily how it would best roll out in a real situation.

The expert paramedics learned the teacher’s method at first, but through experience, tinkered the theory to work better in practice.

The new paramedics did what their teachers taught them because they had nothing else to fall back on.

No practice, no intuition, no heat-of-the-moment feedback.

This intuition is everywhere.

Think of any hobby or skill you’re confident in, and I guarantee there’s a subtle rhythm to your actions that nobody else in the room can emulate.

That’s experience.

Whenever I get frustrated as I practice a skill, this is the fact I fall back on for much-needed comfort.

‘Am I reading this guide wrong?’

‘Is my brain not wired for this?’

‘Am I just… stupid?’

Probably not.

It may well be a question of raw experience, so keep going.

Meet the friction today so tomorrow can bring you the flow of intuition.

Then your hobbies will feel like a dance.

Yours,

Odysseas

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P.S Here's the chicken recipe by the way. It made me see I'd been cooking chicken breasts wrong my whole life, so do give it a shot.

Funnily enough, in the video, Chef Billy mentions the idea above.

"Once you learn how to properly cook, you can do it in anything."

So cheers to that nice little coincidence.