Follow Your Intuition

A few days ago I was contemplating buying a charger for my Nikon D50. I had spent hours searching for it and now that both of my batteries were dead, I had no way of using the camera. I called the local camera stores but the only charger available for my camera cost $250! Twice I had considered buying it, but both times I changed my mind. Something told me not to justify spending that much money, no matter what. So I ordered a compact generic charger on eBay for $35, which included an extra battery and shipping. A few days later I received the charger in the mail. Then today, while in my Lowell office, I stumbled across my original battery charger laying in a heap of wires. Now I have a portable charger to bring with me on trips and a standard charger to leave at home! Intuition?

Last night I checked my bank account online and the check for the lawyer hadn't cleared my account yet. I thought about putting a stop payment on the check and then calling the lawyer the following day to try and talk him out of making me pay full price for his services. I got as far as clicking on the "Stop Payment on a Check" link where I needed to fill out the information. But then something told me to stop. A vision of what the future consequences of that action might be flashed in my head: maybe the lawyer would get pissed off and tell me I have to pay full price for his services after he finds out I canceled the check. And then if I refuse to pay full price, maybe he would come after me for the money (legally).

The following morning I called my Dad and asked for his opinion. He told me to go ahead and put a stop payment on the check then call the lawyer and tell him that I don't have the funds in the account, so the check won't even clear. He said to explain to him that I'm very tight on cash and to offer to pay him a few hundred dollars for the work he's done so far. I was in my truck when I talked to my dad and the closest computer was back at home. So I rushed home and signed into my bank account to put a stop payment on the check. Just as I was about to click on the "Stop Payment on a Check" link, I noticed the balance on my account was lower than it was last night, $1850 lower. The check cleared my account this morning. Damn, I thought, there goes any chances of saving myself $1850!

But I wasn't ready to give up. Later in the day, I devised a plan to call the lawyer and pretend I didn't know the check had cleared my account. I wanted to make sure everything came out right, so I wrote down what I wanted to say when I talked to him:

Michael wasn't there when I called, so I left a message asking him to return my call. A few hours later he called and before I could say anything, he told me that he checked this morning and the sheriff already served the notice of eviction. (In other words, the only reason Lisa approached me last night and told me she was moving out, was because she got a visit from the sheriff earlier that day. She didn't mention that to me last night, so I had no idea.) The lawyer told me that everything was already filed, so the filing fee cannot be refunded. However, he said he would figure out what he can do to give me a discount for his services. He said he'll give me a call sometime beginning of next week.

Had I put a stop payment on the check last night, the lawyer probably would have been pretty pissed that the sheriff already served the notice and now I'm trying to keep my money. I doubt he would even consider reducing his fee had I canceled the check. Besides, had the sheriff not served Lisa the notice, she'd still be living here and I'd still be out $1000 every month.

Twice in the past few days, intuition it seems, has saved me money and gave me a positive ending to what would otherwise be an unpredictable outcome. Some believe intuition is a sixth sense, or that our sixth sense is expressed and used through our intuition. I quote from Wikipedia on intuition:

"Apparently there are lots of unconscious processes that happen within a person and when those unconscious signals become strong enough, a conscious thought is experienced."

How many of our daily conscious thoughts actually start as intuitions? How many of our daily decisions have already been decided inside us, before we even consciously decide to make them ourselves? Many people attribute good decisions to good luck, or simple chance or fate. But I don't believe there is such a thing as good or bad luck; only good or bad decisions. My Dad used to say, "two brains are better than one", but being the rebel I am, I came up with my own version, "two brains are worse than one because you double the chances of making a wrong decision". With regards to intuition, I believe the same holds true for the daily decisions we make. The more time we spend contemplating a decision, the more clouded our original intuition becomes and the less likely we are to make a clear and concise choice.

This doesn't mean we should carelessly make decisions by telling ourselves everything will be fine because we let our "intuition" make the choice. Plenty of decisions require serious thinking. All I'm saying is that we should be more open to hearing what our intuition has to say about the decisions we make. We need to use our intuition as a tool to aid the decision making process, not as an excuse to dismount the responsibility of making a smart decision in the first place.