***Turn Your Intuition into a Power Tool for Success

One fateful day back in 1979, Apple's co-founder, Steve Jobs, had a spark of intuition so bright it is still flashing across the screen of the computer you are looking at right now.nnJobs was visiting Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center, where he saw an experimental computer called the Alto. It had a funny-looking device called a mouse that let the user open files by clicking on pull-down menus. The moment he laid eyes on the Alto, Jobs knew he had seen the future of home computers.nnHe spent a few years developing the Macintosh. Then he launched it with a commercial during the 1983 Super Bowl that showed mighty IBM being vanquished by his Mac - a little mouse-equipped computer that greeted its users with "Hello" instead of a line of incomprehensible code. And the rest, as they say, is history.nnWhat was going on over at IBM at the time? In 1981 IBM had succeeded with its introduction of the IBM PC, which was luring business customers away from mainframes. But to develop computers for the home, IBM was relying on committees. Build something cheaper and more stripped-down than a full-size IBM PC, they reasoned, and IBM could steal the home market from Commodore and Atari. That line of thinking culminated with IBM's 1983 launch of one of the biggest duds in computer history - the PC Junior. It looked like an IBM PC. The only problem was, it didn't do anything.nnThe story of the Mac and the PC Junior tells us that, in most cases, inspiration beats intellect.nnSo, if you get really inspired by an idea, success will automatically follow, right? Well, not necessarily. When Edison invented the phonograph and the light bulb, the marketplace responded. When he invented a concrete house that could be built in just one day - an equally astonishing idea - nobody was interested.nnHow do you know whether to trust your intuition? The best way is to adapt the principle that Ronald Reagan developed for U. S. foreign policy: Trust, but verify.nnYou should respect the value of what your gut is telling you, but you must expose it to some brutal tests. After all, the world is going to beat the heck out of your ideas. The best way to understand their worth is to beat the heck out of them first.nnI once interviewed a man who taught me a lot about the danger of trusting instincts alone. His job was to recruit undercover operatives, people who were very likely to be taken hostage in foreign countries. If he made the wrong choices, people could die.nn"How do you get a sense of how people will behave if they are kidnapped?" I asked. "What questions do you ask them in interviews?"nn"Oh, we don't get a sense of how they will behave," he told me. "We have to know, so we kidnap them."nnThat's right. He and his team actually abducted the candidates they were screening because they needed to know how they would behave if they were snatched off the street, blindfolded, and driven to a remote location. The recruiters had to know, not just think they knew. The cost of failure was too high.nnThe cost of failure can be just as high for your ideas. But if you break some rules, you can find ways to test what your gut is telling you.n

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• You just saw a house and your gut feeling is that you could fix it up and sell it for a quick profit. Okay, fair enough. But first, why not run a fictitious ad for the house in a few newspapers and see if anybody calls? The $50 you spend on the ad will be the best money you ever spent.n
• You have an inspired idea for a new cell phone accessory that you just know will make you a fortune. You could hire a patent attorney and start spending big bucks to develop it. Or you could call your neighbors into your house, show them what you have in mind, and invite them to destroy your idea.n

nWhen you do all you can to shoot down your best ideas, you end up rejecting many of them. But the ones that survive are often real winners.nnWith prudence and hard work, you can be another Steve Jobs. Your gut, in partnership with your mind, will show you the way.