What I Know Without Knowing

How years of input turn into a single, quiet “This feels right.”

I used to think I needed the perfect plan.

Then I noticed my best moves weren’t “planned,” but felt, and then executed.

I would often find myself overwhelmed by the fact that there never seems to be enough time to truly learn and memorise everything that one could want to — that learning new things to the extent that is actually useful isn’t worth it for the sheer time it takes.

But our brains don’t actually work like that.

I recently had a dream in which I remembered a very small detail about something in real life that, consciously, I would not have been able to recall if questioned.

This got me thinking…

In reality, our brains store everything they see or experience, then surface what is needed as instinct when the relevant situation arises.

You could compare this to the training of an AI model.

Training data goes in quietly as input, and the output shows up when it matters and is requested in context.

This shift meant I realised that we don’t have to place so much pressure on conscious learning to memory.

If you can train yourself to truly trust your gut - even over in-depth analysis at times - and feed it with good experiences, resources, and “data”, you’ll be able to instinctively make decisions that, consciously, might have been more difficult or just straight up wrong.

This is backed by research.

In his book Gut Feelings, Gerd Gigerenzer outlines how instinctive decision-making often outperforms complex analytical models, especially when made under uncertainty. Our brains run pattern-matching algorithms on our entire library of experience without us consciously being aware of it happening.

Gary Klein’s Recognition-Primed Decision Model (RPD) studied firefighters, military commanders, and nurses, and showed that experts across domains are not required to weigh pros and cons to make good decisions. They pattern-match against thousands of their stored experiences instantly.

Stepping away and letting the subconscious finish the job is also helpful. Ap Dijksterhuis discovered with the Unconscious Thought Theory that people who were distracted when making complex decisions, such as buying a car or choosing an apartment, made better choices than people who deliberately analysed. The subconscious is able to process more variables simultaneously than the conscious mind can.

But what is important to caveat all this is that your instinct is only as good as what it is fed.

Daniel Kahneman showed that intuition fails in low-validity environments, essentially when you don’t have as many consistent patterns to have learned from.

This is why the “trusting your instinct” methodology doesn’t work unless you are feeding it a wide array of real experience.

Once you load the subconscious with so much high-quality input: resources, experiences, trials/failures — you make your instinct so loud that it becomes impossible to ignore.

Eventually it’s not “I must do this because X person said it’s right,” but more “this feels right.”

This makes sense even with my music career.

When creating, I don’t make conscious strategic decisions. They’ve become part of my instinct as a result of 20 years of musical information, resources, experience, and trials and failures loaded into my brain.

I just know what I like, I know what works, and I follow it. I could do so with even more conviction, though, and that’s what I’ll be working towards in the future.

The same applies for my language learning, using the Comprehensible Input theory, which states that it is all about taking in content of the target language just above your level and that, by doing that, the output (speaking, writing) takes care of itself. I can attest to this from my experience of learning French to fluency, it really does work like this.

When reading, I have the tendency to, after finishing a book, worry about the fact that I cannot recall certain details from its contents. This shift in my thinking eliminates that because I can feel confident that it is building my subconscious decision-making framework. It also allows me to stop overcomplicating decisions on what to read or learn or spend my time on, and just do whatever I feel is good to feed my mind and not what I feel I can consciously learn or need at that exact moment.

Whatever it is that you are doing, this shift should allow you to see that action beats planning every time. You do not need a picture-perfect map, just a direction and movement. You can redirect at any time. I believe it is the best way.

Feed the subconscious, let instinct drive, then learn from the results and repeat.