You Can't Afford to Ignore Your Instincts. Here's How Trusting Mine Saved Lives — and My Business

You Can’t Afford to Ignore Your Instincts. Here’s How Trusting Mine Saved Lives - and My Business Learn how instinct can save lives and how trusting my gut once saved my business. Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own. Key Takeaways The risks of ignoring your gut usually outweigh the price of following it. Instinct can save your business when strategy isn’t enough. You can’t rely on instinct alone, but you can’t ignore it either. Last year, my neighborhood in Seattle was hit with a bomb cyclone . It’s exactly as bad as it sounds: 80 mph winds and 150 ft trees that can crush a house like a toothpick. This particular night, the wind was wailing louder than I’ve ever heard it before or since. Whole branches were flying across the yard. Huge trees were swaying violently, bending farther than seemed possible. I remember looking into my neighbor’s yard and turning to my wife to say, “If I don’t get them out of their house, they’ll be dead by morning.” I can’t tell you why I felt this so strongly. I just knew it in my gut . Related: How to ‘Trust Your Gut’ With Confidence, According to an Expert on Intuition The risks of ignoring your gut usually outweigh the price of following it With that, I ran to my neighbor’s house. Going out in the dark was risky, but nothing compared to what I feared would happen if I didn’t. I finally persuaded them to come over, insisting they bring the whole family, including their dog. They probably thought I was being ridiculous. But I was right to warn them. That night, a falling pine split their house in half. It came down on top of their king-size bed, one of the branches even flattening the dog’s mattress. After seeing the damage, my neighbor hugged me with tears in her eyes and thanked me for saving their lives. It was an emotional moment - one I’ve thought about many times since. I travel a lot for work, and I’ve often wondered what if I hadn’t been home that night. But the far bigger “what if” was: W hat if I’d ignored my gut? When your intuition is screaming at you to act, you’d better listen. Related: How to Unlock the Full Power of Your Intuition Instinct can save your business when strategy isn’t enough Twenty-four days after I became CEO of PhoneBurner, the FCC issued a public notice instructing carriers to block traffic from one of our clients. We immediately removed that client and took every necessary step to mitigate the impact, but the notice’s broad language led carriers to block all PhoneBurner calls. Within hours, our entire platform was offline. This was a crisis. Thousands of real estate, insurance, mortgage and other professionals relied on our power dialing platform to connect with their contacts daily. If we couldn’t connect their calls, we could go under in a matter of days. So I started emailing and...

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