Gut Butterflies …

I’ve been thinking a lot about instincts and guts. What do you call something that you just know is going to work out. Maybe its with a sports game, maybe its a trip to the casino, maybe its a new hire at your business.

It’s not a premonition or vision. Its just a gut feeling.

Greg McKeown wrote the great book Essentialsm, and when I met him I had him sign my favorite page of the book, which is probably also the Hardest.

On it is a very simple quote: “If its not a hell yes, it’s a no.”

Buffett practices this all the time with stocks. And sure it sounds so simple. But its actually hard as heck. Because we want to inherently be optimists.

“I have a pretty good feeling about this person”

“I know I can get them where we need to get them”

“If they just work hard in 6 months they could be really good”

Its really hard to say someone is really good, and so we will pass. Because we have seen so many employees that are not only far from really good, they are quite bad.

We have seen so many deals that are mediocre, we have heard so many lame songs, watched so much crappy TV and movies, that really good sounds friggin’ great.

But I was lucky enough recently to have my first “hell yes” hire, after I first decided to pass on someone who was really good. And it was really hard. But the hell yes hire was very simple:

They gave me gut butterflies.

I got excited about them working for us, and I got nervous as soon as I left every interview with them that they would go somewhere else.

So who knows how this new hire will work out. Maybe my gut butterflies will blind me from mistakes or cause me to hang on too long. But its all a gamble. So why not go with the one that gives you that gut feeling, deep down, when you just know. That feeling that’s vaguely famillar, but so easy to forget about, because we want that feeling so much more often then is probably actually feasible.

You could forgive us for chasing that feeling, trying to get as many hell yes’s as possible, and confusing pretty goods and really nice’s for hell yes.

But all you have to do is check for the gut butterflies, and maybe that is all that life is really about. The feeling in your gut when you are on the first date with your wife, the feeling when you hear a song at a party and say “wow” this is it, the feeling when you walk into that open house that you just happened to drive by on a Saturday by mistake. All those feelings are so great, its hard to blame someone for wanting more of them, but that’s exactly why they are great, because they are special, and rare, and not as common as we all want and dream them to be.

So maybe its just that simple, and still just that hard. Don’t chase… trust your gut, and its butterflies. Easy to say, easy to read, hard to do.

Probably as hard as catching a butterfly.