Mar 07, 2021

Acquire unique intuition

Landmark #8 is acquiring unique intuition.

Before there is knowledge, there is something else that generates knowledge.

The perfect example of using intuition from the book is in the case of Albert Einstein:

 A new idea comes suddenly and in a rather intuitive way. But intuition is nothing but the outcome of earlier intellectual experience.

Einstein’s theories of relativity required a leap of imagination in opposition to the prevailing theories at the time. His totally original view of the universe—that there is no such thing as absolute time—came in a picture he saw in his mind. It was the result of intuition, not linear thinking. Even his revolutionary paper, On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies, was mainly written in the form of thought experiments rather than equations.

To be unreasonably successful, you need to have conviction in ideas that aren’t obvious to most people. These sorts of ideas come from intuition rather than logic.