Instinct: The Power to Unleash Your Inborn Drive (6 page)

Our instincts inspire us to look beyond the usual and identify the unusual. If we’re attuned, our instincts transfer principles from one field of study to another, mix metaphors that yield new insights, and create fresh designs from tired traditions. Our instincts identify relationships among disparate people, places, and principles before we do. They spot patterns, designs, and threads of commonality.

Bowerman saw a waffle iron and a tennis shoe and married them into a multibillion-dollar corporation! Just consider how many people had been exposed to the waffle iron and had seen tennis shoes but didn’t have the instinct to converge the two concepts. Can you imagine going to the bank and saying, “I have an idea from a waffle iron that is going to make me rich”? There was no intelligence to support it. There was no data to refer to. The risk was built on an instinct that paid off with unprecedented success.

Once you have confidence in your instincts, you must never allow other people’s refusal to believe, or their data to refute, what you instinctively know is true. Your instincts know the blueprint for success that’s within you and how to bring it to life all around you. Don’t give up or be deterred from your destiny just because it doesn’t seem to fit a formula. As we say in Texas, “If you believe there’s a fox in that hole, point your tail and keep on barking!”

O
ur human instincts transcend physical survival and include our unique gifting and purpose. When we unleash our instincts to guide us, we discover the special ways we’ve been equipped, educated, and enlightened to fulfill our destiny. Your instincts are more resourceful, resilient, and responsive than you probably realize.

So many tell me that they know what they were designed to do but simply can’t catch a break. They tell me that their circumstances limit them, their finances prohibit them, and their relationships inhibit them. When you unleash your instincts, though, you will find a way to move through, up, over, and beyond what appears to prevent your progress.

When ideas hang out with influence, income will always emerge. Most people abort their creative, out-of-the-box ideas for fear of the investment. But a great idea
can attract investors. I have always believed that relationships are our greatest resource. But those relationships must cross-pollinate beyond the familiar. You must not limit yourself to any one singular viewpoint. You need a manufacturer in the room with a senator, a record producer next to the record breaker, a scientist alongside the artist, the banker teamed with a lawyer. Over the years I’ve learned you can’t be surrounded with monolithic relationships and tap into a full release of your potential. I remain a great believer in research and data, but at the end of the day, most great discoveries can be traced back to instincts.

So when I have an instinctive idea, it will die in the crib if I don’t assemble a team around it that has similar instincts but diverse perspectives of influence and contribution. The best way to kill your instincts is to surround yourself with only practical people who never take the voyage beyond what the empirical data states. If you only move based on data, you will only regurgitate old ideas. Refer to the data and heed its wisdom when feasible, but sooner or later, all inventors and most investors must cut through the clutter of quarterly reports and ground themselves in their instincts.

And when creative instincts emerge, resources will eventually catch up. Usually, the information has to play catch-up with the inclination. You aren’t one bank loan away from a million dollars, but you are one creative idea from a million dollars. When circumstances seem to hold you hostage, your instincts pay the ransom.

At its core an instinct is an inborn pattern of activity or tendency to act that’s common to a given species. It is also a natural or an innate impulse or inclination. These instincts are not just the basic ones you might consider, such as for survival, procreation, or fight-or-flight.

In my research, I was surprised to discover that some experts believe many people possess an instinct or a natural aptitude for making money, others for healing, creating art, organizing, or negotiating. I’m convinced our instincts emerge out of and alongside our gifting, so it makes sense that our instincts would reflect our talents and abilities.

As one expert from Wikipedia explains, “Any behavior is instinctive if it is performed without being based upon prior experience (that is, in the absence of learning), and is therefore an expression of innate biological factors. For example, sea turtles, newly hatched on a beach, will automatically move toward the ocean. A joey climbs into its mother’s pouch upon being born. Honeybees communicate by dancing in the direction of a food source without formal instruction.”

Regardless of our particular instincts, they all share a common direction: forward. Going out into the wild frontier of possibilities means you have to wean
yourself from the nurturing state of normal and accepted practices. All of life is available to us, but not everyone will go through what it takes to enlarge our lives and reshape our environment so that we can release our instincts.

Visit your local zoo, and there you will see animals living in cages. As long as the animal—say, a lion—stays in the cage, he knows exactly when he will eat. Cages are comfortable. Cages are consistent. They provide security. And generally they are safe. And yet I suspect there’s often an alluring urge within our golden-maned friend in a cage to see what’s beyond the safety of his warm bed and conveniently placed water trough in the cage’s corner.

For the animal born in captivity, there’s no basis for comparison. His needs are met and he is safe. “Isn’t that enough?” many may ask. But if the cage were truly natural, then why must it remain locked? Keepers lock cages because animals are instinctively drawn to the wild, even if they have never lived in the wilderness. The lion longs for something he may never have experienced, even when his needs are met in the cage.

This is the roar of the entrepreneur. It’s not that she can’t get a job and be safe. It is that she is attracted to the frontier beyond the cage. The comfort of present limitations may be safe, but where there’s nothing ventured, there’s of course nothing gained. Most creative innovators eventually migrate from the familiar cage
of controlled environments into the wild and, yes, dangerous frontier of entrepreneurship.

Whatever tickles your instincts, it will be something powerful and persistent. Regardless of where your instincts may lead, the question remains the same. Do you have the courage to adapt to the wild after living in the cage? Or to put it another way, what do you do when your experiences conflict with your instincts? What if you’re raised in the ghetto but have instincts for the suburbs? It’s the lion’s dilemma. If you were trained for a job but have the longing to be an entrepreneur, you feel his pain. If you long to be in a loving, stable relationship but have only known breakups and heartbreak, then you see through the lion’s eyes.

The jungle beckons but the cage comforts.

Even after the decision to take the risk has been made, the struggle is far from over. In many ways, it’s just begun. If for some reason this animal, which was never created to be caged but has been all of his life, is placed in his natural habitat—the jungle that he was always meant to be in—he may die.

Although his instincts still reside within and will eventually surface, this transition into the wild may be difficult or fatal if his natural instincts are not reawakened and gradually restored. Leaving a cage for the opportunity to discover the freedom of your true identity requires not only leaving the safety behind bars, but also learning to harness the wilderness within.

What is natural may not feel normal, because your experiences don’t match your inclinations. Just because something is natural doesn’t means it feels normal when you have never had an opportunity to explore the true essence of your instincts.

Imagine how important it is that we wean the lion from the cycles of the cage and gradually reintroduce him to the primal sensation of freedom. That alluring gaze at freedom from a structured job or career may tantalize you with the notion of being your own boss. But I must warn you that the sensual notion of freedom can be a seductive trap if you don’t understand that you are stepping into a world that isn’t as carefree as it looks.

New predators, new diets, and new abodes await you. You will have to learn to hunt your own prey and avoid being someone else’s. Though many of us aren’t happy in cages and feel drawn to the wild, we must never underestimate the fierceness of freedom and the danger of the new world of self-fulfillment.

Instinctively successful individuals almost always have had to go through a metamorphosis in order to free themselves from their cagelike habits. And more important, they need time and training to adapt and to develop the instincts that are critical to survive in
the new environment. If the lion needs that adaption space to develop a more natural instinct, we, too, have to be prepared to be mentored and tutored even when we possess the instinct to increase.

The unborn baby lies in a cage we call a womb. He has eyes but cannot use them, and a mouth that he has never eaten with. He has been innately equipped for a world he has not been exposed to. His innate instincts like sucking, seeing, walking, and sitting have never been utilized because no opportunity exists in his present safe and warm cocoon of development. He must be born and enter the world to discover the instincts imbued by his Creator.

Cages and wombs come in all kinds of shapes and sizes. It doesn’t have to be a dead-end job to be a cage. It can be renting as opposed to owning a home. For some it is the desperate clinging to singleness for fear of the heart-racing perils of intimate partnership. Many would rather sit at a table for one than risk the awkwardness of bolting into the uncertainty of coupling. In that new cycle of circumstances the cost of admission is the risk of rejection and abandonment. We all have cages of comfort that protect us but also isolate us from discovering not only what lies outside but also what lies within.

The baby cannot grow and mature into a healthy child until he leaves the womb. He is finally birthed into something bigger, and it is only after the cord is cut that he discovers within himself unused instruments
that have only just become activated. I fully believe that many people never really leave the wombs of simple survival to the bigger world beyond. Now, you must understand that birthing is traumatic.

Over and over we repeat the process. We go from the womb to the family, which is also a controlled environment that feeds and sustains us. By the time we adapt to our family, we are birthed into the world around us, and we have to activate instincts of survival or return to the cage of living at home again!

Could it be that the social constructs of Mommy and Daddy only lead to the jungle of high school? The baby becomes the toddler becomes the child becomes the tween becomes the teenager. Each stage includes its own weaning into the next phase. Often the adolescent leaves the family bruised by the assault of rebellion as he tries to escape the identity of “Who am I to the family?” and into the wild of “Who am I to myself?”

The rebellion so prevalent at that age is the flailing cry of an emerging adult struggling to go where his instincts demand but mortified at the same time by the wilderness of the second womb vacated. The diploma is awarded, the cord is cut, and with a vehicle for vacating the home, he opens the door to the wild! But is he ready?

Welcome to the jungle of mating instincts, Facebook friends, and the ferocious and foreign prospects of
public performance. Independent environments now require that he disengage some behaviors that he developed within his last environment and develop instincts that will enable him to survive in the wild.

Now, some are pushed but some fear the low-grade life of playing it safe and jump into a waiting destiny they sense deep within. And, yes, it takes a certain kind of person to risk in this way. Curiously enough, these types become the people we end up reading about, watching on television, listening to on our iPods, and following on Twitter. They are what I call jumpers—people willing to jump out of their nests, or run out of their cages and into the free fall of the jungle, where they must survive by their instincts.

Recently I encountered a quotation from a famous jumper that sums up his instinctive philosophy on life: “Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma—which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and your intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.”

This statement comes from Steve Jobs, the visionary founder of Apple, recently declared the most recognizable brand in the world, surpassing Coca-Cola for the first time ever. You know where I encountered Mr. Jobs’ sage advice? On P. Diddy’s Instagram! As crazy as it sounds to consider what Steve Jobs, Sean Combs, and T.D. Jakes have in common, if nothing else we are all jumpers! We have each risked leaving our cages and venturing out into the wilds to discover how our dreams can be brought to life.

Let me give you another example. Bob Johnson, who built up Black Entertainment Television (BET) into a multi-million-dollar enterprise, could not remain content with his achievements. After investing his time, energy, and resources into the unqualified success of BET, what did he do next? He sold it!

He realized what everyone willing to leave the cage eventually realizes—entering the jungle is not a one-time event. Certainly, when he first entered television and considered the prospect of starting a new cable channel geared toward African-Americans, Mr. Johnson probably felt like he had entered a jungle. And yet, years later what once seemed like a jungle had become another cage.

So Bob Johnson entered a new jungle of even wilder endeavors—purchasing the Charlotte Bobcats, which he later sold to Michael Jordan—another jumper and then some! Real estate, investments, asset management, and philanthropy became jungles for
Mr. Johnson as well. Based on his willingness to enter jungle after jungle, it’s no wonder then that Bob Johnson became the first black billionaire in our country.