"Trust your gut" is common advice, but what does it mean? Your "gut feeling" or intuition is your brain's rapid, non-conscious pattern-matching system at work. It's drawing on all your past experiences and knowledge to give you a quick assessment of a situation.

In areas where you have a lot of experience (like an experienced doctor diagnosing a common illness), intuition can be incredibly accurate. But in novel situations, your gut has no patterns to match, and its "feeling" might be based on irrelevant biases or fears.

So, how do you use it safely? Use your gut as a signal, not a verdict. If your gut is screaming "no!" about an opportunity that looks good on paper, don't ignore it. But don't blindly obey it either. Use that feeling as a prompt to investigate further. Ask yourself: "What specific risk is my intuition trying to warn me about?"

A gut feeling is a hypothesis. The safe next step is to find a small, low-cost way to test that hypothesis.