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Hack & Grow Rich Episode 3: Intuition Follow your gut

SUMMARY KEYWORDS

tribes, peripheral vision, men, guide, boat, micro expressions, work, gut, handed, face, paul ekman, bill, amazon, monkey, looked, people, smile, primitive, communicate, bottle

SPEAKERS

Shaahin Cheyene

Shaahin Cheyene  00:02

So how do you know when to follow your gut? And when to follow your intuition? That's a really interesting question. So sometime along the way, during this whole journey, I found myself on a boat with just my guide, who was a local man, part of who's like part tribesmen, and we were going down the Amazon River on a really rinky boat traveling at a fairly slow speed to meet a previously uncontacted group of people from Amazonian tribe. Now, we reach our point, we are hours away, say 15 hours away from our base camp in the jungle. And we notice these men in very primitive like they carve these like boats out of logs stuff. And they're out there in the middle of the Amazon forest, these guys looked amazing. And I have photos that I could share of this adventure. They actually had whiskers, which was really cool. I'd never seen men with whiskers, and I see the color in the face of my guide. Turn pale. Now, this is really unusual, right? So I'm thinking, Okay, cool. I'm, I'm a savvy negotiator, we can communicate with these people just maybe have a little bit of FaceTime, take a few photos, everything's going to be great. My guide explains to me that he does not speak their language. Apparently, there's tons of tribes out there, maybe hundreds of tribes within the Amazon. And they all speak a different language. And so the guide may have some tools to communicate with them. But in general, he doesn't speak their language and they don't speak ours. Now these men are armed, not with guns, we are not we have some machetes. But believe me, we are not about to get into a fight with these guys. And these men are armed with things like dark guns and bows and arrows and spears and you know, very primitive type things. And they think somebody from their tribe had been to the closer reaches the he had brought them a few Western implements as well. So we're hanging out, and then we're trying to communicate. And we noticed that they're actually trying to offer goods in trade, which I thought was a great sign. And they didn't really smile, which was very unusual. So I'm thinking to myself, you know, should I smile? Should I not smile? Do smiles mean the same thing? This is interesting. If you ever read the work of Dr. Paul Ekman, who has done intensive documented work with tribes, and human facial expressions, he goes about that there is a series of human expressions that are universal, regardless of language and culture. But we're not going to go into that on this episode. But it is fascinating. If you want to learn about micro expressions, check out the work of Dr. Paul Ekman he actually has an amazing website and an amazing course that you can take I think it's for you know, a couple 100 bucks you can learn everything that you know he's taken lifetimes to develop the technology that he's developed learning people's micro expressions, regardless of culture but so now we're here face to face with these people might guide lets me know in Spanish that he thinks these guys are cannibals. Now mind you, cannibalism in these cultures is very different than what we think it is. They don't eat people for food or sustenance, but they fight tribes, neighboring tribes, and what they do is if they win, occasionally, a guy might get he still happens to this day, even though it's it's largely undocumented, because it's not something that's well publicized. From what I understand, I'm not a historian of these things, but this is what I'm told. And we look at these guys, and we're giving them something in exchange for these things. So the one guy brings me this beautiful, you know, clay mask that he's made. And I reach into my pocket and I take some money and I'm showing him the money. And the guy in the tribe that apparently made it to the village understands that this paper that I have these US dollars or money, and I am the guy at $50 bill, and he looks at the $50 bill, and it's really interesting and he takes And he seems satisfied with that. And he hands me the mask. And that's great. And so we're standing here transacting, and I'm thinking to myself, okay, this is this could end up really cool, we could end up with some kind of cool souvenirs. And some photos with these really cool guys could also go pretty bad. So I take the the souvenir on one after another, I'm handing them $50 bills, I had several with me. And then I'm out. So I have 320. So the next thing I'm going to get, I give them 320 dollar bills, and they get really happy. And then they give me one final thing. And it's a monkey poison dart implement thing with beads that looked pretty cool that had like a monkey skeleton on it. And this was like one of their prize things. And I didn't have any more $50 bills or $20 bills left. So I handed the guy $100 bill. And I saw him, the expression on his face turned to anger, one of the common micro expressions, but he had a micro and a macro expression on his face. And I realized in that moment that they did not understand money, they did not understand that $100 bill was more than 320 dollar bills, because this is how their minds work. At which point I decided I would start trying smiling. And I smiled and they looked at me. And things started to get tense as the men kind of circled us and another boat of theirs came around us and I saw my guide getting really nervous. At which point I noticed the men were staring at something in our boat, what was it, it was a bottle of cola, fake Coca Cola, like whatever their brand is there. And I realized that somebody had brought back to their village, their little huts in the jungle, a bottle of Coca Cola. Now mind you, these are people who did not have sugar, and did not have, you know, they had fruits, natural fruits, but they did not have refined sugar, and they did not have this drink. So I think to them, it must have been like, you know, some incredible drug. And the man handed me back the money, he actually threw the $100 bill at my boat, and pointed at the bottle of soda that my guide had might guide just rushed and handed it to them. And they sat around, there was a little bit of power play between the men about who gets to drink first. And of course, the lead guy grabbed it. And I've never seen human beings so happy. They sat around, they drank the thing, they actually gave us the monkey thing. And they left. And it was an extraordinary interaction with these guys. But what I realized was that at all points during this interaction, things could have gone very wrong. You know, you're out there in the middle of nowhere. And there there is no doctor, there is no, you know, if something happens, you are done, my friend. And there was something when I looked in the face of these guys, that, you know, really was kindness. But it was a real survival mentality. And I don't think that they would have hesitated. If I had made the wrong move to have attacked in one way or another. I don't think it's common. But I think if they felt threatened in any way, or they felt the transaction was injust, that I don't think it would have gone well for us. And in those moments, is when I feel that intuition kicks in, that your gut feeling kicks in. And it's more than just this woowoo kind of ethereal idea of not knowing and you know, having this like higher sense of like what's going on. But it's this real sense that we don't know what it comes from. And I'm sure if people studied it that they could find you reasons for why we're this way, for example, there's been a lot of research on how we can tell that somebody is looking at us. And some of it derives from our ancestral just how we evolved our ancestral evolution of we needed to have better peripheral vision. So there's some research that's leading scientists to believe now in my job. I'm not an expert by any means in any of this stuff, and I I may just be talking on educated here. But I do remember reading that there is some evidence that we evolved with better peripheral vision. And if you if you actually sit and try, you can actually improve your peripheral vision out of the sides of your eyes. And that seems to have a evolutionary reason that makes sense. And I think we don't really need to know, the reason why we do something, always. And we don't need to know the reason why we go in a certain direction, sometimes, sometimes, we have to try how something feels to us. And if it feels right, we can try it. As long as it's not something crazy here. We don't go over boundaries, but that we test in very measurable ways. And it's similar with the work that I do now on e commerce is that we test we try. There's no hard fast answers to a lot of the mysteries that are out there, with how you succeed in life, how you succeed in any specific business. What people don't tell you, is that oftentimes, the real mysteries in life and in business, and in all this stuff, are solved by just simple trial and error by working through something but how do you get there, you get there by following your gut. Now we'll talk on future episodes about what it takes to actually follow your gut to follow your intuition and why some people are better than this than others. But, in general, I'll leave you with this. Following your gut doesn't just mean blindly taking a guess and going after something. It entails you using your intellect, your knowledge, everything that you know everything that's available to keeping your eyes 110% open but still having a keen sensitivity for which direction you want to go and why. Okay, I rambled on a little bit, but I'll see you on the next episode.

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