Page 52 - Sacred Gift

Arjun loves the outdoors. He has been on ski expeditions to the North and South poles, rafted through the Grand Canyon, climbed in the Himalayas, and done horseback treks in New Zealand and Morocco.
Arjun is a trustee of the Aspen Institute in the United States and India, the Natural Resources Defense Council and the Rocky Mountain Institute. He is an ardent proponent of the Socrates Program and is a Henry Crown Fellow. Recently, Arjun also became an Advanced Leadership Fellow at Harvard University.
Life is growth – growth is life.
There is so much that Arjun can teach us about decision making and success in business and in life.
Arjun started with using what he calls “raw” intuition to set a course.
He needed money as a university student. As he looked through job classifieds, he was “energetically drawn” to computer programming.
At that point he neither had a computer, nor did he know anything about computers or programming.
He responded to the ad and suggested he work for nothing until he could learn enough programming to provide value to work in the computer industry.
This simple life changing, intuitively based, decision set the course of his life for the next three decades.
He credits that experience to giving him the intellectual rigor for making decisions as he moved into the venture capital field.
Now he is in the third stage of his career where he integrates intuition with intellect.
In a conversation over dinner, I asked Arjun what part of his decision making involves intuition. He gave me a surprising answer:
“If you asked me that 20 years ago, I would have said maybe 30%. As you ask me now, I would say 70%. I believe that if you ask me that ten years from now, probably 90%.”
Intuition: Your Sacred Gift 49