I go by instinct - I don't worry about experience.

Gut beats the résumé

There's something almost reckless about trusting your gut over your résumé, which is probably why it works. Most of us are trained to defer to whoever's "done it before"—the person with the track record, the credentials, the safe choice. But instinct cuts through all that. It's the part of you that recognizes patterns faster than your conscious mind can articulate them, that feels when something's off even if you can't explain why.

The tricky part is that instinct isn't the same as impulsivity. Streisand's approach doesn't mean ignoring what you've learned; it means not being paralyzed by it. Experience can actually make you timid, because you've learned all the ways things can go wrong. A beginner's instinct might be bolder precisely because it hasn't been worn down by failure. When you're hiring someone, choosing a direction for your life, or deciding how to handle a relationship problem, sometimes the person who hasn't done it a hundred times before sees possibilities that the veteran misses.

The real insight: experience teaches you what you think should work, but instinct knows what actually works. The best instincts come from people who've trusted themselves enough to fail and pay attention to what happened.