Success Quote by Robert Heller

Heller is giving intuition its due while yanking it off the throne. In business culture, “trust your gut” is often sold as a kind of founder mysticism: the heroic individual who just knows. This line keeps the romance but adds the invoice. A gut feeling is positioned as an alarm system, not a steering wheel - something that detects weak signals before spreadsheets catch up, especially when incentives, office politics, or overconfident forecasts are muffling bad news.

The construction matters. “Never” appears twice, and that symmetry is the trick: he flatters instinct, then limits it with equal force. The first clause is permission to be alert to discomfort, pattern recognition, and the quiet cognitive work that happens below conscious reasoning. The second clause is a warning about the stories we build around that discomfort. Intuition can be bias in a tuxedo: recency effects, stereotyping, wishful thinking, or the seductive certainty of a narrative you want to be true.

Subtextually, Heller is speaking to a world where decisions are judged after the fact. Gut-only calls can look like genius when they hit and irresponsibility when they miss. His standard is defensible judgment: use the gut as a prompt to investigate, to ask sharper questions, to pressure-test assumptions, to seek disconfirming evidence. It’s a quote tailored to executives who must move fast without turning speed into superstition - and who know that “I had a feeling” is not a strategy, it’s the beginning of a due diligence checklist.