Here’s a pattern I’d bet you recognize. You’ve got a decision in front of you, and your gut answers first. I’m not talking about “pizza and beer or steak and wine?” I’m talking real, directional choices. But then along comes the reasonable voice with its slides and its logic, and the reasonable voice is very good in meetings. It’s like a boardroom. If your brain is the CEO, the reasonable voice is the smart guy from IT who gets asked to validate the operational direction. And once the CEO learns the smart guy’s answer is the defensible one, the CEO conditions himself to just go with the smart guy. The gut, meanwhile, is the founder at the end of the table. Built the whole company. Doesn’t own a single slide.
Here’s what I’ve learned about the gut thing: it doesn’t argue, and it doesn’t get louder. It just sends signals, soft pulses through your heart and then up to your brain...noticed, but intentionally ignored. The gut will sit there through the whole reasonable version of your plan, for however long that takes, sending its soft signals here and there. And then time does what time does. The timeline could be ten years or it could be ten weeks, but somewhere along the way, the reasonable choice starts to fit like a shirt one size too small, and the thing you pushed aside is still standing exactly where you left it, right where it said it would be. Turns out it wasn’t a whim. It was the answer, early.
I go with my gut more often than not. It’s served me well; it’s how we ended up entrepreneurs. But a few months back, on a small decision, I didn’t. When I started this page, I had a name for it in my gut, one that had been with me for over a year; I’d even drawn the logo and hung it on my dream board at home. And when it came time to hit the button, I picked a more reasonable name instead. It was safe and explainable. Fine.
You can guess the rest, because it’s the lesson working on me in real time: the gut name waited, the reasonable name got tight in the shoulders, and here we are.
So this page is changing its name. Over Time is becoming The Refinery.
And I’ll admit there’s some poetry in the handoff, because the old name turned out to be the instructions: over time is exactly how the right thing came back.
And as a guy who grew up in energy and oil & gas, refineries aren’t a metaphor I picked out of a book. Here’s what I love about a real refinery: it’s built to be expanded. Nobody pours the foundation thinking the first unit is the last unit. The expansion projects come along over the years; that’s the design, not a change of plans.
Make of that what you will.
Here it is, off the dream board:
Welcome to The Refinery.
— Travis
P.S. If you’ve got a gut thing you’ve been sitting on, this is your note. It won’t get louder. It’ll just get patient. Time will do its part; the rest is yours.
(Housekeeping: the name and URL will update over the next few days. Same inbox, same me.)