Your mood swings are a 2nd source of intelligence

I was on a coaching call about a month ago, and one of my clients said something in passing that I haven’t been able to stop obsessing over.

She was running through ideas she wanted to write about. And somewhere in the middle of the list, she says, “oh, and another one I have is your mood swings are a second source of intelligence.“

I stopped her.

“Wait. Say that again.”

She said it again. And I just sat there for a second. Something in me had already reacted before I could explain why.

“Damn,” I said. “That’s really good. I’d actually write about that.”

“Oh, take it. I have a ton of ideas.”

Something in my guts says it’s pointing at something true.

Something that would explain why many of my friends who live almost entirely in their feelings are living pretty epic lives. Living in Thailand, making cool creative softwares, and earning a fair bit more money than myself doing work they’re genuinely passionate about. Meanwhile, those of us who live almost exclusively in our minds (the so-called source of intelligence) end up somewhat stuck. As if life is a giant multiple choice test we’ve been silently failing, even though we studied more than anyone else in the goddam class.

This newsletter is my real-time exploration of that gut feeling. And the surprising perspective I discovered in the process. If you want to get what you want out of life... If you want to become truly intelligent... This one is for you.

“If you’re in your head, you’re dead.”
- Shaan Puri

When most people hear “mood swing,” they don’t think intelligence. They think reactive. Acting out. Getting pissed when the In & Out staff forget the extra pickles on the burger. You end up saying something you regret. You quit the job. You send the text that’s so long it could land a book deal with Harper Collins. A bad mood swing is bad, I’m not arguing that.

But the more I sat with this, the more I realized we’ve collapsed apples and oranges into orples. Because there are also instant shifts in your mood that are both useful and insightful. We just don’t call them mood swings.

Is it a mood swing when a burst of inspiration hits you in the shower? Is it a mood swing when a sentence on page 53 of the Artist’s Way reaches into your chest and starts pulling out the book you’ve been circling for years? Is it a mood swing when you go from checking your phone at a party to your pulse picking up because the only philosopher in the room starts speaking something real? (I’m talking about you Paul Musso).

When I heard the title of this article for the first time and instantly felt the need to write about it, I was experiencing a special kind of mood swing. I call it a signal swing. Because it feels like your state shifting to signal your mind hasn’t caught up to yet.

The pickle rage? That’s the reactive swing. Monkey-brain stuff. The signal swing is a different animal. It might be more intelligent than my rational mind and intellect ever could be.

But I wasn’t willing to accept this as true just yet. So I went back to two of my favorite definitions of intelligence and I noticed something strange.

They’re both almost right.

But there’s a glaring blind spot. One I can’t believe I haven’t heard anyone talk about. And the person who finally completed the picture for me isn’t a philosopher, cognitive scientist, business thinker or anyone you’d expect. I’ll get to him in a second...

Naval has a definition of intelligence I’ve always liked:

The only real test of intelligence is whether you get what you want out of life.

I love this one because it takes intelligence out of the classroom. It’s not about IQ. It’s not about how many times you’ve read Plato or how dangerously articulate you are. It’s about outcomes.

But the more I sat with it, the more I noticed Naval’s definition tells you what intelligence produces. But it doesn’t tell you what intelligence is. What’s the actual mechanism underneath?

For that, let’s bring Alex Hormozi’s (paraphrased) definition into the ring:

Learning is changing your behavior in response to stimuli, and intelligence is the speed at which you can change your behavior.

This gets closer. Now we have a mechanism. Intelligence is a feedback loop. Input, adjust, input, adjust. The faster the loop, the more intelligent you are. And this stacks nicely on top of Naval’s, because you can only consistently get what you want if you can learn fast when shit goes sideways.

But if intelligence is your speed of learning, what determines the speed?

That was the missing piece. And the person who gave me the answer wasn’t Naval or Hormozi.

It was a fantasy fiction author.

This author is the most interesting thinker on intelligence I’ve come across in the last year.

He was talking about how he writes characters who need to read as wise, quick, and formidable. He said intelligent characters don’t pause. They respond. If a character waits to answer, the reader reads them as less intelligent. If they respond instantly with the (mostly) right answer, the reader reads them as smarter than they are.

This author is Brandon Sanderson.

He goes on to say that what we typically mean by intelligence is actually a stack of three things:

1. Quick recollection

2. Vast knowledge to draw on

3. The ability to make decisions fast

For all three to happen at once, you can’t be the book smart type who needs to pause, retrieve, and analyze. The recollection, the knowledge, the decision, they have to arrive together, as one felt shift in your state.

A signal swing.

Picture two people learning to drive. One studies the manual. Memorizes the steps for a three-point turn. Can describe every mirror check and shoulder check in order. The other has been driving for a year. They’ve felt the road change under the tires when rain pads the pavement.

When a car swerves into oncoming traffic, only one of them reacts in time. That’s the difference between memorized knowledge and embodied knowledge. It stopped living in your head and moved into your nervous system. Your response happens before conscious thought does.

And your mood swings? They’re the readout of how aligned the system is. If you learn to listen, they’re the fastest, most accurate signal you have.

And no, this isn’t just “trust your gut.”

That advice skips a step. And that missing step is exactly why you don’t trust yourself.

My gut said my last newsletter would be my top 3 highest performing ever. I was wrong. My gut said my last product would do $30,000 of revenue in 7 days. It was wrong. My gut said every one of my ex-girlfriends was my future wife. And each time, it was really fucking wrong.

But the reason your gut is unreliable is that you’ve never let it be wrong. Most good students and intellectuals have been afraid of being wrong their whole lives, so they stay in their head, where they can analyze without risking the error. But analysis doesn’t refine intuition. Only contact with reality does.

And so their gut stays untrustworthy, which they read as proof they were right not to trust it, which keeps them in their head, which keeps their gut from ever developing. Now imagine that loop running for twenty years. Your friends who live in their feelings are somehow more sure of themselves than you are. Not because their gut is always right, but because when a real yes hits, they know it’s theirs, and they move on it.

At some point, life stops handing you decisions your intellect can process. Should I stay in this relationship? Is this the life I want? These are questions the body was designed to answer, not the mind.

The move was never to trust your gut blindly. It’s to develop it.

By treating your current intuition as your best guess with the limited information you have. You act on it. You put it into contact with reality. You find out where it was wrong. You feel the gap between what your body predicted and what actually happened.

And then you refine.

Over time, the gap closes. Your mood swings start tracking reality more accurately.

This is how the three definitions finally snap together. Hormozi is the mechanism (change your behavior fast). Naval is the outcome (get what you want out of life). And Sanderson is the wiring underneath it all (your body deciding before your mind can register it).

If you’ve lived in your head your whole life, you were probably taught that your feelings were the unreliable part. The noise. The thing to manage so the real work of thinking could happen. So you did the responsible thing. You studied harder. You analyzed longer. You built the version of yourself that looks great on paper. And somewhere in there, you stopped listening to the one instrument that could have told you what you actually wanted.

You’re allowed to start listening again. You’re allowed to act before the analysis is complete. You’re allowed to let your gut be wrong out loud, because that’s the only way it ever gets calibrated.

The word intelligence needs to get bigger. It was never supposed to live only in our heads. When your thoughts and feelings are calibrated and pointing the same direction, you don’t have to think intelligently.

You just are intelligent.

Because you finally learned to listen to your mood swings.

-Taylin & Dale