We experience the world through feelings. Through individual life experiences, we generate feelings and we can later access these feelings. We capture our feelings by finding the most fitting words. Words form sentences, and sentences form thoughts. Some thoughts are more “respected” than others and we call them intelligence.

Some people take “intelligence” a bit too far. They argue that humans are rational actors and we always act in our own best interest. If such an argument is true, deep-fried foods should have no customers (because rational actors will not eat unhealthy foods) and stock prices for many companies should trend linearly up or down (to reflect the underlying business growth or decline). Similar examples are countless. Clearly, the argument of “we are rational actors” is not entirely true. It fails to recognize the role of feelings.

Psychologists have made the observation that some people have better access to their feelings than others. And I argue that a mastery of applicable tools allows these already advantaged people to more perfectly express some of their feelings. A powerful combination.

Think about the Canadian singer Céline Dion. She has experienced a myriad of personal challenges: She grew up in a financially humble family; she lost her husband to cancer; she was diagnosed with Stiff Person Syndrome. Those challenges have probably exposed her to a wide range of feelings that she can later access — that most others have never experienced before. In turn, these factors allowed her to empathize with others, ultimately to see something universal among human experiences. That is probably why in Céline Dion’s songs, many of us find a level of emotional depth that is like no other, of real-life grief and joy that we do not find in average songs.

Think about the French novelist Honoré de Balzac. His life was ladened with debt until his death. The incessant toil Balzac experienced in his life probably imbued in him an enhanced ability to perceive other people’s feelings, which allowed him to read the external world with a force that pierced through appearances. Through Balzac’s slow and deliberate reading (and later, writing) of contemporary French society, he captured a broad spectrum of emotions and crystallized them into his works like Père Goriot, which we still read today.

The more access you have to your feelings, the better. The higher mastery you have of your tools, the better. For singers, the tool is your voice. For writers, the tool is your pen. Can you find the right pitch, tone, and word to capture your feelings in an authentic yet creative way?

Fast forward to today. Many people have shared the observation that texts written by various AI tools exhibit techniques but lack feelings. The vocabulary is rich. The grammar is perfect. Yet, it reads flat. Something is missing. We humans experience the world through feelings. AI experiences the world via math.

Intelligent and hardworking people abound, learning and practicing techniques: singing, writing, investing, you name it. They individually try to get ahead of others, yet few manage to achieve the heights of Céline Dion, Honoré de Balzac, Warren Buffett. There can be no doubt that hard work is absolutely necessary. Yet, it also appears that in some fields, it is insufficient. Then, what separates the legends from the average?

I increasingly think, it is not techniques but feelings. Do you have a wide range of feelings? Do you have unfettered access to your feelings? If you do, and if you have also mastered relevant tools of expression, you probably know what I am writing about here. If you do not, you are likely to end up in a never-ending game of competing on techniques.

If you still feel unsure about what you are reading here, consider the following. Paul Slovic, a psychologist at the University of Oregon, has known Daniel Kahneman for more than 50 years. (Daniel Kahneman is a Nobel Prize laureate and the author of Thinking, Fast and Slow.) Commenting on Kahneman’s decision on his own life (literally that), Slovic put, “Of course, those of us who spend our lives studying decisions, we think a lot about the reasons for those decisions. But often the reasons aren’t reasons. They’re feelings” (link).

We like to think we are thinking. Probably, we are all just feeling. Even the best thinkers cannot but end with feelings. So, from the very beginning, perhaps, it starts with feelings.

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