Finding your intuition under a bridge.

One of the things I love about travel is the perspective jolt it brings. A constant reminder that despite drastically different environments, economies, cultures, traditions, and technologies, at the end of the day we aren’t really that different. A reminder that the things around us change a hell of a lot more than we actually do. A reminder that belies the fabrications that the corporate world tells itself on a daily basis.

I’m over in Hanoi at the moment, with my wife and two girls in tow, ducking and weaving between motorbikes and tuk tuks. The number one consideration each day being ‘what amazing things are we going to eat next’. I’m not a ‘stay in the hotel/resort’ guy. I’m a ‘go wandering down a weird alley and see where it goes’ guy. There’s even a running joke in the agency about the time I ate ‘soup in a bag’ on a previous trip that didn’t end so well. (‘Soup in a bag’ literally being, someone in a street cart pouring some mysterious non-descript soup in to a plastic grocery bag. Still one of the best soups I’ve ever eaten. I just shouldn’t have eaten it four times…)

It feels more and more in life we’re fighting a battle between intuition and data. Intuition being the innate human ‘gut feel’ that has driven our survival and prosperity for, quite literally, eternity, and data being, if we’re honest, an arbitrary set of numbers that can be interpreted to suit a particular narrative or bias.

For example, where we used to talk to a taxi driver, guide, or local, upon reaching a new city, one of the first things people do now is google something like this.

I’m sure you’re noticing a trend here. No matter what food you google, MET Vietnamese restaurant, with over TEN THOUSAND 5 STAR REVIEWS, comes up. Must be good right? Can’t be that bad? The numbers can’t lie, can they? And everyone’s talking about it at the hotel. (Everyone being the white foreigners that is.) Because, of course, no one is feeling anything out for themselves, they’re just reading the same data.

My spidey senses were tingling that this was a complete load of bullshit. But after traipsing around the city in extreme humidity with a seven and nine-year old, who’d been pretty good at eating whatever weird shit we were eating up until that point, we took the ‘safe option’ for dinner one night. At the restaurant, alarm bells again. Only tourists. Generic menu with no distinctive speciality. (And french fries on the starters.)

I live in Footscray, a suburb of Melbourne with a huge Vietnamese community, and this food wasn’t even a shadow on what we have back at home. Bland, generic, run of the mill. Just a flat average. As it often is, the data was clearly manipulated to fabricate a false narrative. (Whoever runs that joint has a serious SEO operation going on.)

The best food we’ve eaten here doesn’t have 10,000 five star google reviews. Some of it hasn’t even existed on google at all. When meandering down a side street I spotted an old lady hacking up chicken on the side of the road and tossing it into boiling hot bowls of broth, with a group of locals crouched on tiny plastic chairs slurping it up. My intuition went two ways on this, one, this could put you into an induced coma, and two, this could be the best chicken pho you’ve ever eaten. Everyone looked at me looking at the soup with a ‘what are you doing here?’ kind of expression, and in my past travels, this had generally been a good sign. So, I rolled the dice. It was phenomenal. And I’m still standing.

But the absolute best thing we’ve eaten here came on the recommendation of a local. Someone who’s lived and breathed the place for years. Someone with knowledge and experience. A place called Bún chả Gầm Cầu, which apparently translates to ‘Bún chả under the bridge’. Because that’s literally what it was. Locals cooking up Bún chả under a bridge. No tourists, no English, no 5-star reviews. Just some of the best fucking food I have ever put in my mouth.

One person with a wealth of real world knowledge and experience turned out to be more on the money than 10,000 pieces of data. (Here’s my daughter, Nina, with her real world 5-star review.)

If you’re thinking, “God, is this guy really doing an ‘I Travelled to Vietnam and Here’s What it Taught Me About Advertising’ post?”, maybe in some ways I am, but it’s more so an ‘Everything about Everything’ kind of post. Because this is about more than our business.

Every day, more and more, it seems we are absconding the use of our own intuition. Abandoning our instincts. Ignoring expertise and discarding knowledge. Quite literally everything that has brought us to this point, all the things that make us human. Just so we can absolve ourselves of responsibility in the wake of some mechanical aggregation of data and analysis.

And this isn’t to say that data and analysis isn’t important or of value, quite the opposite. It’s also been a huge factor in the propulsion of the human race. But you still need all that other shit I mentioned to read and interpret it. You still need discernment and experience and gut feel and an ambitious want to turn the data into something real and tangible.

Because, quite often, the data is bullshit and doesn’t taste like 10,000 5 star reviews. A lot of the time, it tastes like a food court bain-marie.

If you only spend your life overanalysing the average output of what’s already been done, you miss the old lady hacking up something better on the sidewalk.

And, unsurprisingly, an expert with knowledge and experience giving you their gut feel is actually a ‘safer’ bet than 10,000 critics who haven’t lived and breathed it.

For me, anyway, there’s some food for thought there. Literally and figuratively.