One of my most brilliant colleagues who dutifully served our country as an intelligence officer for years puts it best: “Spy skills are just common sense on steroids.” Boiled down to its simplest form, he’s absolutely right. Intelligence training is about learning to home in on innate skills—refining, developing, and perfecting them until they reach a very heightened sense. It requires spending years of your life learning to elevate common sense to something bigger and more powerful. When you learn to do this, how you view the world and your immediate environment changes. You understand that at the foundation of any successful mission are some key concepts. No mission would succeed without loyalty, teachability, communication, and preparedness. It’s common sense that we should go through life valuing our friends, family, and co-workers, and we should keep our minds open to new concepts, communicating appropriately in our daily interactions and preparing ourselves for unforeseen happenings. In the spy world, those common sense concepts mean absolutely everything—these simple ideas represent the difference between success and failure as well as life and death.
Since leaving the CIA and becoming an entrepreneur, I’ve seen how these same basic concepts are a perfect guide to running a business. If you can learn to tap into your common sense and allow it to grow to unprecedented levels, it will be your own personal compass, steering your company toward greatness.