The phone rang in my dorm room in Chicago. I picked up the receiver. It was my Aunt Mary calling from California. This one was my dad’s sister (I had two Aunt Marys, one on each side of the family).

We greeted each other with the typical niceties. I don’t remember what she said next, but I remember that it was all entirely logical. 100%. There was no arguing with what she said.

And yet, when I hung up, I didn’t know if my world had just been rocked or if I had just been fed a load of cr*p. I felt strangely destabilized. Confused.

A few days later I was talking to my dad. I mentioned the call, and how I had felt strangely destabilized after the conversation.

“Don’t worry,” he said, “it’s not you, she was drunk, that’s just what she does.”

A few years later that Aunt Mary went on a major bender and passed away.

A couple days ago, I was on the phone with a friend of mine in another country. He had just gotten out of an interview and wanted to know what I thought about the company and the interview. I heard destabilization and self-doubt in his voice, so I recounted the Aunt Mary story.

“That’s exactly how I feel,” he said. “Destabilized. Their logic was airtight. They had an answer for everything, and yet I feel weird.”

“Then turn and run,” I said to him. “Don’t try to make sense of it.”

Here’s my point:

Especially in business, we like to think that logic somehow is the superior way of thinking. That only a fool would go against logic.

We like to think that somehow, logic has a life outside of us.

And yet it does not, and it cannot, because it originates from within us.

Because logic originates from within us, it cannot transcend us. And so while logic is a useful tool that should be used often, it does not deserve a place above intuition or gut feelings or experience.

So if you hear an argument that sounds completely logical, but you feel weirdly destabilized and your gut is telling you that something is wrong, even though that argument is rock solid logically, it’s quite likely that something is wrong with it, you just haven’t put your finger on it yet.

I am not saying that when your gut says one thing and logic says another, always go with your gut. If you did that, you would never move forward, you would never evolve. What I am saying is that logic is but one tool in the toolbox, not something outside of us that we can hold up above all else.