How hard must you tap an egg, to just crack its shell? No one can tell you how to neatly open an egg; you have to learn by practicing, by learning to feel what you are doing and understand how you are doing it.

It’s the same when anyone teaches himself to develop intuition about anything he wants to do, or anything he wants to understand. No one can tell someone else, each person must feel his way, paying focused attention to what he feels as he goes.

When you bring home a baby, or even a kitten, you may or may not have instincts, but you certainly have interest enough to develop knowledge about the meaning of each cry and the proper response.

Your first crude responses are refined when you meet failure, and rewarded when you meet with success. Gradually you reach a state in which your responses seem instinctive, perhaps even to yourself. Nevertheless, they are actually the result of concentrated practice. That baby is wet, you think when you hear her yelp, though you do not know how you know. Or, more precisely, you do not even think, you know. Without conscious thought, you prepare to make your child more comfortable.

Surely trained athletes have refined their responses in a similar way, all that grace is not the result of casual practice. All elite athletes work at the games they play. They spend hours rehearsing moves until they become so fluent that anything they choose to do comes to seem instinctive, that is, to seem intuitive.

Some sensitive children hate playing scales on the piano. They cannot bear the clanging ugliness of the sounds they are coaxed or coerced to produce. But some piano players endure sounds that they alone can hear as just slightly off. They refine their work with countless hours of intent, devoted practice. Thinking alone did not get them there, nor praying for more skill. Intuition is earned, purchased with hours of attention. Eventually, they feel each note, as it is formed.

More than competent scientists and taxi drivers develop intuition too, learning through practice to feel their way to solutions to the complicated problems they have trained themselves to solve. The clues they follow may seem imperceptibly subtle to outsiders, but for the practiced and intent, they lead through a maze of wrong turns to correct outcomes for those who have learned to follow their intuition.