Every professional in finance develops a private theory of how deals actually close — a working model built from wins, losses, and pattern-matching over years. The problem isn't that these theories are wrong. It's that they become invisible. The 11th-century Persian philosopher Avicenna, writing on the psychology of perception in his 'Kitab al-Nafs' (Book of the Soul), made a sharp distinction between what he called 'estimative faculty' — the layer of cognition that assigns meaning and threat and value to raw experience — and the intellect that can actually examine those assignments. His insight was that the estimative faculty operates faster and louder than reason, and crucially, it is shaped entirely by accumulated experience. It doesn't update itself. It just repeats, with increasing confidence. What this means in practice: the seasoned banker or insurance underwriter who 'just knows' a deal is good or a client is reliable isn't accessing wisdom — they're accessing a calcified pattern from ten years ago, running it silently beneath the visible reasoning. The philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce called this 'the fixation of belief' — the point where inquiry stops because certainty feels like arrival. Your edge isn't your instincts. It's your ability to notice when instinct has quietly replaced inquiry.

What is a deal, client type, or product category that you instinctively discount before fully examining — and when did that reflex actually form?

Drawing from Islamic Peripatetic Philosophy (Avicennian psychology) — Avicenna (Ibn Sina), Kitab al-Nafs (Book of the Soul), c. 1014–1020, on the estimative faculty (wahm) as a sub-rational meaning-making layer