“If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said ‘faster horses,'” Henry Ford famously said. The lesson is clear: Your inner muse is a more reliable source of information than all the market surveys you can afford.

What Ford didn’t say was, “If I had listened to people when they told me what they wanted, I’d have offered a new model instead of insisting the Model T was all they’d ever want, nearly wrecking my company with my stubbornness.”

The world is more complicated than the simple stories we prefer.