Hands-up anyone who feels they’re drowning in data.

It wouldn’t be surprising to know there are lots of us in the Switched ON Living community who feel overwhelmed by all the information we’re bombarded with day and night, at work, at home, and just about everywhere else.

What’s more of a shock is that Bozoma Saint Johns thinks the same.

Bozoma is chief marketing officer at Netflix, and she says she’s here to liberate us from the endless data that stops us from moving to the future because we’re so busy analysing the past.

And what will free us from the obsession of data is our intuition.

In this TED Talk, Bozoma recalls being told at the beginning of her marketing career to anchor her ideas in data, that the data will predict what will work and what won’t.

The problem was once she went deep into the data, that’s when her ideas stopped. Intuition by contrast is magical, it takes us from inchoate thoughts to practical solutions.

As Bozoma says, all of that measuring, and counting, and analysis, that can take us so far in our decision making, but what resonates with our emotions is just as important. Does the situation makes us feel scared, or happy, or connected with others and if yes, how do tap into our emotions to find the solution?

Bozoma calls our intuition a present and the more we use it, the better we get at using it.

All of this is great news for all of us aged over 50. It helps us to play to our strengths where our intuition has been finely tuned over decades of work and life experience.

Netflix is a known in the finance world as a FAANG, one of the group of tech companies – Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix, Google – that became so all-powerful in-part because of their superior ability to collect, analyse and operationalise all the data that their customers so kindly provide every time they click on the platform or use a product.

It’s no surprise at all that Netflix relies not just on the mountains of data it collects, but on the instincts of key staff such as Bozoma.

We can all learn lots from Netflix’s success.