What the richest man in America wouldn't put on the record

J.P. Morgan made decisions based on something he could never admit to. So do you, and it might be your edge.

Picture the richest man in America sneaking out of his own mansion at dusk.

He dismisses his coachman for the night. He checks over his shoulder. He walks to an unmarked building and sits down across from a woman with dark, shining hair, surrounded by birth charts and tarot. Her name is Evangeline Adams. She is an astrologer. The man paying for her time is J.P. Morgan.

My version of this scene is admittedly colored by too many hours watching HBO’s Gilded Age. But the crux of it is true. Morgan, the richest man of his era, maintained a documented practice with his astrologer, year after year, quietly and in private.

I know that feeling. I’ve spent most of my life hiding the half of me that reached the answer before the numbers did.

Eighteen years ago, I walked into 345 Park Avenue, the J.P. Morgan office, as an analyst. Credibility there looked like one thing: all numbers, no voice. You earned the right to be heard by having the data to back every decision. Anything you couldn’t put in a cell didn’t count.

The job was building models, fast and clean. I was slow at it. I could not give a damn about Excel shortcuts. On a floor that measured worthiness by arbitrary skills that signaled analytical horsepower, I was mediocre.

It took me years to see what I actually had. On top of the moderate quant skills, I had something the pure quants didn’t: I could feel where a situation was heading before the analysis got there. Pattern recognition, if you want the technical name for it.

It took me even longer to learn the thing had a name and a body of research behind it. Herbert Simon, a Nobel laureate who helped build the first artificial intelligence, spent decades arguing that intuition isn’t mysticism. It is, in his words, “nothing more and nothing less than recognition.” The chess master doesn’t out-calculate her opponent. She has seen the pattern thousands of times, and the right move surfaces before the reasoning does. The veteran firefighter walks his crew out of the building moments before the floor gives way, and he can’t tell you how he knew. His body knew. It had cataloged every fire he had ever stood in.

That is the second operating system. Not a sixth sense. It is experience, stacked up over years, that the brain matches to the present moment faster than you can reason through it. The quants weren’t smarter than me. I had a second engine going, and I had been trained to be ashamed of it.

So I hid it. I got good at leading with the slow stuff. Models, build-outs, the work I could point to. The fast thing I kept to myself. Who was I going to tell? There’s no line on a performance review for knew it in my gut.

So I tried to fix myself. I believed that if I just built better spreadsheets, I’d be a worthier human. As if human worth could be measured in a spreadsheet.

That was my excuse. Young, scared, everything to prove. A century earlier, the most powerful man in America hid the same instinct, and he had none of those reasons. He hid an astrologer.

You’ve probably even heard the line they attribute to J.P. Morgan. Millionaires don’t use astrology, billionaires do. It’s everywhere. And almost certainly fake. The oldest version anyone can find surfaced around 1989, more than seventy-five years after J.P. Morgan died, with no source cited.

But the truth is better than the fake quote. In her 1926 memoir, The Bowl of Heaven, Evangeline Adams wrote that she taught Morgan astrology herself, read his chart many times, and that he returned to her for readings year after year.

So the astrologer is the fun part. How he actually made decisions is the point. Morgan didn’t build the House of Morgan on star charts. But he didn’t build it on spreadsheets either. Asked under oath in 1912 what he lent money on, he didn’t say collateral. He said character. The first thing, he told Congress, is character, before money or anything else. A man he didn’t trust couldn’t borrow from him on all the bonds in Christendom. That is not a quant talking. That is a man putting a value on the one thing no model on his desk could measure, a read on a person, and betting the largest fortune in America on it.

On top of the analysis sat the part he could never have defended in a meeting. That was the edge. The astrologer was just the most private corner of the same instrument. Morgan was one of the most powerful spreadsheet-and-shamans who ever lived, and it was the combination, not either half, that made him.

The character and the nerve he could show, because they passed for judgment. The astrologer he could not. So he hid her, behind a dismissed coachman and an unmarked door, and let the world believe the rest was just good sense.

Morgan wasn’t an exception. He was the rule. Run the numbers. Then do what your gut already told you. And say nothing.

We still don’t have permission to trust our gut when the spreadsheet says otherwise. We don’t have permission to count a tarot reading as one more data point when we’re deciding whether to quit. We tell ourselves the people at the top got there on data alone.

They didn’t. They ran on data and instinct, like everyone else. They just learned to keep the instinct quiet.

I did too. It’s 2020. Day one of the company I’d just taken over. My desk was a corner of my bedroom, a forty-dollar table I’d bought off Facebook Marketplace in the middle of the pandemic. I was supposed to be building the sober plan: a list of VCs, a list of metrics to fix. Instead, I was thinking about a founder I’d worked alongside at Google, whose product I’d championed inside the company for a stretch. I’d just read that his latest company had been acquired for an absurd number, and it made me smile. I was happy for him. I was also a little in awe, because he’d done it again, a second sale most people never get once. I’d had a front-row seat to how he operated. I watched him build the alliances, work the rooms, position himself years before there was a deal. Nobody handed it to him.

The smile wasn’t only joy. It was recognition. My body remembered the lesson before my brain could spell it out. I knew what that kind of outcome looked like from the inside, because I had watched one get built. So I stopped writing the sober plan and wrote a different list. If this company were going to end the way his did, who would buy it? I named six buyers. For each one, I found the person who’d have to say yes to a deal, and wrote the name down. The first real thing I did was start pulling those six people close. Onto the cap table. Into the story. Years before there was a deal to do.

No spreadsheet told me to do that. A pattern my gut had filed away years before surfaced as certainty I couldn’t yet show my work for. Twenty-three months later, we sold. The math made the case eventually. My body had made it on day one.

That’s my practice. I’ve pulled a card, sat with an astrologer, held the crystal. They have their place. But the one I actually steer by is quieter, and I almost never name it out loud. The gut goes tight on the deal that pencils out perfectly. Or everything in me goes still and certain about a call I can’t yet defend on paper. I’ve spent my career learning to stop overruling that, and to start treating it as the first data point instead of the embarrassing one.

Morgan had an astrologer and a fortune to hide behind. I have a feeling in my chest and, for a long time, the same instinct to keep it off the record.

The difference is I’m writing it down. Under my own name. While I still have something to lose.

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The Practice

Pick the next decision where the data says one thing and something in you says another. Before you decide, write down what your body is telling you. One line. Then decide however you decide, and note which one turned out right. Don’t act on the body signal yet. Just start collecting it. You trust what you can measure, so measure this. Give your intuition a spreadsheet and watch how often it was already correct while you were busy overruling it.

The Shelf

The Bowl of Heaven, Evangeline Adams, 1926. The actual source, Morgan’s astrologer, tells it herself. Fair warning, it’s a hunt. Out of print, but you can find it in the Internet Archive or dig up a copy on eBay. Worth it for the receipts alone, but the real surprise is the prose. Watching how a woman wrote about power and intuition a hundred years ago, formal and certain in a way nobody writes now, tells you something the content doesn’t. We didn’t just hide the practice. We lost the voice that talked about it without flinching.

The Invitation

What do you already know that you’re waiting for the spreadsheet to confirm? Name the decision where your body has already voted, and your head is still stalling for cover. You don’t have to act on it today. But stop pretending you don’t know.