Gut feeling and choices

Is trusting your gut feeling and intuition a good idea when making choices? I've started to wonder. I've had to make a great deal of choices lately when deciding on what I want from life and particularly from work. Always going with my gut feeling has been a way of living so far, and it's only lately that I've started to second guess it.

My brother, who I love dearly, told me when asking his thoughts about it: Always trust your intuition and gut feeling. It might be wrong, but what's important is that it came from somewhere. Gut feelings don't come in vain.

I'd like to believe he's right (as big brothers are supposed to be), but still I'm wondering.

Here's the case: Going with your intuition might not take you where you thought you were going - however - you never know what you avoided by making that decision. We'll never know what would have happened going in the other direction, right?

I'd also like to believe that our intuition is what we might call our true self. My intuition = the real me. All people should follow their own path, create their own pattern of footprints in the sand of the beach we call life. Following our gut feeling and our intuition would in that case mean expressing our true self by following our heart. The print might be a winding path and I guess it scarcely ever will be a straight line, but the important thing is that the direction is the right one. We might as well enjoy the new things we see along the road, even when we are taking different roads than the ones we'd marked on the map. We might learn a thing or two on the way.