> I find my struggle with chess is that I want to act intuitively, something that has served me well all my life in other avenues. But the board doesn't lie and if you don't think thoroughly you will get punished.

I believe strong players do act intuitively when playing chess (especially fast chess), it's just that they've developed their intuition through lots of practice and thorough thinking in the past. For some reason our intuition about life seems to be more developed, or perhaps the game of life is incredibly complex and most people are roughly at the same skill level.