That wish to pass something on is about the most basic, human and natural instinct there is.
It had the chutzpah of Charlie Adam's 65-yard missile against Chelsea, the touch and technique of Wayne Rooney's swivelling volley against Aston Villa and the did-that-actually-just-happen quality of Jermain Defoe's winner for Sunderland against Newcastle United, and above all it was a gloriously subtle goal, instinct combining with a clear thought-process to devastating effect.
You're a rational person with an instinct for self-preservation.
"That makes me wonder whether I will be able to recover my instinct for the game," he said.
She was popular at school and had a noted instinct for caring, going out of her way to play with Michael, the neighbour with Down's syndrome, and paying regular visits to a lonely old man down the road known as Mr Partridge.
"They had been asking for some time to do it, but I don't really have that sort of retrospective instinct and so kept saying 'No thank you'.
Again, my first instinct is that they must have been rubbernecking, the sordid allegations having made HRH a rather grim sort of draw, or at the very least not as ferociously dull and pointless as the rest of the apres-ski programme.
While the first Conservative instinct was simply to welcome Pfizer, Ed Miliband deserves some credit for his insistence that Britain could do better, even though the intervention exposed how sketchy Labour's industrial thinking remains.
Independent editor Amol Rajan said "every instinct" told him to publish the cartoons but described it as "too much of a risk".
If he's going to bring it back to British telly, he must sit on his instinct to make everything as big as possible and remember what he liked about wrestling in the first place.
The instinct, in these circumstances, is to brace oneself for the onslaught of unbearable Aussie swagger.
