Hell Yeah! or Hell No! And How to Tell the Difference Read online

  Intuitive decision-making is never going to be perfect. It’s never going to accurately read a situation 100% of the time. Referring to intuition incorrectly, like when gamblers claim to know a face card is “due” or four reds in a row means black is going to come up, gives it a bad rap. Hint: intuition doesn’t matter when it’s all about chance. You’re just producing snap judgments with negative consequences and with little basis in reality.

  Don’t confuse desire for intuition. Just because you want something to be true, doesn’t mean it is.

  Intuition, true intuition, isn’t irrational. In fact, it’s a totally rational output of living—of learning from both success and failure, and of committing to improving one’s knowledge. You input experience and get intuition as a result.

  So how do we develop better intuition, beyond just accumulating experience? There are two components to intuition: chunking and heuristics. Let’s take a look at how they work, and how we can develop our capabilities to use them to our advantage. It might not be easy, but you’ll be far more efficient at using your intuition once you understand it.

  Chunking

  When you know—really know—how to solve a problem just by looking at it, you’ve created a commanding chunk that sweeps like a song through your mind. ―Barbara Oakley, A Mind for Numbers: How to Excel at Math and Science

  One component of intuition is “chunking.” To help us encode more memories, our brains group information into “chunks” that are then remembered as a whole. This gets around our inability to store more than roughly five to nine pieces of information in our short-term memory. According to research by psychologist George Miller in the 1950s, that’s our limit. Once we store a chunk in our long term memory, it’s easier to recall everything it contains as if it were one thought. That means we can hold five to nine chunks of information in mind at once.

  Chunking is why we’re often taught little rhymes or acronyms to help us remember information. Like I before E, except after C to help with spelling. Or Never Eat Soggy Waffles to remember the points of a compass. Or one I made up in high school to help me remember how to jumpstart a car: red on dead, red alive, black, then back, you’re ready to jive. These examples help me remember information in one chunk.

  Daniel Bor, a neuroscientist who studies consciousness and complex thought processes, writes in The Ravenous Brain:

  The process of combining more primitive pieces of information to create something more meaningful is a crucial aspect both of learning and of consciousness and is one of the defining features of human experience. Once we have reached adulthood, we have decades of intensive learning behind us, where the discovery of thousands of useful combinations of features, as well as combinations of combinations and so on, has collectively generated an amazingly rich, hierarchical model of the world.

  He views chunking as a means of “compressing an unwieldy dataset” into memorable pieces we can recall with ease.

  Bor goes on to write, “Although [chunking] can vastly increase the practical limits of working memory, it is not merely a faithful servant of working memory—instead, it is the secret master of this online store and the main purpose of consciousness.” While chunking is sometimes sold as a memory technique, it’s how we automatically process information for later reference. There’s nothing to buy. It’s how your brain already works. It’s how experts manage to scan through what they know so fast, with minimal effort. Chunking ties together what we know for easier recall. If you want to remember more, find ways to package pieces of information together.

  A chess grandmaster typically identifies their next move within about five seconds of looking at the board. Even though they’re likely to deliberate for a while longer, their first thought is typically correct. Their intuition is more powerful than their thinking mind. How do they do it?

  Researchers believe that chess grandmasters store chunks of information from many years of deliberate, focused practice. For example, they know the options when pieces sit in conjunction with each other in particular ways. As they face each new challenge, they recall those chunks and their working memory uses them to inform their next move. That’s why they’re so fast.

  Journalist and editor Philip E Ross explains in a Scientific American article that experts use structured knowledge more than they use active analysis of what’s in front of them:

  The expert relies not so much on an intrinsically stronger power of analysis as on a store of structured knowledge. When confronted with a difficult position, a weaker player may calculate for half an hour, often looking many moves ahead, yet miss the right continuation, whereas a grandmaster sees the move immediately, without consciously analyzing anything at all.

  Experienced general practitioner doctors can diagnose problems the second they look at a patient. They’ll follow that intuition up with diagnostic tests, but it’s likely to be correct. Like a chess grandmaster, they’re recalling chunks of information tied together, such as the groups of symptoms of different conditions. That’s despite seeing hundreds or thousands of patients who could have any of thousands of conditions. That’s even despite patients giving incomplete or irrelevant information. Wouldn’t you love to be able to do that in your own field? To look at a problem and straight away see the perfect solution without any conscious effort? It’s completely possible if you hone your intuition.

  Remember, your chunks are only as good as your observation skills and your honesty about your experiences. It is, however, an important part of what lets us make intuitive judgments. The other piece of the puzzle is heuristics.

  Heuristics

  The technical definition of heuristic is a simple procedure that helps find adequate, though often imperfect, answers to difficult questions. ―Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow

  Herbert Simon first proposed in the 1950s that making rational decisions every time is too cognitively taxing to be sensible. If people had to analyze which way to run when the tiger came for them in prehistoric time, we wouldn’t exist today. And life would be pretty boring if you weighed up every choice, every minute of the day. Simon coined the term 'satisficing' to describe the common decision-making heuristic of selecting the first option that is sufficient to satisfy our minimum requirements. So you might be a hungry vegetarian. When you’re looking for lunch, you grab the first sandwich you see that doesn’t contain meat. No time for checking out every single lunch option in the area—you’ve got stuff to do.

  Psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky famously expanded on the concept in the 1970s, identifying dozens of common heuristics as part of their research into cognitive shortcuts. Some of these, such as anchors, availability, and representativeness, reflect how our brains are built. And they often lead us astray.

  In Thinking, Fast and Slow, Kahneman provides many examples of the influence of the immediate past on our judgments. For example, when exposed to a large number immediately before making a guess about the height of a redwood tree, we may subsequently guess a higher number, and vice versa. Or we may judge the truth or value of something based on the ease with which we can recall supporting examples.

  In these cases, it’s important to be aware of how our tendency towards these types of heuristics may negatively influence our outcomes. You don’t want to make big decisions based on the anecdotes you can most easily recall. They’re probably not the most useful information. But there are other types of heuristics, useful ones that we create based on experience.

  Athletes rely on heuristics to make decisions—most sports don't allow the time for rational analysis. Things move too fast. As Gerd Gigerenzer, psychologist and author of a series of books on decision-making, writes in Gut Feelings: Shortcuts to Better Decision-Making, if you ask a professional baseball player how they manage to catch a ball as it flies through the air, it's doubtful if they can give a meaningful answer. Based on their movements, it looks as if they're able to perform complex calculations, taking into account factors like wind speed.

&
nbsp; In the short amount of time they have available, this is impossible. Most athletes don't know the relevant calculations, nor is mathematical skill a prerequisite for athletic skill. Instead, as Gigerenzer describes, they use heuristics picked up through trial and error. One example is “the gaze heuristic”—“In situations where the ball is already high up in the air: Fix your gaze on the ball, start running, and adjust your running speed so that the angle of the gaze remains constant.” The amazing part is that they don’t even know they’re using this heuristic.

  These heuristics are apt for situations which don’t lend themselves to identifying a perfect solution, such as when there is no ideal answer or there’s too little time to do extensive research. Sometimes you must react quickly. No time for analysis. When someone makes an intuitive decision, it's likely they're using a heuristic of some type.

  Gigerenzer describes intuition as “a form of unconscious intelligence” and “the steering wheel through life.” So we can think of intuition as being chunked knowledge that experience has turned into a heuristic. It is this intuition that produces a “hell yeah!” when we’re faced with an opportunity.

  Improving Intuition

  Many things—such as loving, going to sleep, or behaving unaffectedly—are done worst when we try hardest to do them. —C. S. Lewis

  Now that we know how most of our decisions are in fact intuitive—that this approach is not inherently irrational and can be super useful—how can we embrace and improve our intuition?

  In the ancient Greek myth of Orpheus, the musician attempts to rescue his wife, Eurydice, from the underworld after she dies from a viper bite. Orpheus charms the gods of the underworld with his music. They let him retrieve Eurydice, on the condition that he doesn’t look back. But as he climbs back to the upper world he looks back to check if she's following, only for her to vanish. This time, she’s gone forever. The gods won’t give Orpheus another chance.

  That's a good metaphor for intuition. The conundrum is that we can't force it. We just have to trust it. Trying too hard is counterproductive. If you look back, it’s gone.

  This is known as the centipede effect, which states that reflecting on an automatic process makes us worse at it, as in the old story about a centipede who forgets how to walk when asked which order it moves its legs in. Maybe you've experienced this while trying to teach a child how to tie their shoelaces, or a new coworker how to do a basic task you've done hundreds of times. The routine becomes surprisingly complicated when we reflect on it. Athletes in high-stakes situations are especially prone to the centipede effect. The more they think, the worse they perform.

  So when you’re establishing if something is a “hell yeah!” spending more time deliberating it won’t help. Intuition is, by its nature, immediate.

  Develop Self-Awareness

  It’s not necessarily easy to identify and follow a “hell yeah!” One major barrier, as we’ve mentioned, is the stigma that can surround intuition, leading to a form of learned helplessness where we don't trust our gut feelings. However, we can change that.

  According to research into intuitive decision-making, the most essential factor is deep fluency for the area, such as you’d expect from chess experts who have spent decades playing. The depth of a decision-maker’s knowledge is key. We improve our intuition by chunking away large amounts of information and learning useful heuristics. Contrary to popular belief, there's no set amount of time required to master a given area. It’s not 10,000 hours or any other figure. It depends on the field and how you practice, and how you define mastery.

  If you want to be able to trust your gut feelings, you have to put effort into learning where your intuition let you down. Don’t abandon it, improve it.

  Life is full of signs. The trick is to know how to read them. ―Abraham Verghese

  If you're swamped with potential projects, clarify to yourself exactly what your requirements are for a 'hell yeah!' opportunity and where your strengths lie. Become fluent in your own strengths and standards. If you don’t know which job to take or career path to pursue, learn about your needs as a worker, as a team member, as a leader. What does your ideal environment look like? Your ideal day? What do you really want?

  While your life isn't something you can master like a game of chess, it pays to know what you actually want, to have a deep understanding of short and long-term wishes. An easy criticism to make of the “hell yeah!” approach is that it encourages instant gratification and only doing what feels good now. But if we're making decisions with an implicit understanding of what will benefit us in the long-term, the opposite is true. It's easier to make decisions that will benefit you a year from now if you have a deep fluency in how you work as a person, what your needs are, and where you want to end up. If you don’t know where you want to go, you’ll end up getting nowhere.

  Rational Intuition

  Balance intuition with rigor. ―Howard Schultz, Onward: How Starbucks Fought for Its Life without Losing Its Soul

  Intuition and rationality are not mutually exclusive. Intuition, as we’ve been talking about it, is inherently rational. It’s the logical response based on experience.

  One study of traders in four London banks found that while both inexperienced and experienced participants talked about intuition, inexperienced traders tended to regard it as a mysterious, uncontrollable process (“It's almost like a sixth sense”), while experienced traders “tended to reflect critically about the origins of their intuitions and to bring them together with more objective information” (“I may examine opportunities based on intuition that something is going to happen, but the decision is based on something I think is rational”).

  The highest performers used metacognition—thinking about thinking—to critically assess their intuition, and knew how to distinguish relevant and irrelevant emotions. This is important. Intuitions need to be updated based on the results of our decisions. We have to learn. The best traders in the study didn’t just think, they thought about how they think. They examined their own thought processes for biases or logical fallacies.

  Here is where a decision journal will take you to the next level. It’s a notebook, physical or digital, where you log the decisions you make and how they pan out so you can get better over the long term.

  After you've said “hell yeah!” or “hell no!,” take a moment to record details such as the main variables governing the wider situation, the options you considered, any possible complications you anticipate, and your expected outcome. The precise details will vary depending on the decision and your preferences. But the intention is to be able to later look for flaws in your intuition that you can correct. Like the traders did. Capturing your initial mindset will also stop you from evaluating solely on outcomes. You need to change the feedback loop.

  Sometimes good decisions have bad results. And sometimes you make a terrible decision that, due to an excessive amount of luck, turns out okay. But you don’t want to make those too often, because luck isn’t constant. Sooner or later, we all regress to the mean.

  They say the definition of insanity is doing the same thing expecting different results. But we can't always tell if we're repeating ourselves, or if we’re mistaking the factors that are contributing to success or failure. By recording the context of your major decisions you will give yourself the absolute best tool to get better in the future. What if you found out that most of the problems in your life were caused by you making the same sort of bad decisions again and again? A decision journal can help highlight this. So head to your local stationery shop, buy a pile of cheap little notebooks, and start carrying one everywhere. Then use it each time you make a decision.

  I’ll say it again because this point is so important: recording outcomes of decisions and comparing these to our initial goals and thought processes can let us diagnose common biases and unhelpful heuristics.

  Take one of the most common biases which distorts our ability to catch a “hell yeah!”: the illusory truth effec
t. This is the widespread tendency to assume information is correct after being exposed to it multiple times.

  Researchers first identified the illusory truth effect in the 1970s, with a series of experiments where students were asked to rate their certainty as to the truth of 60 statements on a range of areas of knowledge. The statements were chosen so it would be possible though unlikely for the students to know if they were correct or incorrect. Not too obscure, not too common. Repeating this exercise on three occasions, each a fortnight apart, the researchers included a few of the statements every time but changed the rest. With each repetition, the students grew more certain of the truth of the repeated statements.

  The illusory truth effect explains the enduring effectiveness of advertising (even though we know it's not “real”), why memorable myths can persist even after they're discredited (such as the belief that vitamin C prevents colds or that we only use 10% of our brains), and why many people swear by affirmations.

  Imagine you're deciding whether going to a conference is a “hell yeah!” or a “hell no!”. The tickets aren’t cheap and you’d need to fly to a different state. Your initial intuition says that you're enthusiastic enough to justify the time and cost involved. But on reflection, you realize you've lately seen a lot of sponsored content espousing the conference, from some of your favorite thought leaders. It's possible that repeated exposure to positive sentiments has distorted your intuition. After critically reflecting on the relevant information, you might change your mind.

  So what if you're struggling to identify your intuitive judgments? Flip a coin. No, really.

  Some people swear by this as a means of unlocking their gut feeling. It's not that you should go with whichever answer the coin gives, it's that you get an immediate sense of whether it's a “hell yeah!” or not. If the coin comes up one way and you feel a stab of disappointment, you know to go with the other, and vice versa. There's more to this method than you might expect. It’s all about unlocking your intuition.