You Already Know: The Science of Mastering Your Intuition

You Already Know: The Science of Mastering Your Intuition

From celebrated business school professor and author of Edge , a research-backed framework for honing and harnessing your intuition to make the right decisions and attain greater levels of achievement. What sets the most successful people apart? You may think that the correct answer is hard work (and it’s certainly part of it), but in her interviews of the most accomplished individuals—from entrepreneurs and investors to Olympic athletes and Pulitzer Prize winners—Distinguished Professor of Management Laura Huang discovered that what they called their gut feel, the product of their intuition, played the most important role. We all have intuition, our brain's intelligent synthesis of external data and the entirety of our personal experiences. As such, it draws from what we already know and what we didn’t even realize we knew. This culminates in a gut feel that manifests as a eureka moment, a Spidey sense, or a jolt that changes how we see things and compels us to act. Most people experience these flashes of clarity passively, as random occurrences that come out of the blue. In You Already Know , Laura Huang scientifically breaks down what happens during the intuiting process and details the personified, physical, emotional, and cognitive components of the gut feel that results. Along the way, she provides valuable exercises to help you recognize, understand, and strengthen your intuition. Purposeful practice enables you to: • take it from passive and accidental to active and intentional • develop it to deliver increasingly reliable signals • heighten your own sensitivity to the signals it sends Drawing on Huang’s pioneering research on individual judgments and decision-making, organizational psychology, and behavioral economics, as well as hundreds of interviews, You Already Know offers a highly practical model that equips you to leverage your most powerful and underutilized resource to make better decisions, take swift action, and accomplish your most ambitious goals. As the external world gets ever noisier, often, the smartest thing you can do is turn your focus inward and trust your gut to guide you in the right direction. Laura Huang is Distinguished Professor of Management and Organizational Development at Northeastern University, and has held faculty positions at Harvard Business School and the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania. A Kauffman Fellow, she was a recipient of the 2020 Cozzarelli Prize given by the National Academy of Sciences, and was named one of the world’s best 40 business school professors by Poets & Quants . In 2021 she was included on the Global Thinkers50 Radar list as one of the top thinkers with the potential to change the world of theory and practice. Her speaking and consulting clients include Google, Microsoft, McKinsey, Lululemon, Sanofi, Pandora, and Asana. She is the author of Edge: Turning Adversity into Advantage . CAUTION: This email originated from outside of Penguin Random House. Please be extra cautious when opening file attachments or clicking on links. 1 Intuition Is a Process, Gut Feel an Outcome Gut feel is a flash of clarity resulting from an intuiting process that draws on the interaction of personal experience and external data. In the late 1990s, the first-ever web page was created by Tim Berners-Lee, sparking the beginning of the Internet Age. As the World Wide Web started to evolve and internet users began to grapple with the significance of immediately available, universally broad access to information, Ethan Zuckerman, who was an employee at tripod.com and in charge of the design and implementation of the website, was contending with his own quandary. Web page-hosting sites, including tripod.com, couldn't quite figure out their revenue model. While advertisers seemed willing to pay, they were unhappy about how their ads appeared side by side with website content that would be associated with their brands. Sometimes the content was irrelevant and disconnected, like in the case of advertisements from employment agencies about job opportunities in health care being placed next to articles about real estate investments. Other times, however, ads would be placed next to content that was disparaging, inappropriate, or downright offensive, which resulted in numerous complaints from advertisers. Zuckerman had been pondering this issue for months, looking through ideas he had scribbled on Post-it notes, when he had a realization: Ads needed to be seen and couldn't be hidden because clicking between pages was too clunky. But they had to be less prominent and invasive. Why couldn't they be like his Post-it notes? As he stared at his computer, he pictured a Post-it note on his screen, covering just a tiny portion of it-big enough to notice but small enough to be able to focus on everything else on his screen. A few moments later, he scribbled down: window.open('http://tripod.com/navbar.html'" width=200, height=400, toolbar=no, scro