In “You Already Know: The Science of Mastering Your Intuition,” Huang, a professor of management and organizational development at Northeastern University, recounts that entrepreneurs, investors, and Olympic athletes told her the key to their success has been what they called their gut feel — a physical, emotional, and cognitive ball of wax.
Sure, there’s hours of practice and hard work, innate talent, deep analysis of data, or even luck for some folks. But gut feeling was the primary factor that drove their decision-making and life choices.
Here are edited excerpts of our conversation:
Kerry Hannon: How do you define gut feel?
Laura Huang: What I found in my research is that gut feel is a flash of clarity, a jolt, that results from an intuiting process. That’s the basic definition. Some people think of it as this mystical, magical quality. Most people think of this as a random occurrence. It’s not.
How is intuition different from gut feel?
Intuition is a process. Gut feeling is the outcome. Intuition is where we’re combining our experiences, our expertise, our culture, our background, and data. At the end of that process, there’s our gut feel that we can trust, that allows us to make decisions. It compels us to act.
We all have intuition. It draws from what we already know and what we didn’t even realize we knew.
We’ve confused gut feel with intuition and used these terms interchangeably. I argue that, although they are related, they are distinct from each other.
When we’re making a decision, it’s never completely isolated. We’re drawing from one thing that might have happened to us yesterday and something that we’re seeing now, and something that we loved to do when we were 5 years old. It’s really this executive summary of lots of pieces that we’re drawing from that is the intuitive process.
What does gut feel provide?
It provides us with a way to take action. A gut feel allows us to go for directionality. We go in the direction of a quadrant. Even though we might not end up at point B, the absolute point, we end up in this quadrant that is very much where we should be and where we want to be.
How would your gut feeling relate to making investment decisions?
With investment decisions, there’s hard data and numbers — P/E ratios, income and loss statements. Even with all of those, there’s uncertainty and complexity to the decisions. We need to rely, for example, on our judgments of who is the leader of this organization? What does their top management team look like? Will they be able to weather through this next economic storm, or this next political storm? There are all sorts of things that have nothing to do with the objective hard data. There are humans involved. That is where the nuance comes in.
Can you give another example?
In Michael Lewis’s book “Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game,” analytical, evidence-based information was used to recruit and build a baseball team, pioneered by Billy Beane and Peter Brand of the Oakland A’s.
Stories like “Moneyball” seem to leave us with the conclusion: Don’t rely on your gut. Rely on the data. Data doesn’t lie.
Yet what was so interesting to me was that Billy Beane’s team didn’t start doing well until he got to know his players and engaged with them, drawing on his own experiences as a player. The data was critical, and the analytics did reshape the game, but that was when he realized that the experience of a manager still had a place in the game — it was the manager’s gut feeling.
Why don’t people typically go to their gut when making decisions?
They don’t trust it. Let’s go back to investment decisions. You should be making your choices very differently than other people, thinking about it in terms of what it means to you and only you. Is this a short-term one? Is this a long-term investment? Is this something where dividends come with it? Is this something where I’m looking at it in terms of a portfolio strategy?
We sometimes forget that piece of it because the first thing most of us do is ask other people we trust: What would you do? What do you think about this stock? What do you think about this start-up company?
We need to listen to what whispers to us. That’s where the best decisions come from. A bit of other people’s opinions, algorithms, data, machine learning, and AI goes into it, but pause and create a stillness so that you can listen to your own opinions, your own whispers, and what you think.
How is gut feel our superpower?
It is our superpower because it’s ours. It allows us to really tap into things that we know for our goals — from our silence, from our whispers — rather than doing things according to others.
The gut feel breakthroughs you have will be distinct and personal, specific just to you. They cannot be explained; they cannot be transferred.
Can AI replace our gut instinct?
It could supplement it, and it helps us think about new ways that we can understand our intuition, but it will never replace the benefit of our personal experience in making successful decisions.
Talk about how flipping a coin can trigger a gut response.
This works when you come down to two choices. There are trade-offs to be made for each: on one hand, on the other hand.
Even if it’s a serious decision, once that coin flip says ‘tails it is,’ pause. How do you feel? If you find you wish it went the other way, there’s your answer. You’ve now given yourself that spark, that catalyst for recognizing your gut feel. It presents itself.
Kerry Hannon is a Senior Columnist at Yahoo Finance. She is a career and retirement strategist and the author of 14 books, including the forthcoming “Retirement Bites: A Gen X Guide to Securing Your Financial Future,” “In Control at 50+: How to Succeed in the New World of Work,” and “Never Too Old to Get Rich.” Follow her on Bluesky.
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