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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, scrollbars=no,
resizable=no, target=_top");

It was a pop-up ad. He had a sudden sense of certainty-a gut feel-that this was the solution.

When you visited a Tripod page, the instructions embedded in the code he had written would spawn a small pop-up ad in its own window. It was technically separate-and hence not associated-with the particular page that it overlaid.

He couldn't contain his excitement. This weird, hacky solution was going to change the entire web experience. "It was a way to associate an ad with a user's page without putting it directly on the page, which advertisers worried would imply an association between their brand and the page's content," Zuckerman explained.

Today, pop-up ads hold an undeniable place in the history of online advertising. Not only did they solve the attention and association issues that Zuckerman was originally trying to figure out but they addressed the dwindling banner ad click-through rates that were also plaguing the industry. Pop-up ads saved online advertising and allowed companies to capture the attention of increasingly ad-blind users, and they translated to real ROI, where advertisers could start to determine if their ads were actually driving tangible results for their businesses. As a result, today marketers can more efficiently manage their campaigns across multiple websites. They're able to report on how users are interacting with their ads, make changes to a live campaign, reach their audience in hyper-targeted ways, and, in turn, pay according to search and pay-per-click through new pricing models based on cost per impression (CPM).

For those of us on the receiving end of these pop-up ads, they are a nuisance. Indeed, pop-ups have been called everything from "the most hated advertising technique" to "the internet's original sin." Google pop-ups, and you'll see that the top results all try to address questions like "How do I stop pop-ups?" "How do I block pop-ups?" and "How do I disable pop-ups?" Zuckerman has even apologized for creating the underlying code that unleashed them upon unsuspecting web surfers, despite his good intentions.

What Is Gut Feel?

It might seem like pop-ups came to Ethan Zuckerman as an immediate impulse. This impulse, however, was actually the result of an extensive process that began with a cocktail of familiarity and newness, and external data and personal experience, that gave rise to a pause, and then a sensation, and then a moment of clarity and certainty when he finally scribbled down that tiny snippet of code that would go on to change everyone's experience of web browsing forever.

How did Zuckerman know that he was in the midst of a breakthrough? And how can we create similar moments of breakthrough in our lives?

To answer these questions, we must first answer-and really answer-the question of "What is gut feel?" Let me ask you: What has been your definition up until now? Have you thought of gut feel as something good? Bad? Smart? Foolish? Rational? Emotional? Does it allow you to merely blink and know that an ancient statue in the Getty Museum is a fake, as Malcolm Gladwell would describe? Or is it something you see as fickle and undependable because our brains are lazy, relying on heuristics and error-laden shortcuts, as Daniel Kahneman claimed in Thinking, Fast and Slow? Do you think it depends? If so, what does it depend on?

I believe that the reason there is so much disagreement and debate on the nature of gut feel is because we've been trying to answer two questions at once. 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.

Gut feel is a flash of clarity. It's a sudden moment of insight from deep within that often cannot be completely explained, yet inspires a strong sense of conviction, faith, and assurance.

Intuition is a mode of processing nonsequential information. Intuition is a process that can be short or long, during which information is accessed, and external data (as inputs) interact with your personal knowledge and experience, to enable you to form a judgment or make a decision. Intuition is the process; the outcome is the flash of clarity that we recognize as our gut feel. One is the process; the other is the outcome. Related yet distinct.

During this process-consider the word intuition synonymous with the term intuiting process-we are accessing information that we've stored in our long-term memory, information that we've acquired through associated learning, information induced by exposure to available options, and even information through unconscious cognition.

Although we experience gut feel-which is synonymous in my mind with gut feel outcome or gut feel breakthrough-as a sudden flash, it requires time to mature and it requires the intuitive process that leads up to the discrete moment of clarity and recognition. Those months that Zuckerman spent pondering the problem of his online advertisement, gathering information and thinking through solutions, were a necessary condition for arriving at his Eureka moment. His understanding happened gradually over the course of those months, even though the answer came suddenly, in a moment. We often don't recognize it that way because we tend to experience it instantly, as opposed to as a culmination of a process.

Judith Orloff, in her book The Power of Intuition, says: "Gut feelings are those rapid, physical responses that we sometimes get, which guide our immediate decisions. Intuition, however, is subtler and often involves a process of unconscious reasoning that informs our insights and judgments." She differentiates between the process and the outcome but doesn't go as far as to explicitly state that gut feel is the outcome. Similarly, Brené Brown, of Daring Greatly fame, concurs: "While gut feelings can be impulsive and reactionary, intuition is a quieter, more contemplative process that often requires time to reveal its insights." Gerd Gigerenzer, author of Gut Feelings: The Intelligence of the Unconscious, comes the closest by declaring that intuition involves a deeper level of cognition and understanding, integrating past experiences and knowledge, with gut feel the response (to this).

Some think that gut feel is part of emotional intelligence and vice versa. Daniel Goleman, one of the foundational scholars of emotional intelligence, has discussed how gut feelings provide the basis of extracting life experiences to apply to any emotional sense of purpose, meaning, or ethics and vice versa. In this way, gut feel is related to emotional intelligence. Peter Salovey and John Mayer, also considered pioneers in the field of emotional intelligence, state that people with lower emotional intelligence tend to misread their own bodily signals and somatic cues. They sometimes misinterpret what their gut feel is trying to tell them. But gut feel goes beyond emotional intelligence. When honed, emotional intelligence can help us understand our experiences, background, lived truths, memories, emotions, and trauma in a way that informs our gut feel.

Many misunderstand gut feel as a mystical, instant panacea that will just tell us the answer. Or, at the other extreme, dismiss it and cite examples where data and data alone reigns supreme-like in the instance of "Moneyball," the sabermetric approach that used analytical, evidence-based information 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. The story is an argument for rigorous statistical analysis and data eclipsing all else.

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 only when he realized that the experience of a manager still had a place in the game.

Indeed, researcher David De Cremer and chess grand master and World Chess Champion Garry Kasparov looked into this amalgam of data and experience and found that even with all the fanfare about how AI, machine learning, and data-centric modeling will change the nature of decision-making, it's only when AI and human intelligence augment each other that we truly see breakthroughs. In 1997 IBM's Deep Blue computer defeated Kasparov, leading to decades of discussion about the power of data and artificial intelligence vis-à-vis human intelligence. But out of Kasparov's defeat came his investigation into the type of chess player who would dominate. His conclusion: the centaur chess player. Neither man alone nor machine alone. Mike Cassidy, who has studied this interplay between humans and machines, describes a centaur chess player as "one who plays the game by marrying human intuition, creativity and empathy with a computer's brute-force ability to remember and calculate a staggering number of chess moves, countermoves and outcomes." It's by combining data with personal experience, over the course of a process in which players and computers are interacting, that leads to the best outcome. As Kasparov describes, "Weak human + machine + better process is superior to a strong computer alone and, more remarkably, superior to a strong human + machine + inferior process."

The outcome is reliant on the strength of the process. The reliability of your gut feel is dependent on the quality of your intuiting process.

It was the analytics, combined with "feeling" the game, that led to success for Billy Beane as well. Both data and scout player evaluations helped them quantify the intangibles and build a team. It's individuals who ultimately need to interpret the data, slice and dice it in operative ways, integrate it into what you already know, make decisions, and act on them-whether you're in baseball, chess, or business.

This is why I often say that the more important question isn't necessarily "What is gut feel?" but "Who is gut feel?" And by answering this question, we'll be able to grasp a richer, fuller definition that will allow us to develop our ability to reach intentional breakthroughs: Gut feel is a flash of clarity resulting from an intuiting process that draws on the interaction of personal experience and external data.

Who Is Gut Feel?

If gut feel is the outcome and intuition is the process, then there must be an individual in whom this is taking place. Gut feel is you. As a professor, I often say to my students: "The most beautiful story you ever tell should be the story of who you are and the collection of all you love." Gut feel is informed by the entirety of your lived experience: your knowledge, observations, background, memories, truths, relationships, feelings, emotional intelligence, disappointments, losses, and trauma. Gut feel is you because it stems from your individual interpretation of the external data that you are receiving and acquiring, and it is the culmination of everything that takes place during your intuiting process. The gut feel breakthroughs you have will be distinct and personal, specific just to you. They cannot be explained; they cannot be transferred.

For this reason, once you fully comprehend, recognize, and harness it, you can use it to make the right decisions and act on them, with a greater chance of success. You can learn how to rely on past experiences, thoughts, emotions, tendencies-everything that makes us unique and makes us who we are-to master the intuiting process that leads to gut feel breakthroughs that you can undeniably trust. Understanding that gut feel is you allows you to discover that there is also a unique, personal way you experience it. Just like there are different body types, so too are there individual idiosyncrasies in how our gut feel breakthroughs manifest.

Over the course of this book, we will hone and master our intuiting process, and sharpen the recognition and activation of our gut feel so that it becomes a reliable superpower that drives our success. For that to happen, we need to listen closely to ensure it isn't drowned out by the noise around us-recognizing that another important characteristic of gut feel is that it can be quiet and unassuming and quite easy to snub. You may already be feeling the urge to move to the intuiting process and consider your own intuitive patterns. But hold that impulse because we're not done laying the groundwork. We'll continue discussing the outcome of intuition-gut feel-so we can better grasp and master both the experience of arriving at a conclusion, however quiet, as well as the nonlinear process leading up to it, more effectively.

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Gut Feel Is Not
Easily Heard

Listen to what whispers
and not what screams.

Surigao City in the Philippines is known as the City of Island Adventures because of its seventeen beautiful islands, each with long stretches of pristine white-sand beaches, underwater marvels, mystical caves, and massive mangrove forests. One of my students grew up there. I said to him, "You must have amazing childhood memories of beaches and island adventures." He shook his head and then shared that his most powerful memories were not of the stunning natural beauty but of boats and killer typhoons. "As a child," he shared, "I learned the most important life and business lesson: 'Ships don't sink because of the water around them; ships sink because of the water that gets in them.' It always reminds me that you can't let what's happening around you get inside of you and weigh you down."