You Already Know

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.

Preface ix
Introduction xi

Part I
Intuition and Gut Feel

1 Intuition Is a Process, Gut Feel an Outcome 3

2 Gut Feel Is Not Easily Heard 13

3 Gut Feel Is Sensed in Three Ways 23

4 Gut Feel Doesn't Lie 33

5 Gut Feel Compels Action (and Re-Action) 53


Part II
Intentional Intuition

6 Perceptible: How Do I Engage My Intuition 71

Introspection 83

7 Personified: How Do I Describe Myself? 85

8 Embodied: Where Do I Feel That? 101

9 Emotional: How Do I Feel? 111

10 Cognitive: How Do I Construct Concepts? 123

Interactions 135

11 What Does Your Eureka, Spidey Sense, or Jolt Feel Like? 137

12 Focused Abstraction 161

13 Prompted Action 169

Iterations 181

14 The Relevance of Experience 183

15 The Value of Mistakes 191

Conclusion Deploy Your Superpower 203

Acknowledgements 207

Appendices 211

Notes 221

Index 237