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.

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.

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