When Should You Trust Your Intuition?

One of the great and least spoken about benefits of having a job isn't the money or health insurance. It's escaping job interviews entirely.

You forget how brutal they are until you're back on the market. Then, once you land something, you never want to think about interviews again. Especially now, when employers hold all the leverage. They'll put you through a gauntlet.

Constantly interviewing for jobs takes something out of you. Successive waves of rejection start to chip away at your confidence, your sense of control. You repeat the same stories, smile the same way, deliver the same lines. After a while, you can hear yourself performing. You do well. You nail all the interviews.

Then days pass. Weeks. You get an email rejection if you’re lucky. You wonder who they hired instead. What did that person have that you didn't? The truth is, nothing. The interviewer's gut said yes to them. That's it

I’ve interviewed for jobs, and I’ve hired people. Every time, it’s the same story. Each applicant looks the same on paper. They all prepare the same answers, project the same energy. Even the tricks you learn online to “stand out”, everyone does them too.

So hiring managers end up using their gut. But you as an applicant can’t prepare for that. You can’t predict it. That’s what makes constant interviewing a brutal process.

Executives do the same thing all the time. Half of all major business decisions are gut decisions, but they can never admit it in public. They fear appearing irrational.

Much of modern consulting exists to rationalize gut decisions, to make feelings look like logic. The German psychologist Gerd Gigerenzer found that over half of consulting engagements are post-hoc justifications, hired to dress intuition up as analysis.

What’s funny is that many times executives decide to go against their intuition because they can’t really justify it other than gut instinct. In corporations you need to appear to be logical with your decisions or you risk your job. So they choose a worse option they can at least justify. It saves them their job.

You see why data is so important in organizations. Executives can craft an argument that other people can sympathize with, everyone will assume you’re rational and it may save your job.

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Which leads me to speculate that you're only truly free in life when you don't have to explain why you did something.

What is Intuition?

Despite how much intuition shapes our lives, most people have never been taught when to use it, or when not to.

Gerd Gigerenzer is one of the few psychologists worth reading because he’s spent decades studying the rules that govern intuition..

Intuition is compressed experience.

It’s knowing without knowing why you know. Unconscious intelligence. Part of it is evolutionary, the other part comes from experience. Your mind tracks patterns you don’t consciously notice. You’re learning all the time without realizing it. Then one day, you get a feeling. Intuition is memory turned into emotion.

What makes Gigerenzer unique is that he knows how intuition can be trained. When we study and practice heuristics (the simple rules we use to make decisions) our intuition gets sharper. Over time, that makes us genuinely smarter and react quickly to our environment.

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From the brilliant Gerd Gigerenzer... 👨🏼‍⚕️ #doctorsoftiktok #doctorsadvice #doctortiktok #alternativemedicine #conspiracytiktok #conspirancytheory

Is This a Problem of Risk or Uncertainty?

So when should you trust your intuition?

Gigerenzer offers a framework. Start by asking whether this a problem of risk or uncertainty?

If it's a risk problem like games of chance where all outcomes and probabilities are known, or simple financial calculations where every variable is fixed, then just calculate. Write down the probabilities. Think through the problem systematically.

If it's an uncertainty problem like medical decisions, hiring, relationships, creative work, anything involving other people's intentions, intuition becomes your primary tool. These are situations where outcomes can't be fully known or predicted, even when statistics exist.

Hiring is a classic uncertainty problem. You can't know the future performance of a candidate, their chemistry with the team, or if they'll get a better offer in two months. This is why hiring managers fall back on their gut

But intuition isn't magic. It requires experience and heuristics. Most people don't know which side they're on, modern life creates the illusion we live in a risk world (data, analytics, metrics everywhere), but most of life is still uncertainty.

Which raises another question, when is your intuition actually reliable?

Experts Should Choose the First Option

The rule is simple, if you're an expert, trust the first option. If you're not an expert, take some time to think about all the options and build experience until you can rely on the first option.

When you’ve spent years in an environment, your mind starts ranking options by how quickly they appear. The first thought is the most refined pattern your memory can retrieve. The second is weaker. The rest are noise.

• A firefighter senses a floor will collapse before seeing cracks

• An ER doctor knows a patient is declining before the vitals show it

• A mother immediately knows something is wrong with her child before anyone else notices it.

That’s why experts move fast without feeling rushed. Across fields from chess to medicine, studies show the same thing: the first instinct sees what reason takes too long to find.

You can see this become weaponized in tennis. A common way to break an opponent's rhythm is to make them overthink. Get them to second-guess. Once they start deliberating instead of flowing, their performance drops. The same trick works everywhere. Make an expert doubt their first instinct, force them to choose anything but the first option, and you jam them. You gain the advantage

But if you're a novice, the opposite is true. Your first instinct is often wrong. The more time you spend thinking, the better your answers become.

Enter Heuristics

So we have a clear picture for when intuition works: in the face of uncertainty, provided you have expertise. But this presents a dilemma. What do you do when a problem is uncertain, but you lack the deep experience to trust your gut?

Reach for a heuristic. A heuristic is just a simple, efficient rule, a mental shortcut, that helps you make good decisions quickly. For example, how to exercise

You’re apartment hunting. Instead of visiting fifty places to find the perfect one, you take the first that fits your budget, location, and space needs. That’s the satisficing heuristic, stopping at the first acceptable option rather than searching for the absolute best. It saves time, avoids analysis paralysis, and often performs just as well as optimizing, especially when the “best” choice is uncertain or impossible to identify.

Gigerenzer's crucial insight is that good intuition is often just heuristics internalized through practice. Feelings are signals that you're using the correct heuristic to solve a problem. Experts simply baked hundreds of these rules into their subconscious through experience.

You can consciously build your own toolbox of heuristics and make yourself smarter.

1) Learned heuristics - These are heuristics we already know that you can implement right away. You can consciously develop and practice them your specific domains of life, career, investments, relationships.

2) Evolved heuristics - These are the rules hardwired into our brains through evolution. They work brilliantly in the environments we evolved in but can misfire in modern contexts.

3) Cultural heuristics - These are the proverbs and rules of thumb passed down through generations. They are sometimes called parables. If a heuristic survives for centuries, it's usually because it produces reliably good outcomes.

Learned Heuristics

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