There is no such thing as an unintuitive person; everyone has intuition. The difficulty comes in recognizing and using it. What does it take to effectively use your intuition? Here are a few suggestions.

• Go right to the heart of any problem or decision. Don’t let a myriad of data, analysis, options, and probabilities overwhelm you and push you into catatonic indecision.

• Clear away the clutter—the long lists of pros and cons—and zero in on the central question. When confronted with a problem, say to yourself, “What’s the essence of this? Never mind the details, what’s the important thing?” Don’t dwell incessantly on all the attributes and complexities of a problem. Pare the situation down to its essential elements.

• A useful technique is to distill a decision down to its core and ask a simple question: Does your gut say “Yes” or “No”?

Do yourself the favor of getting lots of options, then culling the list down to a short and manageable size (five max); then make the best choice that you can, given the time and resources available to you, get on with it, and build your way forward. Note that if you’re doing this with prototype iteration, you don’t have too much at stake, and you will be able to adjust as you go, before you really reach a significant investment. And once you make a choice—then embrace your choice and go with it. When the questions that lead to agonizing creep into your head, evict the thoughts, and direct your energy into living well the decisions you’ve made. Pay attention and learn as you go, of course, but don’t get caught with your eyes fixated on the rearview mirror of decision regret.

This letting-go step relies primarily on personal discipline. Keep your reframed understanding of decision making handy, and be sure to win the internal argument with yourself when you’re tempted to rehash and ruminate. Put in place the support you need to stick with it—find a life design collaborator or team to help remind you why you made the choice or choices you did; make a journal entry about your decision, and reread it when you get confused. Find what works to enable yourself to enjoy your choices fully.

In order to get the results we desire, we must do two things. We must first create the space to reason in our thoughts, feelings, and actions; and second, we must deliberately use that space to think clearly. Once you have mastered this skill, you will find you have an unstoppable advantage.

Decisions made through clear thinking will put you in increasingly better positions, and success will only compound from there.

Many of us have a hard time learning from our decisions. One reason is that our thinking and decision-making process is often invisible to us. We inadvertently conceal from ourselves the steps we took to reach our final decision. Once that decision gets made, we don’t stop to reflect, but just move forward. And when we look back at our decision later, our ego manipulates our memories. We confuse what we know now with what we knew at the time we made the decision. And we see the outcomes and read them back into our intentions: “Oh, I meant to do that.”

If you don’t check your thinking at the time you made the decision— what you knew, what you thought was important, and how you reasoned about it— you’ll never know whether you made a good decision or just got lucky. If you want to learn from decisions, you need to make the invisible thought process as visible and open to scrutiny as possible. The following safeguard can help:

Safeguard: Keep a record of your thoughts at the time you make the decision.

Conclusion

The Value of Clear Thinking

Good judgment is expensive, but poor judgment will cost you a fortune.

The overarching message of this book is that there are invisible instincts that conspire against good judgement. Your defaults encourage you to react without reasoning— to live unconsciously rather than deliberately.

When you revert to defaults, you engage in a game you can't win. When you live a life run on autopilot, you get bad results. You make things worse. You say things that can't be unsaid and do things that can't be undone. You might accomplish your immediate goal, but you fail to realize that you’ve made it harder to achieve your ultimate goals. All of this happens without consciously being aware you are exercising judgment in the first place.