“Hell Yeah!” or “Hell No!”

And How to Tell the Difference: The Definitive Guide to Intuitive Decision-Making

Table of Contents

What is “‘Hell Yeah!’ or ‘Hell No!’?”

How Our Brains Let Us Down

Intuition: Thinking Without Thinking You're Thinking

The Amateur and the Expert

Chunking

Heuristics

Improving Intuition

Develop Self-Awareness

Rational Intuition

Environment Matters

Putting Intuition to Use

Tame Problems vs. Wicked Problems

Conclusion

What is “Hell Yeah!’ or ‘Hell No!”?

“If you're not saying "HELL YEAH!" about something”, wrote writer and CD Baby founder Derek Sivers in 2009, 'say no.'

We're all overstretched and overcommitted these days. Running around trying to become better, trying to check all the boxes: Kids, parents, friends. Read, meditate, exercise. “So busy!” has become a perfectly normal (even praiseworthy) response to the question “how are you?” Being busy used to be the exception. Now it’s the rule. The feeling is one of being perpetually behind, sprinting faster and faster to keep up, yet seeming to stay in the same place. “Busy” is no longer an adjective, it's a state of being, one that can leave us chasing endless new time management techniques and productivity tactics.

This widespread feeling of time poverty might explain why people still read Derek Sivers's short, succinct blog post years later. This idea that there is a simple way to take control of our time and jettison all the waste that clutters up our day is beyond appealing.

So what is he really talking about? After the success of CD Baby, Sivers found himself with an increasing list of demands on his time. I’m sure you can relate to that, even if you haven’t had the experience of selling the largest online e-commerce store for indie musicians. We all know what schedule creep feels like.

But instead of saying yes to as many opportunities as possible, Sivers adopted a simple filter: saying no to any opportunity or request that didn’t elicit an enthusiastic “hell yeah!”

In other words, if you aren’t thinking, “That sounds so amazing, I can’t think of a better way to spend my time,” then politely decline. It’s easy, at least on paper. Reject anything that doesn’t make you excited. Don’t waste time trying to convince yourself. Just say no and move on without any guilt. Your time is too precious.

If you feel overwhelmed, or if your attention is scattered in fifty directions at once, you can gain a lot from this approach. By paying attention to your emotional response to opportunities, you can narrow your focus, only devoting time and energy to what's truly worthwhile.

“Hell yeah!” is about trusting your intuition.

It’s about knowing yourself and learning from your experiences to continually hone your knowledge about what works for you.

There are serious upsides to making intuitive decisions across numerous areas of our lives: work, relationships, personal finance, side projects, and more. Upsides like more time doing things we love, and discovering where we can really contribute.

For example, imagine you've received a job offer where the salary is a little below your ideal number. You tell the recruiters this, but they say there's no room for any negotiation whatsoever. They're not willing to budge.

The standard approach to a lowball job offer might be to consider the positives of that role and the career advancement it offers. Surely it's not worth the time you'll spend finding and interviewing for a different role. Anyway, the offer is only slightly below your ideal salary so maybe it’s not so bad. Right? This is where most of us go in this situation. But this is how we talk ourselves into average and miss out on the greatness that lies on the other side of a “hell yeah!”

We don’t consider the opportunity costs, what we’re missing out on, as we rationalize why we should take the offer. But think of it this way. Even if the job is a “hell yeah!” for you, the unwillingness to negotiate could indicate that you're not a “hell yeah!” for the company in question.

If they truly felt you were the perfect person for the role, they'd be willing to at least discuss meeting your requirements. After all, it's going to cost the company time and money to find another candidate. Plus, letting an ideal candidate go could leave them worse off in the long run. The lowball offer could indicate they've also made it to multiple people. So you'd be well advised to reconsider and wait for a genuine “hell yeah!” rather than taking a substandard offer.

Why? Because when it’s a “hell yeah!” you’re more willing to go all in. You’re more likely to get creative, persevere through the obstacles, take calculated risks, and get to success. It’s a win-win for everyone involved.

In this book we’re going to look at how we can use intuitive emotional responses, like “hell yeah,” to inform decision-making, what it is, how it benefits us, and explore how we can develop this ability. We'll also look at the major error many of us make when thinking about life decisions, and how masters of their fields hone their intuition.

How Our Brains Let Us Down

Before you can start using “hell yeah!” to make decisions, it will help to understand a bit about how your brain works.

US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld once said, “As you know, you go to war with the Army you have. They’re not the Army you might want or wish to have at a later time.” We can apply that to decision-making. We make decisions with the brains we have, not the brains we might want to have.

You don’t think the way you believe you do. Many common decision-making approaches, like listing pros and cons, ignore the reality of natural decision-making processes. Most of the time, we're not making rational calculations. Nope, not even you. We aren’t objectively looking for pros and cons. We’re not considering long-term effects. We’re evaluating our wants, not our needs.

In Obliquity: Why Our Goals Are Best Achieved Indirectly, economist and writer John Kay describes his experience running an economic consultancy firm that sold decision-making models to corporations. After a decade of doing this, Kay asked himself why he didn’t use similar models for making decisions in his business and personal life. That was when he realized his clients weren't using them as intended. Instead, they were making decisions, then using his models to justify them, both to themselves and others. They didn't need the models—they needed a means of strengthening their arguments. Rationalizing their choices. Justifying their decisions.

Although we might like to think otherwise, this is how we all frequently make decisions. Even the smartest people do it. It's known as choice-supportive bias. It’s similar to confirmation bias, except that it exclusively refers to the way we retrospectively assign support to whatever justifies our choices. The advantages of our chosen option are crystal clear and obvious. Any disadvantages fade into the background. For the other competing options, the disadvantages are clearer and the advantages go unnoticed.

Rationalization is not the same as rationality--it’s the process of telling ourselves that something irrational is rational, and whatever we’ve done was the right thing to do. Decision-making models, like the ones Kay sold at his consultancy, can serve as a means of rationalization.

Choice-supportive bias is most obvious when we're making purchases (hence why it's also known as post-purchase rationalization). If you're choosing a new car, you might walk into a dealership and decide what you want within seconds, then spend hours listing the pros and cons of various models. Funnily enough, the pros list for your chosen car will be longer and the cons list shorter than for the others. The list provides a handy rationalization for your choice, even though gathering more information hasn't improved the quality of the decision. We're biased towards placing undue emphasis on irrelevant information that supports what we want or overstating the value of less meaningful factors in the effort to prove we’ve made the right choice.

To give another example of how choice-supportive bias can play out, imagine you're listening to a friend complain about their relationship after a couple of drinks. Again. They say they're thinking of ending it because in between work, training for a marathon, and evenings with friends, they don't have time for their partner. They claim lack of time is the only reason they can’t make it work. But it doesn't take a psychologist to know that can't be the real explanation. If the relationship were a priority—a genuine “hell yeah!”—they'd be willing to make the trade-offs necessary to find the time. Lack of time is a less hurtful excuse than lack of interest. People make time for what they really want: the things that make them get up in the morning. The things that make them feel awesome. What they truly value.

Mark Manson, author of The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck, later expanded on the “hell yeah!” concept in a blog post about dating and relationships. Manson argued that you shouldn't get involved with someone unless your answer to the question of whether you want to spend time with them is an unequivocal “fuck yes!” and you're confident they feel the same. Unless there's mutual enthusiasm with no need to play games, Manson posits, it's not worthwhile.

That's why the “hell yeah!” or “hell no!” approach can be a game-changer. Instead of wasting time justifying our intuitive decisions, or ending up in endless rounds of “what if?” we recognize the reality of how our brains work and adjust for it. Instead of rationalizing, we can work to improve our intuitive decision-making. We can learn from each “hell yeah!” to improve our intuition in the future.

Are you excited to start making this skill work for you? I’m sure you are. But before we look at how we can improve our intuitive decision-making capabilities, it's critical to understand what intuition is, what it is not, and how it works.

Intuition: Thinking Without Thinking You're Thinking

We usually use the word “intuition”—sometimes also “judgment” or even “creativity”—to refer to this ability of experts to respond to situations in their domains of expertise almost instantaneously and relatively accurately. —Herbert Simon

In Plato's dialogue The Apology of Socrates, the character of Socrates, on trial for corrupting the youth of Athens, claims he has a “daimon,” a guiding spirit that follows him around. When he is on the verge of acting unethically or making a wrong choice, the daimon guides him. It is a voice that appears to come from nowhere and tells him what to do.

Intuition is regarded by some as similar in nature to Socrates' concept of a daimon: a mystical, mysterious force that swoops out of nowhere. We’ve all surely experienced dramatic moments of intuition at some point. Someone returns home and immediately knows a stranger has been in the house before they see any obvious signs, or knows a child is ill before they show any clear symptoms, or double-checks something because it feels wrong and uncovers a huge issue. Some people take those moments as evidence for supernatural abilities or a ‘sixth sense.’

They're not. Intuition isn’t mystical, like the daimon. Instead, intuition is a form of unconscious pattern matching, recognizing what we’ve seen before. There's nothing mysterious about it, although it can feel that way. Intuition is generally defined as the capacity to know something without knowing how you know it. In some cases that means you can't point to any evidence, beyond a certain feeling. We make intuitive decisions without consciously working through the options. We draw intuitive conclusions without considering the path that got us there.

So you might unlock your front door and subconsciously notice a slight drop in temperature from a broken window, an ill-at-ease cat, and a faint whiff of cigarette smoke. While your conscious mind is busy fumbling with your shoelaces, you pick up on those subtle cues and match them to what you've previously learned—then suddenly you know someone has been in the house, before you see the obvious signs. The whole process required no conscious effort and you might never know how you knew. Yet there’s no mistaking that creepy feeling. Whereas sometimes we arrive at a conclusion by mulling over a problem, intentionally or otherwise (such as when you get a good idea in the shower or come up with a solution after taking a walk), intuition is more immediate.

But it’s super important to also understand what intuition isn’t. Don’t confuse it with prejudice or assumption. Intuition is a form of knowledge that has been honed over many years through many experiences, but it has its limits.

Our brains are equipped to make snap decisions under pressure. If you accidentally touch a hot pan, you immediately pull your hand away without conscious thought. You don’t need to weigh up the pros and cons. If you were walking along the street and a car suddenly swerved onto the pavement, you’d instinctively leap out the way without consciously thinking about it. Such is the power of intuition. But concluding that the driver was deliberately aiming for you, or has a certain ethnic background—these things don’t make the cut. Even though we may not bother to trace our intuitions back to the knowledge that produced them, we could if we needed to. Assumptions and prejudice don’t have the same intellectual underpinnings. Any basic rational investigation will reveal they are based in what we believe, not what we know.

Before we dive into how intuition is actually developed, let’s look at an example highlighting the role it plays in our professional lives. It is, in fact, one of the distinguishing features between amateurs and experts.

The Amateur and the Expert

An expert art historian and an art history student walk into a room (no, this isn't the beginning of a bad joke.) They both look at a recently discovered statue that may be genuine or a forgery.

The student carefully studies every detail of the statue, takes notes and photographs, then spends hours researching the proposed background. They compare the details to their other works and process a lot of information. Failing to find any signs of forgery, they conclude that as far as they can tell, it appears to be genuine.

Meanwhile, the expert glances at the exact same statue and knows in seconds that it’s a fake. Through years of study, they’ve built up an internalized understanding of how that type of statue should look, down to the tiniest details. As they look at the statue, their mind quickly matches what they know against what they see.

This story comes from Blink, by Malcolm Gladwell. In the 1980s, the Getty made moves to buy a statue called a kouros, dating back to the 6th century BC. This type of statue is extremely rare and they’re usually found in a bad condition. But this one was beautiful and pristine—hence its $10 million price tag. Geologists and historians studied its composition and provenance. They were sure it was real.

A number of art historians who knew all about kouroi didn’t agree. They spotted little details, like its fingernails and unusually fresh condition. And they were right. It was a fake.

To an outsider, it may seem as if the expert in this example has an inbuilt instinct for their field. It looks as if what they do is completely natural and comes easily to them. While the student might run through the same information during their study of the statue, the difference is that for the expert that information is processed below the surface, without conscious recall.

The expert may not know how they know and may need to make a conscious effort to identify the signs, so they can justify their intuition or educate their student. A challenging task for the amateur is no harder than picking lunch for the professional. According to the recognition-primed decision-making model, a theory of how we make fast decisions in complex conditions, experts can reach a conclusion faster because they match the current situation to ones they’ve previously encountered. Amateurs must run through the possibilities one by one.

Scientist Gary Klein, who has extensively studied groups like experienced firefighters and how they seem to intuitively make the correct decisions in split seconds, explains, “These are intuitions that are based on 10, 15, 20 years or more of experience that has allowed them to build a repertoire of patterns that allow them to quickly frame situations, size situations up, and know what to do.”

That’s a really key point: to get to the place where your intuition leads you in the right direction, you need experience. Not just any experience. You need lots of it in repeatable, consistent situations in which you get immediate feedback. This was the point made by Daniel Kahneman in Thinking, Fast and Slow. The more consistent the parameters and rules that govern any particular situation, the more reliable your developing intuition will be.

Firefighters are dealing with a lot of physics and chemistry, quite reliable stuff. Art can only be faked in so many ways. Social media, on the other hand, doesn’t have the same kind of reliable repetition. It’s always changing and evolving, so the Twitter tactics that worked for you last month might not apply now. It’s impossible to predict what tweet is going to go viral. You can’t rely on your intuition and you need to keep learning new tricks. If you’re an experienced chef you might be able to draw upon your intuition, but if you only know how to make sushi, your expertise might not transfer to baking cakes. 

As Nobel Prize–winning economist Herbert Simon, well known for his work on decision-making heuristics, explained:

A major component of expertise is the ability to recognize a very large number of specific relevant cues when they are present in any situation, and then to retrieve from memory information about what to do when those particular cues are noticed. Because of this knowledge and recognition capability, experts can respond to new situations very rapidly—and usually with considerable accuracy. Of course, on further thought, the initial reaction may not be the correct one, but it is correct in a substantial number of cases and is rarely irrelevant.

Intuitive decision-making is never going to be perfect. It’s never going to accurately read a situation 100% of the time. Referring to intuition incorrectly, like when gamblers claim to know a face card is “due” or four reds in a row means black is going to come up, gives it a bad rap. Hint: intuition doesn’t matter when it’s all about chance. You’re just producing snap judgments with negative consequences and with little basis in reality.

Don’t confuse desire for intuition. Just because you want something to be true, doesn’t mean it is.

Intuition, true intuition, isn’t irrational. In fact, it’s a totally rational output of living—of learning from both success and failure, and of committing to improving one’s knowledge. You input experience and get intuition as a result.

So how do we develop better intuition, beyond just accumulating experience? There are two components to intuition: chunking and heuristics. Let’s take a look at how they work, and how we can develop our capabilities to use them to our advantage. It might not be easy, but you’ll be far more efficient at using your intuition once you understand it.

Chunking

When you know—really know—how to solve a problem just by looking at it, you’ve created a commanding chunk that sweeps like a song through your mind. ―Barbara Oakley, A Mind for Numbers: How to Excel at Math and Science

One component of intuition is “chunking.” To help us encode more memories, our brains group information into “chunks” that are then remembered as a whole. This gets around our inability to store more than roughly five to nine pieces of information in our short-term memory. According to research by psychologist George Miller in the 1950s, that’s our limit. Once we store a chunk in our long term memory, it’s easier to recall everything it contains as if it were one thought. That means we can hold five to nine chunks of information in mind at once.

Chunking is why we’re often taught little rhymes or acronyms to help us remember information. Like I before E, except after C to help with spelling. Or Never Eat Soggy Waffles to remember the points of a compass. Or one I made up in high school to help me remember how to jumpstart a car: red on dead, red alive, black, then back, you’re ready to jive. These examples help me remember information in one chunk.

Daniel Bor, a neuroscientist who studies consciousness and complex thought processes, writes in The Ravenous Brain:

The process of combining more primitive pieces of information to create something more meaningful is a crucial aspect both of learning and of consciousness and is one of the defining features of human experience. Once we have reached adulthood, we have decades of intensive learning behind us, where the discovery of thousands of useful combinations of features, as well as combinations of combinations and so on, has collectively generated an amazingly rich, hierarchical model of the world.

He views chunking as a means of “compressing an unwieldy dataset” into memorable pieces we can recall with ease.

Bor goes on to write, “Although [chunking] can vastly increase the practical limits of working memory, it is not merely a faithful servant of working memory—instead, it is the secret master of this online store and the main purpose of consciousness.” While chunking is sometimes sold as a memory technique, it’s how we automatically process information for later reference. There’s nothing to buy. It’s how your brain already works. It’s how experts manage to scan through what they know so fast, with minimal effort. Chunking ties together what we know for easier recall. If you want to remember more, find ways to package pieces of information together.

A chess grandmaster typically identifies their next move within about five seconds of looking at the board. Even though they’re likely to deliberate for a while longer, their first thought is typically correct. Their intuition is more powerful than their thinking mind. How do they do it?

Researchers believe that chess grandmasters store chunks of information from many years of deliberate, focused practice. For example, they know the options when pieces sit in conjunction with each other in particular ways. As they face each new challenge, they recall those chunks and their working memory uses them to inform their next move. That’s why they’re so fast.

Journalist and editor Philip E Ross explains in a Scientific American article that experts use structured knowledge more than they use active analysis of what’s in front of them:

The expert relies not so much on an intrinsically stronger power of analysis as on a store of structured knowledge. When confronted with a difficult position, a weaker player may calculate for half an hour, often looking many moves ahead, yet miss the right continuation, whereas a grandmaster sees the move immediately, without consciously analyzing anything at all.

Experienced general practitioner doctors can diagnose problems the second they look at a patient. They’ll follow that intuition up with diagnostic tests, but it’s likely to be correct. Like a chess grandmaster, they’re recalling chunks of information tied together, such as the groups of symptoms of different conditions. That’s despite seeing hundreds or thousands of patients who could have any of thousands of conditions. That’s even despite patients giving incomplete or irrelevant information. Wouldn’t you love to be able to do that in your own field? To look at a problem and straight away see the perfect solution without any conscious effort? It’s completely possible if you hone your intuition.

Remember, your chunks are only as good as your observation skills and your honesty about your experiences. It is, however, an important part of what lets us make intuitive judgments. The other piece of the puzzle is heuristics.

Heuristics

The technical definition of heuristic is a simple procedure that helps find adequate, though often imperfect, answers to difficult questions. ―Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow

Herbert Simon first proposed in the 1950s that making rational decisions every time is too cognitively taxing to be sensible. If people had to analyze which way to run when the tiger came for them in prehistoric time, we wouldn’t exist today. And life would be pretty boring if you weighed up every choice, every minute of the day. Simon coined the term 'satisficing' to describe the common decision-making heuristic of selecting the first option that is sufficient to satisfy our minimum requirements. So you might be a hungry vegetarian. When you’re looking for lunch, you grab the first sandwich you see that doesn’t contain meat. No time for checking out every single lunch option in the area—you’ve got stuff to do.

Psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky famously expanded on the concept in the 1970s, identifying dozens of common heuristics as part of their research into cognitive shortcuts. Some of these, such as anchors, availability, and representativeness, reflect how our brains are built. And they often lead us astray.

In Thinking, Fast and Slow, Kahneman provides many examples of the influence of the immediate past on our judgments. For example, when exposed to a large number immediately before making a guess about the height of a redwood tree, we may subsequently guess a higher number, and vice versa. Or we may judge the truth or value of something based on the ease with which we can recall supporting examples.

In these cases, it’s important to be aware of how our tendency towards these types of heuristics may negatively influence our outcomes. You don’t want to make big decisions based on the anecdotes you can most easily recall. They’re probably not the most useful information. But there are other types of heuristics, useful ones that we create based on experience.

Athletes rely on heuristics to make decisions—most sports don't allow the time for rational analysis. Things move too fast. As Gerd Gigerenzer, psychologist and author of a series of books on decision-making, writes in Gut Feelings: Shortcuts to Better Decision-Making, if you ask a professional baseball player how they manage to catch a ball as it flies through the air, it's doubtful if they can give a meaningful answer. Based on their movements, it looks as if they're able to perform complex calculations, taking into account factors like wind speed.

In the short amount of time they have available, this is impossible. Most athletes don't know the relevant calculations, nor is mathematical skill a prerequisite for athletic skill. Instead, as Gigerenzer describes, they use heuristics picked up through trial and error. One example is “the gaze heuristic”—“In situations where the ball is already high up in the air: Fix your gaze on the ball, start running, and adjust your running speed so that the angle of the gaze remains constant.” The amazing part is that they don’t even know they’re using this heuristic.

These heuristics are apt for situations which don’t lend themselves to identifying a perfect solution, such as when there is no ideal answer or there’s too little time to do extensive research. Sometimes you must react quickly. No time for analysis. When someone makes an intuitive decision, it's likely they're using a heuristic of some type.

Gigerenzer describes intuition as “a form of unconscious intelligence” and “the steering wheel through life.” So we can think of intuition as being chunked knowledge that experience has turned into a heuristic. It is this intuition that produces a “hell yeah!” when we’re faced with an opportunity.

Improving Intuition

Many things—such as loving, going to sleep, or behaving unaffectedly—are done worst when we try hardest to do them. —C. S. Lewis

Now that we know how most of our decisions are in fact intuitive—that this approach is not inherently irrational and can be super useful—how can we embrace and improve our intuition?

In the ancient Greek myth of Orpheus, the musician attempts to rescue his wife, Eurydice, from the underworld after she dies from a viper bite. Orpheus charms the gods of the underworld with his music. They let him retrieve Eurydice, on the condition that he doesn’t look back. But as he climbs back to the upper world he looks back to check if she's following, only for her to vanish. This time, she’s gone forever. The gods won’t give Orpheus another chance.

That's a good metaphor for intuition. The conundrum is that we can't force it. We just have to trust it. Trying too hard is counterproductive. If you look back, it’s gone.

This is known as the centipede effect, which states that reflecting on an automatic process makes us worse at it, as in the old story about a centipede who forgets how to walk when asked which order it moves its legs in. Maybe you've experienced this while trying to teach a child how to tie their shoelaces, or a new coworker how to do a basic task you've done hundreds of times. The routine becomes surprisingly complicated when we reflect on it. Athletes in high-stakes situations are especially prone to the centipede effect. The more they think, the worse they perform.

So when you’re establishing if something is a “hell yeah!” spending more time deliberating it won’t help. Intuition is, by its nature, immediate.

Develop Self-Awareness

It’s not necessarily easy to identify and follow a “hell yeah!” One major barrier, as we’ve mentioned, is the stigma that can surround intuition, leading to a form of learned helplessness where we don't trust our gut feelings. However, we can change that.

According to research into intuitive decision-making, the most essential factor is deep fluency for the area, such as you’d expect from chess experts who have spent decades playing. The depth of a decision-maker’s knowledge is key. We improve our intuition by chunking away large amounts of information and learning useful heuristics. Contrary to popular belief, there's no set amount of time required to master a given area. It’s not 10,000 hours or any other figure. It depends on the field and how you practice, and how you define mastery.

If you want to be able to trust your gut feelings, you have to put effort into learning where your intuition let you down. Don’t abandon it, improve it.

Life is full of signs. The trick is to know how to read them. ―Abraham Verghese

If you're swamped with potential projects, clarify to yourself exactly what your requirements are for a 'hell yeah!' opportunity and where your strengths lie. Become fluent in your own strengths and standards. If you don’t know which job to take or career path to pursue, learn about your needs as a worker, as a team member, as a leader. What does your ideal environment look like? Your ideal day? What do you really want?

While your life isn't something you can master like a game of chess, it pays to know what you actually want, to have a deep understanding of short and long-term wishes. An easy criticism to make of the “hell yeah!” approach is that it encourages instant gratification and only doing what feels good now. But if we're making decisions with an implicit understanding of what will benefit us in the long-term, the opposite is true. It's easier to make decisions that will benefit you a year from now if you have a deep fluency in how you work as a person, what your needs are, and where you want to end up. If you don’t know where you want to go, you’ll end up getting nowhere.

Rational Intuition

Balance intuition with rigor. ―Howard Schultz, Onward: How Starbucks Fought for Its Life without Losing Its Soul

Intuition and rationality are not mutually exclusive. Intuition, as we’ve been talking about it, is inherently rational. It’s the logical response based on experience.

One study of traders in four London banks found that while both inexperienced and experienced participants talked about intuition, inexperienced traders tended to regard it as a mysterious, uncontrollable process (“It's almost like a sixth sense”), while experienced traders “tended to reflect critically about the origins of their intuitions and to bring them together with more objective information” (“I may examine opportunities based on intuition that something is going to happen, but the decision is based on something I think is rational”).

The highest performers used metacognition—thinking about thinking—to critically assess their intuition, and knew how to distinguish relevant and irrelevant emotions. This is important. Intuitions need to be updated based on the results of our decisions. We have to learn. The best traders in the study didn’t just think, they thought about how they think. They examined their own thought processes for biases or logical fallacies.

Here is where a decision journal will take you to the next level. It’s a notebook, physical or digital, where you log the decisions you make and how they pan out so you can get better over the long term.

After you've said “hell yeah!” or “hell no!,” take a moment to record details such as the main variables governing the wider situation, the options you considered, any possible complications you anticipate, and your expected outcome. The precise details will vary depending on the decision and your preferences. But the intention is to be able to later look for flaws in your intuition that you can correct. Like the traders did. Capturing your initial mindset will also stop you from evaluating solely on outcomes. You need to change the feedback loop.

Sometimes good decisions have bad results. And sometimes you make a terrible decision that, due to an excessive amount of luck, turns out okay. But you don’t want to make those too often, because luck isn’t constant. Sooner or later, we all regress to the mean.

They say the definition of insanity is doing the same thing expecting different results. But we can't always tell if we're repeating ourselves, or if we’re mistaking the factors that are contributing to success or failure. By recording the context of your major decisions you will give yourself the absolute best tool to get better in the future. What if you found out that most of the problems in your life were caused by you making the same sort of bad decisions again and again? A decision journal can help highlight this. So head to your local stationery shop, buy a pile of cheap little notebooks, and start carrying one everywhere. Then use it each time you make a decision.

I’ll say it again because this point is so important: recording outcomes of decisions and comparing these to our initial goals and thought processes can let us diagnose common biases and unhelpful heuristics.

Take one of the most common biases which distorts our ability to catch a “hell yeah!”: the illusory truth effect. This is the widespread tendency to assume information is correct after being exposed to it multiple times.

Researchers first identified the illusory truth effect in the 1970s, with a series of experiments where students were asked to rate their certainty as to the truth of 60 statements on a range of areas of knowledge. The statements were chosen so it would be possible though unlikely for the students to know if they were correct or incorrect. Not too obscure, not too common. Repeating this exercise on three occasions, each a fortnight apart, the researchers included a few of the statements every time but changed the rest. With each repetition, the students grew more certain of the truth of the repeated statements.

The illusory truth effect explains the enduring effectiveness of advertising (even though we know it's not “real”), why memorable myths can persist even after they're discredited (such as the belief that vitamin C prevents colds or that we only use 10% of our brains), and why many people swear by affirmations.

Imagine you're deciding whether going to a conference is a “hell yeah!” or a “hell no!”. The tickets aren’t cheap and you’d need to fly to a different state. Your initial intuition says that you're enthusiastic enough to justify the time and cost involved. But on reflection, you realize you've lately seen a lot of sponsored content espousing the conference, from some of your favorite thought leaders. It's possible that repeated exposure to positive sentiments has distorted your intuition. After critically reflecting on the relevant information, you might change your mind.

So what if you're struggling to identify your intuitive judgments? Flip a coin. No, really.

Some people swear by this as a means of unlocking their gut feeling. It's not that you should go with whichever answer the coin gives, it's that you get an immediate sense of whether it's a “hell yeah!” or not. If the coin comes up one way and you feel a stab of disappointment, you know to go with the other, and vice versa. There's more to this method than you might expect. It’s all about unlocking your intuition.

What you want is a tool that cuts through all the “what ifs” and “what abouts,” a technique that skips over guilt and the “should dos.” An article on Farnam Street describes a simple thought experiment based on Bayes’ Theorem. If you aren’t sure how much you actually believe something, imagine going into a casino and placing a bet. The idea of quantifying how much we would risk on something being true will tell us a lot about if we actually believe it. For example, say you get a job offer and you are unsure whether to take it. It seems amazing, but you’re doubting yourself. To access your “hell yeah!” or “hell no!” visualize yourself beside a table with a stack of chips. You see a square called “in 1 year my life will rock if I take this job.” How much do you put on it? Ten grand? Twenty bucks? How much you’re willing to risk will tell you immediately what you think about that job. There’s your answer.

Environment Matters

It’s important to recognize that we’re worse at intuitive decision-making when we’re under intense stress or duress, or if we’re sleep deprived or otherwise not at our best. For example, throughout 2018 a sleep-deprived and over-stressed Elon Musk made some dubious decisions, like getting angry at analysts, sending unwise tweets, and alienating employees. No one can make good decisions without ever taking time off. The tired cellist Yo-Yo Ma once left his $2.5-million violin in the back of a taxi (and luckily got it back).

The better your mindset, the better equipped you are to identify a “hell yeah!” People tend to be better at intuitive decision-making in a happy mood and to subsequently place higher value on outcomes if there’s a match between mood and approach. So you want to be calm and well-rested.

As the authors of Thinking, feeling and deciding write, “A guiding metaphor for much cognitive psychology has been the brain as a computer.” This presents emotions as little more than a disruption of rationality: “Thinking has been understood as quite apart from feeling…. Emotions act as a heuristic. That is, emotions provide an accessible summary of experience, cognitions, and memories.” Emotions, in general, are closely intertwined with intuition: “A study of investment club members...found that individuals who experienced more intense emotions achieved higher decision-making performance.... There is also evidence that we rely on emotional cues in rapid, automatic decision-making, and they confer a tangible advantage to everyday decision-making.” You don’t need to act like a robot with no emotions.

Ideally, the bigger the decision, the more important it is to get to “hell yeah!” or “hell no!”, the more we need to give ourselves some calm space to activate our intuition. Being tired and hungry will make us more biased in one direction, while just having won a game will lead us in another.

“Hell yeah!” is important. It means you’re going to go all in.

We don’t want how we felt in the last 10 minutes to be the deciding factor.

Using Intuition

It is not that we have a short time to live, but that we waste a lot of it. Life is long enough, and a sufficiently generous amount has been given to us for the highest achievements if it were all well invested. But when it is wasted in heedless luxury and spent on no good activity, we are forced at last by death’s final constraint to realize that it has passed away before we knew it was passing. —Seneca, On The Shortness of Life

Given a lever long enough, Archimedes claimed over 2000 years ago, he could lift the world. Leverage is a powerful concept. By applying the right amount of force in the right area, we can achieve outsized results. But spreading ourselves too thin gets us nowhere.

We all have a limited amount of time, energy, and resources at our disposal. Like the ancient Egyptians lifting stone blocks weighing up to 100 tons with simple levers, we can often get far better results with a focused effort than with a scattershot, exhausting one. It can be far more effective to make few, high-quality decisions than to attempt to do everything. Getting more done isn't productive if what we're doing doesn't move the needle.

“Hell yeah!” people, opportunities, projects, choices and so on are high-leverage. We feel truly enthusiastic about them, so we bring genuine energy and attention and get results to match. We chose them because we wanted to, not because we couldn't see an alternative or couldn't think of a reason not to. When you start filtering decisions based on your initial intuitive reaction, you stop squandering so much energy on things you feel ambivalent towards. They’re not worth your time.

The financial independence movement is predicated on taking a “hell yeah!” approach to spending. Proponents aim to retire at a relatively young age, well before their sixties. Most don't achieve this through high incomes or inheritances - they do it by only putting money towards uses deemed truly worthwhile and that meet a genuine need. They don't spend for the sake of it and prioritize control of their time over luxury.

We've normalized spending as much money as we have available, even if it doesn't bring happiness and is just the result of habit or social pressure. But if you view each unit of money as a chunk of your life you sacrifice, the perspective shifts. The question is no longer, “What can I afford?” It's, “What's the minimum I can spend while still deriving maximum happiness?” You can buy stuff now or freedom later, but not both. Spending more than necessary means sacrificing your freedom.

Think of car ownership. Owning the largest, most expensive car possible has become, in some cultures, a mark of status. People have developed an expectation that self-worth and vehicle size are one and the same. People are happy to go into high-interest debt to get the biggest car or even to get an additional car.

If this is the case for you, then your “hell yeah!” is about the car, with the associated debt a minor irritation. The trade-offs involved, like working longer in a job you don’t really like just because the paycheck supports that vehicle, are no big deal. But there are others who have no problem driving a low-end car because their “hell yeah!” is about having the freedom to not do any work that isn’t also a “hell yeah!” It’s important to weigh it up before you get caught up in doing what your neighbors or coworkers do.

The “hell yeah!” approach is also in sharp contrast to typical dating advice, which usually advises on reading nebulous signs or persuading others of your worthiness. If you really like someone, you don’t need to wait three days to text them or put on an act. You just do what feels natural and don’t feel the need to manipulate anyone. If someone isn’t messaging you back, you can safely conclude you aren’t a “hell yeah!” for them. For that reason alone, they aren’t a “hell yeah!” for you. This applies to friends, lovers, family, anyone you spend time with. Meaningful relationships take an investment of time, a finite resource for all of us. Recognizing that someone isn’t a “hell yeah!” for you lets you move on to people who genuinely improve your life by being in it.

No matter what form your relationship takes, you always want to focus on the people who actually want to spend time with you. You want to be a “hell yeah!” for others as well. So all the time you stop wasting in dead end relationships can be spent developing your self-awareness of what you have to offer others.

Tame Problems vs. Wicked Problems

You're facing a big decision, one that could dictate the rest of your life. Maybe you're deciding what field of study to pursue, whether you should move to a different country or stay where you are, and so on. Maybe it's smaller but still significant—a big deal requiring an optimal solution. Or is it?

Tame problems include games like chess and the majority of mathematical propositions.... In contrast to these are wicked problems; problems where there is no way of formulating the issue at stake definitively, nor any such thing as a single or definitive solution...life itself is a wicked problem.” —Tom Chatfield, How To Thrive In The Digital Age

In the 1970s, design theorists Horst Rittel and Melvin M. Weber coined the terms “tame and wicked problems.”

A wicked problem has no perfect outcome. It's impossible to solve. We don't even know the requirements for solving it and the problem keeps on changing as we try. When we attempt to solve it, we create new wicked problems which may be equally resistant to resolution. Any solutions are contrary to the principle of bivalence, being neither right nor wrong, merely better or worse.

In Design of Business: Why Design Thinking Is The Next Competitive Advantage, Roger L Martin compares attempting to solve a wicked problem to “trying to grasp a handful of sand: the harder you grip, the more the sand slips between your fingers.” The more we ponder it, the more wicked the problem becomes. Keith Grint further explains the role of uncertainty in wicked problems in Leadership: A Very Short Introduction: tame problems have occurred before so they are more certain. They are predictable. Meanwhile, “a wicked problem is complex rather than just complicated—that is, it cannot be removed from its environment, solved, and returned without affecting the environment.”

World poverty is a wicked problem. There are countless perspectives on what the issue is and how to solve it, many contradictory. It’s connected to other wicked problems like gender imbalances, educational inequality, health care, and so on. We don’t have comprehensive data to assess the extent of every part of the problem. Add in numerous ideological and cultural conflicts, a gulf between those who experience it and those with the most power to solve it, and a resistance to change in some areas, and there’s no outright solution. Healthcare and climate change are other wicked problems.

This is in contrast to “tame” problems which we can define and solve, even if not easily. Solutions are either right or wrong, and it’s usually clear straight away which one is which. And if it’s not, it’s possible to try multiple solutions to find the right one through trial and error. Video games, chess, and sports matches are all tame problems. You can win them or lose them.

We often approach life decisions, such as relationships and “finding your passion,” as if they were tame problems. There must be a solution. We just need to find it. Yet many of the big decisions in our lives concern what could be categorized as wicked problems. There are no right or wrong choices, merely better or worse ones. They are subject to nonlinear dynamics, having unpredictable, even chaotic outcomes. Even if the problem is far from unusual, our individual situations are always unique. If we dislike our choice, there's no option of a do-over. In life, true solutions are rare.

Imagine you're faced with a choice between two job offers. Each has its upsides and downsides, although neither is overwhelmingly better. Perhaps one pays slightly more, while the other has a much shorter commute, or one appears to be more interesting while the other has better benefits.

It may feel as though there is a right answer to be ascertained through rational analysis, such as by making a list of pros and cons. As we've already seen, such methods tend to serve as justifications for what we want to be true which means they aren't as useful as we think.

This is a wicked problem. It changes depending on how you look at it and what you prioritize. Different stakeholders in the decision have radically different ideas of the perfect solution. Your family might prefer you to take the better-paid option. Your close friends may wish you’d choose the shorter commute, leaving more time to spend with them. You only get one shot at making up your mind and can't try again like with a board game if you dislike the choice.

We often overstate the impact life changes will have on our happiness. This is known as hedonic adaptation and was first shown in a study that found that lottery winners tended to return to their baseline level of happiness after a short time. While we may expect to become much happier by making the right decisions, our level of happiness tends to rise only temporarily. Inevitably, new problems and challenges emerge. We grow accustomed to life changes and return to our equilibrium. Homeostasis is a powerful force.

In the case of the job options, if one is a lot better you may feel happier for a while, but you're likely to adapt. If the other is terrible you'll probably adapt too—or, hopefully, leave as soon as possible. While this is not to say the experience would be in any way identical, the differences in happiness may be, averaged out, marginal. What we think will make us happier doesn’t always do so. We can’t predict outcomes on paper.

Solely rational decision-making processes don’t take into account the wide spectrum of possible outcomes for wicked problems and can lead us to expect a particular outcome or to not consider long-tail occurrences—the unexpected but absolutely possible things that could happen. The implicit uncertainty means any sort of mathematical calculations are probably doomed to fail because we can’t assign probabilities to most outcomes, and to be honest, most of us don’t have the ability to do complex probability math. If that's the case, there's something to be said for learning from our experiences, being as aware as we can of our biases, and simply making “hell yeah!” decisions. When we need to confront a wicked problem, we should use our intuition to make decisions we feel good about. If there’s no perfect solution, stop worrying and go with what feels like a “hell yeah!” Make the decision that feels right and stop getting hung up on the details.

Conclusion

Just pay close attention to what excites you and what drains you. —Derek Sivers, Anything You Want

By paying closer attention to our initial gut feelings when we’re presented with decisions, we can put our time and energy behind the highest leverage opportunities and options. Intuitive judgment can be a powerful means of making decisions that takes into account a lifetime of learning and reflects the reality of how we make up our minds. Although intuition has a reputation for being less effective than rational decision-making processes, it’s far from irrational and is something we can hone over time.

The obvious caveat is that we can't use the “hell yeah!” approach for all our decisions. It works best for areas with rapid feedback loops, and where the consequences of imperfect decisions aren't drastic. As Daniel Kahneman advises, ask yourself, “Is the domain one where there is enough regularity to support intuitions?” Domains like medicine and chess are ideal for intuition because the feedback on bad decisions is rapid and unambiguous. Domains that are more subject to randomness and therefore attribution errors are less suitable, because the patterns we unconsciously identify may not be patterns at all. The key is the quality of feedback

When you look at an opportunity and think “hell yeah!” you’re drawing on a lifetime of learning and experiencing. As we’ve just seen, what looks like a split-second decision is nothing of the sort. As dramatic as it sounds, your entire life has led up to that moment. So use it well.

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