thus help us make better decisions and behave better, an anchor that will bring us closer to reality, that will ground us and rejuvenate us. That anchor is intuition.
The Highest and Best Uses of Intuition
Intuition should not be used in a vacuum. At least I would never use it alone. My intuitive skills are just not advanced enough — and likely never will be — to depend upon them to the exclusion of external data and logical thinking. Likewise, intuition should never be ignored. At a minimum, intuition is a tool to be used in conjunction with all other input in the decision-making process. At certain times, however, intuition can be dominant, including the following:
When Relevant Facts are Scarce or Conflicting. Many times we find ourselves in a position of having insufficient facts, facts that conflict with each other, or facts that are old or inapplicable. This is the time to turn to intuition for direction.
When We Just Can’t Decide Among Alternatives. At other rimes, we are just plain undecided. We can’t make a decision. We line up the pros and cons, we weigh them, and we analyze them ad nauseum, but we still can’t decide. Intuition, in my experience, always provides the answer, and always the right one. We may fight our intuition, stacking all the objective data against it and arguing why our intuition is wrong, but intuition, in my experience, is always correct.
When Under Time Pressure. Intuition is a perfect tool, indeed the only tool, when there is time pressure to act or react and the data does not provide a clear course. I believe the old adage that if something is too good to be true, it usually isn’t true. But there have been times in my