You Already Know (US)

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.