Blink

Finished 11/13/2021

This book was about trusting your gut instincts and how sometimes you can just know that something is going to happen, but not be able to explain it. Basically, if you do something for a really long time, your brain starts to see patterns and differences that you can’t explain in your words. One of the examples was the tennis coach that could tell when someone would double fault 17/18 times and he didn’t know how he knew, he just knew. Another example was the art museum that thought that a sculpture was real, but a lot of the leading Greek sculptures specialists knew there was something wrong about it after a minute of being in the same room as the sculpture that was deemed real by the evidence presented, that the museum had spent months going through and studying to make sure it was legitimate. This also lead to the conclusion that sometimes we want something to be real so badly that we perceive it as real, even when it’s not. We trick ourselves.

The book basically says that sometimes you can’t rely on the facts, you just have to trust your gut and find a happy medium because you need facts to make observations based off of, but sometimes you just know. The book also talks about a general that trusted his gut instinct more than the “data.” This led to him winning a skirmish against the data that America had because he used “outdated” techniques and they basically had to tell him to knock it off so that they could be right.

Key takeaways from this book for me are that I need to trust my gut instinct more and that I need to keep learning and knowing more so that I can be able to trust these gut instincts more and be able to make better perceptions and decisions about those perceptions.