Blink by Malcolm Gladwell

The Power of Thinking without Thinking

I found this book about the power of intuition fascinating. Essentially the idea is that when we develop expertise and intuition in a certain area, our intuition can become a more reliable guide than what we end up with by using our analytical thinking. The trick is to know when to trust our snap judgements, and when they are likely to lead us astray or bias us in some way. Often we are quite unaware of our biases and unless we’re aware of when they’re operating, we go along thinking that we’re making objective choices when really we’re not.

Although it’s tangential to the main theme, one of the most interesting insights I got from this book was in the section on spontaneity where the author talked about the golden rule of improvised comedy: characters accept everything that happens to them. They accept whatever … Continue reading…