CAUTION: This email originated from outside of Penguin Random House. Please be extra cautious when opening file attachments or clicking on links. 1 Intuition Is a Process, Gut Feel an Outcome Gut feel is a flash of clarity resulting from an intuiting process that draws on the interaction of personal experience and external data. In the late 1990s, the first-ever web page was created by Tim Berners-Lee, sparking the beginning of the Internet Age. As the World Wide Web started to evolve and internet users began to grapple with the significance of immediately available, universally broad access to information, Ethan Zuckerman, who was an employee at tripod.com and in charge of the design and implementation of the website, was contending with his own quandary. Web page-hosting sites, including tripod.com, couldn''t quite figure out their revenue model.

While advertisers seemed willing to pay, they were unhappy about how their ads appeared side by side with website content that would be associated with their brands. Sometimes the content was irrelevant and disconnected, like in the case of advertisements from employment agencies about job opportunities in health care being placed next to articles about real estate investments. Other times, however, ads would be placed next to content that was disparaging, inappropriate, or downright offensive, which resulted in numerous complaints from advertisers. Zuckerman had been pondering this issue for months, looking through ideas he had scribbled on Post-it notes, when he had a realization: Ads needed to be seen and couldn''t be hidden because clicking between pages was too clunky. But they had to be less prominent and invasive. Why couldn''t they be like his Post-it notes? As he stared at his computer, he pictured a Post-it note on his screen, covering just a tiny portion of it-big enough to notice but small enough to be able to focus on everything else on his screen. A few moments later, he scribbled down: window.open(''http://tripod.

com/navbar.html''" width=200, height=400, toolbar=no, scrollbars=no, resizable=no, target=_top"); It was a pop-up ad. He had a sudden sense of certainty-a gut feel-that this was the solution. When you visited a Tripod page, the instructions embedded in the code he had written would spawn a small pop-up ad in its own window. It was technically separate-and hence not associated-with the particular page that it overlaid. He couldn''t contain his excitement. This weird, hacky solution was going to change the entire web experience. "It was a way to associate an ad with a user''s page without putting it directly on the page, which advertisers worried would imply an association between their brand and the page''s content," Zuckerman explained.

Today, pop-up ads hold an undeniable place in the history of online advertising. Not only did they solve the attention and association issues that Zuckerman was originally trying to figure out but they addressed the dwindling banner ad click-through rates that were also plaguing the industry. Pop-up ads saved online advertising and allowed companies to capture the attention of increasingly ad-blind users, and they translated to real ROI, where advertisers could start to determine if their ads were actually driving tangible results for their businesses. As a result, today marketers can more efficiently manage their campaigns across multiple websites. They''re able to report on how users are interacting with their ads, make changes to a live campaign, reach their audience in hyper-targeted ways, and, in turn, pay according to search and pay-per-click through new pricing models based on cost per impression (CPM). For those of us on the receiving end of these pop-up ads, they are a nuisance. Indeed, pop-ups have been called everything from "the most hated advertising technique" to "the internet''s original sin." Google pop-ups, and you''ll see that the top results all try to address questions like "How do I stop pop-ups?" "How do I block pop-ups?" and "How do I disable pop-ups?" Zuckerman has even apologized for creating the underlying code that unleashed them upon unsuspecting web surfers, despite his good intentions.

What Is Gut Feel? It might seem like pop-ups came to Ethan Zuckerman as an immediate impulse. This impulse, however, was actually the result of an extensive process that began with a cocktail of familiarity and newness, and external data and personal experience, that gave rise to a pause, and then a sensation, and then a moment of clarity and certainty when he finally scribbled down that tiny snippet of code that would go on to change everyone''s experience of web browsing forever. How did Zuckerman know that he was in the midst of a breakthrough? And how can we create similar moments of breakthrough in our lives? To answer these questions, we must first answer-and really answer-the question of "What is gut feel?" Let me ask you: What has been your definition up until now? Have you thought of gut feel as something good? Bad? Smart? Foolish? Rational? Emotional? Does it allow you to merely blink and know that an ancient statue in the Getty Museum is a fake, as Malcolm Gladwell would describe? Or is it something you see as fickle and undependable because our brains are lazy, relying on heuristics and error-laden shortcuts, as Daniel Kahneman claimed in Thinking, Fast and Slow? Do you think it depends? If so, what does it depend on? I believe that the reason there is so much disagreement and debate on the nature of gut feel is because we''ve been trying to answer two questions at once. We''ve confused gut feel with intuition and used these terms interchangeably. I argue that, although they are related, they are distinct from each other. Gut feel is a flash of clarity. It''s a sudden moment of insight from deep within that often cannot be completely explained, yet inspires a strong sense of conviction, faith, and assurance. Intuition is a mode of processing nonsequential information.

Intuition is a process that can be short or long, during which information is accessed, and external data (as inputs) interact with your personal knowledge and experience, to enable you to form a judgment or make a decision. Intuition is the process; the outcome is the flash of clarity that we recognize as our gut feel. One is the process; the other is the outcome. Related yet distinct. During this process-consider the word intuition synonymous with the term intuiting process-we are accessing information that we''ve stored in our long-term memory, information that we''ve acquired through associated learning, information induced by exposure to available options, and even information through unconscious cognition. Although we experience gut feel-which is synonymous in my mind with gut feel outcome or gut feel breakthrough-as a sudden flash, it requires time to mature and it requires the intuitive process that leads up to the discrete moment of clarity and recognition. Those months that Zuckerman spent pondering the problem of his online advertisement, gathering information and thinking through solutions, were a necessary condition for arriving at his Eureka moment. His understanding happened gradually over the course of those months, even though the answer came suddenly, in a moment.

We often don''t recognize it that way because we tend to experience it instantly, as opposed to as a culmination of a process. Judith Orloff, in her book The Power of Intuition, says: "Gut feelings are those rapid, physical responses that we sometimes get, which guide our immediate decisions. Intuition, however, is subtler and often involves a process of unconscious reasoning that informs our insights and judgments." She differentiates between the process and the outcome but doesn''t go as far as to explicitly state that gut feel is the outcome. Similarly, Brené Brown, of Daring Greatly fame, concurs: "While gut feelings can be impulsive and reactionary, intuition is a quieter, more contemplative process that often requires time to reveal its insights." Gerd Gigerenzer, author of Gut Feelings: The Intelligence of the Unconscious, comes the closest by declaring that intuition involves a deeper level of cognition and understanding, integrating past experiences and knowledge, with gut feel the response (to this). Some think that gut feel is part of emotional intelligence and vice versa. Daniel Goleman, one of the foundational scholars of emotional intelligence, has discussed how gut feelings provide the basis of extracting life experiences to apply to any emotional sense of purpose, meaning, or ethics and vice versa.

In this way, gut feel is related to emotional intelligence. Peter Salovey and John Mayer, also considered pioneers in the field of emotional intelligence, state that people with lower emotional intelligence tend to misread their own bodily signals and somatic cues. They sometimes misinterpret what their gut feel is trying to tell them. But gut feel goes beyond emotional intelligence. When honed, emotional intelligence can help us understand our experiences, background, lived truths, memories, emotions, and trauma in a way that informs our gut feel. Many misunderstand gut feel as a mystical, instant panacea that will just tell us the answer. Or, at the other extreme, dismiss it and cite examples where data and data alone reigns supreme-like in the instance of "Moneyball," the sabermetric approach that used analytical, evidence-based information to recruit and build a baseball team, pioneered by Billy Beane and Peter Brand of the Oakland A''s. Stories like Moneyball seem to leave us with.