by Sam Kyle
“Hell Yeah!” or “Hell No!”
And How to Tell the Difference: The Definitive Guide to Intuitive Decision-Making
Table of Contents
What is “‘Hell Yeah!’ or ‘Hell No!’?”
How Our Brains Let Us Down
Intuition: Thinking Without Thinking You're Thinking
The Amateur and the Expert
Chunking
Heuristics
Improving Intuition
Develop Self-Awareness
Rational Intuition
Environment Matters
Putting Intuition to Use
Tame Problems vs. Wicked Problems
Conclusion
What is “Hell Yeah!’ or ‘Hell No!”?
“If you're not saying "HELL YEAH!" about something”, wrote writer and CD Baby founder Derek Sivers in 2009, 'say no.'
We're all overstretched and overcommitted these days. Running around trying to become better, trying to check all the boxes: Kids, parents, friends. Read, meditate, exercise. “So busy!” has become a perfectly normal (even praiseworthy) response to the question “how are you?” Being busy used to be the exception. Now it’s the rule. The feeling is one of being perpetually behind, sprinting faster and faster to keep up, yet seeming to stay in the same place. “Busy” is no longer an adjective, it's a state of being, one that can leave us chasing endless new time management techniques and productivity tactics.
This widespread feeling of time poverty might explain why people still read Derek Sivers's short, succinct blog post years later. This idea that there is a simple way to take control of our time and jettison all the waste that clutters up our day is beyond appealing.
So what is he really talking about? After the success of CD Baby, Sivers found himself with an increasing list of demands on his time. I’m sure you can relate to that, even if you haven’t had the experience of selling the largest online e-commerce store for indie musicians. We all know what schedule creep feels like.
But instead of saying yes to as many opportunities as possible, Sivers adopted a simple filter: saying no to any opportunity or request that didn’t elicit an enthusiastic “hell yeah!”
In other words, if you aren’t thinking, “That sounds so amazing, I can’t think of a better way to spend my time,” then politely decline. It’s easy, at least on paper. Reject anything that doesn’t make you excited. Don’t waste time trying to convince yourself. Just say no and move on without any guilt. Your time is too precious.
If you feel overwhelmed, or if your attention is scattered in fifty directions at once, you can gain a lot from this approach. By paying attention to your emotional response to opportunities, you can narrow your focus, only devoting time and energy to what's truly worthwhile.
“Hell yeah!” is about trusting your intuition.
It’s about knowing yourself and learning from your experiences to continually hone your knowledge about what works for you.
There are serious upsides to making intuitive decisions across numerous areas of our lives: work, relationships, personal finance, side projects, and more. Upsides like more time doing things we love, and discovering where we can really contribute.
For example, imagine you've received a job offer where the salary is a little below your ideal number. You tell the recruiters this, but they say there's no room for any negotiation whatsoever. They're not willing to budge.
The standard approach to a lowball job offer might be to consider the positives of that role and the career advancement it offers. Surely it's not worth the time you'll spend finding and interviewing for a different role. Anyway, the offer is only slightly below your ideal salary so maybe it’s not so bad. Right? This is where most of us go in this situation. But this is how we talk ourselves into average and miss out on the greatness that lies on the other side of a “hell yeah!”
We don’t consider the opportunity costs, what we’re missing out on, as we rationalize why we should take the offer. But think of it this way. Even if the job is a “hell yeah!” for you, the unwillingness to negotiate could indicate that you're not a “hell yeah!” for the company in question.
If they truly felt you were the perfect person for the role, they'd be willing to at least discuss meeting your requirements. After all, it's going to cost the company time and money to find another candidate. Plus, letting an ideal candidate go could leave them worse off in the long run. The lowball offer could indicate they've also made it to multiple people. So you'd be well advised to reconsider and wait for a genuine “hell yeah!” rather than taking a substandard offer.
Why? Because when it’s a “hell yeah!” you’re more willing to go all in. You’re more likely to get creative, persevere through the obstacles, take calculated risks, and get to success. It’s a win-win for everyone involved.
In this book we’re going to look at how we can use intuitive emotional responses, like “hell yeah,” to inform decision-making, what it is, how it benefits us, and explore how we can develop this ability. We'll also look at the major error many of us make when thinking about life decisions, and how masters of their fields hone their intuition.
How Our Brains Let Us Down
Before you can start using “hell yeah!” to make decisions, it will help to understand a bit about how your brain works.
US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld once said, “As you know, you go to war with the Army you have. They’re not the Army you might want or wish to have at a later time.” We can apply that to decision-making. We make decisions with the brains we have, not the brains we might want to have.
You don’t think the way you believe you do. Many common decision-making approaches, like listing pros and cons, ignore the reality of natural decision-making processes. Most of the time, we're not making rational calculations. Nope, not even you. We aren’t objectively looking for pros and cons. We’re not considering long-term effects. We’re evaluating our wants, not our needs.
In Obliquity: Why Our Goals Are Best Achieved Indirectly, economist and writer John Kay describes his experience running an economic consultancy firm that sold decision-making models to corporations. After a decade of doing this, Kay asked himself why he didn’t use similar models for making decisions in his business and personal life. That was when he realized his clients weren't using them as intended. Instead, they were making decisions, then using his models to justify them, both to themselves and others. They didn't need the models—they needed a means of strengthening their arguments. Rationalizing their choices. Justifying their decisions.
Although we might like to think otherwise, this is how we all frequently make decisions. Even the smartest people do it. It's known as choice-supportive bias. It’s similar to confirmation bias, except that it exclusively refers to the way we retrospectively assign support to whatever justifies our choices. The advantages of our chosen option are crystal clear and obvious. Any disadvantages fade into the background. For the other competing options, the disadvantages are clearer and the advantages go unnoticed.
Rationalization is not the same as rationality--it’s the process of telling ourselves that something irrational is rational, and whatever we’ve done was the right thing to do. Decision-making models, like the ones Kay sold at his consultancy, can serve as a means of rationalization.
Choice-supportive bias is most obvious when we're making purchases (hence why it's also known as post-purchase rationalization). If you're choosing a new car, you might walk into a dealership and decide what you want within seconds, then spend hours listing the pros and cons of various models. Funnily enough, the pros list for your chosen car will b
e longer and the cons list shorter than for the others. The list provides a handy rationalization for your choice, even though gathering more information hasn't improved the quality of the decision. We're biased towards placing undue emphasis on irrelevant information that supports what we want or overstating the value of less meaningful factors in the effort to prove we’ve made the right choice.
To give another example of how choice-supportive bias can play out, imagine you're listening to a friend complain about their relationship after a couple of drinks. Again. They say they're thinking of ending it because in between work, training for a marathon, and evenings with friends, they don't have time for their partner. They claim lack of time is the only reason they can’t make it work. But it doesn't take a psychologist to know that can't be the real explanation. If the relationship were a priority—a genuine “hell yeah!”—they'd be willing to make the trade-offs necessary to find the time. Lack of time is a less hurtful excuse than lack of interest. People make time for what they really want: the things that make them get up in the morning. The things that make them feel awesome. What they truly value.
Mark Manson, author of The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck, later expanded on the “hell yeah!” concept in a blog post about dating and relationships. Manson argued that you shouldn't get involved with someone unless your answer to the question of whether you want to spend time with them is an unequivocal “fuck yes!” and you're confident they feel the same. Unless there's mutual enthusiasm with no need to play games, Manson posits, it's not worthwhile.
That's why the “hell yeah!” or “hell no!” approach can be a game-changer. Instead of wasting time justifying our intuitive decisions, or ending up in endless rounds of “what if?” we recognize the reality of how our brains work and adjust for it. Instead of rationalizing, we can work to improve our intuitive decision-making. We can learn from each “hell yeah!” to improve our intuition in the future.
Are you excited to start making this skill work for you? I’m sure you are. But before we look at how we can improve our intuitive decision-making capabilities, it's critical to understand what intuition is, what it is not, and how it works.
Intuition: Thinking Without Thinking You're Thinking
We usually use the word “intuition”—sometimes also “judgment” or even “creativity”—to refer to this ability of experts to respond to situations in their domains of expertise almost instantaneously and relatively accurately. —Herbert Simon
In Plato's dialogue The Apology of Socrates, the character of Socrates, on trial for corrupting the youth of Athens, claims he has a “daimon,” a guiding spirit that follows him around. When he is on the verge of acting unethically or making a wrong choice, the daimon guides him. It is a voice that appears to come from nowhere and tells him what to do.
Intuition is regarded by some as similar in nature to Socrates' concept of a daimon: a mystical, mysterious force that swoops out of nowhere. We’ve all surely experienced dramatic moments of intuition at some point. Someone returns home and immediately knows a stranger has been in the house before they see any obvious signs, or knows a child is ill before they show any clear symptoms, or double-checks something because it feels wrong and uncovers a huge issue. Some people take those moments as evidence for supernatural abilities or a ‘sixth sense.’
They're not. Intuition isn’t mystical, like the daimon. Instead, intuition is a form of unconscious pattern matching, recognizing what we’ve seen before. There's nothing mysterious about it, although it can feel that way. Intuition is generally defined as the capacity to know something without knowing how you know it. In some cases that means you can't point to any evidence, beyond a certain feeling. We make intuitive decisions without consciously working through the options. We draw intuitive conclusions without considering the path that got us there.
So you might unlock your front door and subconsciously notice a slight drop in temperature from a broken window, an ill-at-ease cat, and a faint whiff of cigarette smoke. While your conscious mind is busy fumbling with your shoelaces, you pick up on those subtle cues and match them to what you've previously learned—then suddenly you know someone has been in the house, before you see the obvious signs. The whole process required no conscious effort and you might never know how you knew. Yet there’s no mistaking that creepy feeling. Whereas sometimes we arrive at a conclusion by mulling over a problem, intentionally or otherwise (such as when you get a good idea in the shower or come up with a solution after taking a walk), intuition is more immediate.
But it’s super important to also understand what intuition isn’t. Don’t confuse it with prejudice or assumption. Intuition is a form of knowledge that has been honed over many years through many experiences, but it has its limits.
Our brains are equipped to make snap decisions under pressure. If you accidentally touch a hot pan, you immediately pull your hand away without conscious thought. You don’t need to weigh up the pros and cons. If you were walking along the street and a car suddenly swerved onto the pavement, you’d instinctively leap out the way without consciously thinking about it. Such is the power of intuition. But concluding that the driver was deliberately aiming for you, or has a certain ethnic background—these things don’t make the cut. Even though we may not bother to trace our intuitions back to the knowledge that produced them, we could if we needed to. Assumptions and prejudice don’t have the same intellectual underpinnings. Any basic rational investigation will reveal they are based in what we believe, not what we know.
Before we dive into how intuition is actually developed, let’s look at an example highlighting the role it plays in our professional lives. It is, in fact, one of the distinguishing features between amateurs and experts.
The Amateur and the Expert
An expert art historian and an art history student walk into a room (no, this isn't the beginning of a bad joke.) They both look at a recently discovered statue that may be genuine or a forgery.
The student carefully studies every detail of the statue, takes notes and photographs, then spends hours researching the proposed background. They compare the details to their other works and process a lot of information. Failing to find any signs of forgery, they conclude that as far as they can tell, it appears to be genuine.
Meanwhile, the expert glances at the exact same statue and knows in seconds that it’s a fake. Through years of study, they’ve built up an internalized understanding of how that type of statue should look, down to the tiniest details. As they look at the statue, their mind quickly matches what they know against what they see.
This story comes from Blink, by Malcolm Gladwell. In the 1980s, the Getty made moves to buy a statue called a kouros, dating back to the 6th century BC. This type of statue is extremely rare and they’re usually found in a bad condition. But this one was beautiful and pristine—hence its $10 million price tag. Geologists and historians studied its composition and provenance. They were sure it was real.
A number of art historians who knew all about kouroi didn’t agree. They spotted little details, like its fingernails and unusually fresh condition. And they were right. It was a fake.
To an outsider, it may seem as if the expert in this example has an inbuilt instinct for their field. It looks as if what they do is completely natural and comes easily to them. While the student might run through the same information during their study of the statue, the difference is that for the expert that information is processed below the surface, without conscious recall.
The expert may not know how they know and may need to make a conscious effort to identify the signs, so they can justify their intuition or educate their student. A challenging task for the amateur is no harder than picking lunch for the professional. According to the recognition-primed decision-making model, a theory of how we make fast decisions in complex conditions, experts can reach a conclusion faster because they match the current situation to ones they’ve previously encountered. Amateurs must run through the possibil
ities one by one.
Scientist Gary Klein, who has extensively studied groups like experienced firefighters and how they seem to intuitively make the correct decisions in split seconds, explains, “These are intuitions that are based on 10, 15, 20 years or more of experience that has allowed them to build a repertoire of patterns that allow them to quickly frame situations, size situations up, and know what to do.”
That’s a really key point: to get to the place where your intuition leads you in the right direction, you need experience. Not just any experience. You need lots of it in repeatable, consistent situations in which you get immediate feedback. This was the point made by Daniel Kahneman in Thinking, Fast and Slow. The more consistent the parameters and rules that govern any particular situation, the more reliable your developing intuition will be.
Firefighters are dealing with a lot of physics and chemistry, quite reliable stuff. Art can only be faked in so many ways. Social media, on the other hand, doesn’t have the same kind of reliable repetition. It’s always changing and evolving, so the Twitter tactics that worked for you last month might not apply now. It’s impossible to predict what tweet is going to go viral. You can’t rely on your intuition and you need to keep learning new tricks. If you’re an experienced chef you might be able to draw upon your intuition, but if you only know how to make sushi, your expertise might not transfer to baking cakes.
As Nobel Prize–winning economist Herbert Simon, well known for his work on decision-making heuristics, explained:
A major component of expertise is the ability to recognize a very large number of specific relevant cues when they are present in any situation, and then to retrieve from memory information about what to do when those particular cues are noticed. Because of this knowledge and recognition capability, experts can respond to new situations very rapidly—and usually with considerable accuracy. Of course, on further thought, the initial reaction may not be the correct one, but it is correct in a substantial number of cases and is rarely irrelevant.