Why 'Trust Your Gut' Is Bad Advice (And What a Nobel Winner Does Instead)

I recently listened to a podcast with Daniel Kahneman, the Nobel Prize-winning psychologist who wrote the book on cognitive biases. In the podcast, he admitted that after decades of study, he is still just as prone to making biased decisions as anyone else.

His conclusion was that to make better decisions, you need an algorithm or a structured process to check your own flawed thinking.

If the world’s leading expert on the subject can’t trust his own unaided judgment on a critical decision, why should we? It completely re-frames the popular advice to “trust your gut,” revealing it as a dangerous gamble when the stakes are high.

This idea mirrored a painful lessons I learned working in my first startup. We operated on pure gut instinct and memory, a chaotic system that felt efficient until quite a few of them came back to hurt us badly. It did prove to me back then that a system reliant on human intuition is a system designed to fail.

Just as my business needs a reliable systems to ensure things run smoothly and avoid chaos, our minds need one when we are making a critical decision. Taking Kahneman’s advice to heart, I spent a week reading from other experts on systems they use and built a simple AI Workflow to act as an algorithm for my mind.

My gut instinct works great when dealing with routine situations I have faced dozens of times but fails when faced with a new situation. I was keen to get some support and help me systematically frame my problems, understand my biases, expand options, and develop more confidence on the final decision

Now even when a Nobel laureate says that even he finds it hard to make better decisions, its time for us to stop relying solely on your gut and develop a process to improve