Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight

Intuition, argues Gerd Gigerenzer, a director at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development, is less about suddenly "knowing" the right answer and more about instinctively understanding what information is unimportant and can thus be discarded.

Gigerenzer, author of the book Gut Feelings: The Intelligence of the Unconscious, says that he is both intuitive and rational. "In my scientific work, I have hunches. I can’t explain always why I think a certain path is the right way, but I need to trust it and go ahead. I also have the ability to check these hunches and find out what they are about. That’s the science part. Now, in private life, I rely on instinct.

For instance, when I first met my wife, I didn’t do computations. Nor did she."I'm telling you this because recently one of my readers, Joy Boleda, posed a question that stopped me in my tracks:What about intuition? It has never been titled as a form of intelligence, but would you think that someone who has great intuition in things, has more intelligence?

We’ve made a habit of filling those hundred random spaces in our day with glances at Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook. But those glances have slowly become stares, and those stares have grown to encompass a major portion of our waking hours.

The end result is the same person who spends 127 hours per year on Instagram (the global average) complains that she has “no time” for reading.

The fact is, the ability to read is becoming a source of competitive advantage in the world.I’m not talking about basic literacy. What has become exceedingly scarce (and therefore, valuable) is the physical, emotional, attentional, and mental capability to sit quietly and direct focused attention for sustained periods of time....

We all want an audience for something these days. Whether it’s for our company, cause, creation, or just for ourselves to be heard, it’s an ongoing challenge to capture the attention of people we want to reach.

In the course of profiling various smart people on my website/newsletter A Person You Should Know, I’ve learned a lot from them about how to build an audience and I thought I’d share some of their advice here.

There’s a lot more where this comes from, so if you find it helpful and would like me to send you profiles of the people I feature in the future by email you can subscribe here. Here’s a taste of what I’ve learned from some of the people I’ve featured so far….