Don't blink

Robert Burton's On Being Certain could be described as the anti-Blink. While Gladwell's book suggests that our intuitions are right more often than we think, Burton's argument is that we aren't right nearly as often as our intuition tells us we are. More precisely:

Despite how certainty feels, it is neither a conscious choice nor even a thought process. Certainty and similar states of "knowing what we know" arise out of involuntary brain mechanisms that, like love or anger, function independently of reason.

Each book is the flip side of the other. Both tell us that quick, reflexive, primitive brain circuits make a lot of decisions for us which we then explain or explain away with more rational justifications. But Burton's is the better book.

Maybe it's the Asperger's talking, but the idea that you should "trust your feelings" has always struck me as useless. Which feelings? (Okay, to be fair, Blink is about specifying the times when you should trust your instincts, but the gist is that intuition is underrated. It's not.) At the level of consequences, gut-level certainty is much more destructive than doubt. And personally, I've always been an outsider to that moment in the creative development process when everyone seems to converge on one approach as being "right" and team feeling takes over from discussion. Intuitive, creative leaps are necessary to get anywhere and a sense of rightness is politically and emotionally useful, but certainty, particularly in a field as socially-determined as advertising, is a fairly certain sign that you're wrong.