Knowing Without Knowing
Why intuition – not logic – may be your most powerful decision-making tool.
What I watched: “Intelligence Insider WARNS: ‘You Have No Idea’” by The Diary of a CEO. Posted March 11, 2026.
My life path has been, at least in part, an exercise in moving from my childhood and early adult acculturation that logic and verifiable data should always guide my decisions to instead allowing intuition to take the lead. That might seem counterintuitive to you, but it’s served me well.
In “Living Intuitively,” I explain my changing of mindset. At the urging of countless self-appointed productivity and goal attainment “experts” along with a father who often bought into the same outlook, I painstakingly laid out goals, milestones, tasks, and visions in the belief they would magically lead to a predetermined end result. They rarely did.
I’ve written before about my tussles with the lifelong habit of believing I can somehow guide my future optimally through the use of detailed goals and associated task planning. Over time, I’ve had too many dashed hopes that resulted from a robust bout of detailed life planning. At least I’ve abandoned believing that such planning works for me, but replacing it with something that does actually work for me hasn’t been easy.
Enter intuitive living. At least that’s where my thinking is headed nowadays.
In “More On Living Intuitively,” I mentioned how I struggled in the past when using the word intuitive to describe my decision inclinations because it often felt like it bordered on an amorphous spirituality or mystical foundation. We all possess tacit knowledge that underpins intuition and that gives me the comfort to keep using the word.
I struggled for a while with the word intuitive because it elicited an amorphous and intangible sense of mysticism, or something like that. But over time I’ve become comfortable with the word intuitive in part because it aligns with the concept of tacit knowledge we accumulate over time.
When I watched Steven Bartlett interview security expert and author Gavin de Becker on his The Diary of a CEO podcast, it was validating to hear someone of such intellectual depth be such a vehement proponent of being guided by intuition.
When Bartlett asked de Becker what advice he would give to the podcast’s listeners about how to navigate in the world we’re living in today, and what advice he was giving to his 10 children (yes, he has 10), de Becker championed intuition.
Well, they all know that their dad is a big proponent… [of] intuition and personal responsibility. So, the very first thing I would say to your listeners, to you, to remind myself as well, is that human beings did not get the biggest claws or the biggest teeth or the biggest muscles. We got the biggest brains relative to our size, and the nuclear defense system that all human beings have is intuition, much different from logic.
I found it interesting to learn during the interview that the root of the word intuition originates from the Latin verb intueri, which means “to look at, consider, or contemplate”. It is formed by combining the prefix in- (”at,” “on”) and tueri (”to look at,” “watch over” or “guard”). So, intuition is part of our mental process to guard and protect us.
De Becker believes that intuition is always correct in two ways and why intuition is what leads us toward success.
One, it always has your best interest at heart. It’s not fucking with you. It’s giving you real information that’s valuable. And number two, it’s always based on something…
Everything you’ve succeeded at and accomplished was based on what you felt. It was based on intuition.
Using an example of a corporate board making decisions, de Becker explains how Western thinking prefers to use logic to make decisions even if that leads to a bad outcome instead of using intuition that might lead to a much better outcome.
Logic is weak and plodding. Logic does A, B, C, D. Intuition does A to Z instantly. And you don’t know why. It’s knowing without knowing.
I recommend you watch the video, and perhaps the entire longer interview which you can find here.
Really great interview. But let me point out something de Becker says that I think is incredibly useful in daily life.
By the way, canceling is one of my favorite things. I recommend it to everybody. I recommend canceling and postponing to everybody I know. You are not obligated to keep your plans. You made a plan three months ago and you don’t know who you’ll even be or if you or them or anybody will even be alive three months from now. There’s nothing wrong with canceling.
A big resounding yes to that. I tell people that I make plans “lightly.” By the I mean, I make plans with the full understanding that I or the situation may change in such a way that canceling makes more sense than following through. I cancel politely and responsibly, but I never hesitate to cancel. Life is too damn short to undertake commitments that don’t bring you joy and fulfillment.
I believe the gist of De Becker’s thoughts on the power of intuition to guide us is that people should “fall in love with intuition and to learn the way you communicate with yourself. There are signals from intuition – curiosity (you just wonder something), suspicion, worry can even be a signal of intuition. But the biggest one is true fear. When you feel true fear.”
I concur that feeling fear is the number one way I know I need to examine what’s ahead of me and trust my intuition. Luckily, I don’t fear writing for you, my reader, but this post is long enough. I’ll let the rest of the video stand on its own. Check it out.
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