The book is about decision-making, and despite the title it’s not by a self-help guru. It’s written by a psychologist who argues that the first, snap decision you make is often the right one. That doesn’t make sense to most people because it seems counterintuitive – spending more time thinking about something, debating about it, or researching it should mean you make a better decision, not a worse one. But the problem with that bit of common sense is that humans are actually hard-wired for making snap decisions – and we’re able to rapidly assess large volumes of information unconsciously without ever knowing that we’re doing it. If you think about it, that’s practically an evolutionary must. When tigers or sharks are coming at you, you don’t have time to sit around debating whether you should run or fight back or have a meeting to consider the option of a formal response forthwith, subject to the approval of Human Resources. You have to make decisions without thinking things through. And most of these thoughts happen in milliseconds – too quickly for you to consciously be aware of what is really going on.

Most of the books is just a series of interesting examples of how people take advantage of snap decisions like this in various fields. Art critics get “feelings” about whether a Greek statue is a fake – nearly all the experts who view it think it’s fake, even though extensive testing says it’s real. They can’t articulate why, but they knew within an instant of seeing it. Turns out the snap judgment was right – the statue was fake. A military commander plays Iraq in a wargame, relying entirely on snap judgments and getting rid of all the detailed protocol that is routine. He wins – against the United States. Often the people rationalize it after the fact – there’s a particular experiment where the psychologist sends a subtle signal about the solution to the participants, who all instantly see it. They all also give varying explanations about their Eureka moment, none of which are the truth – that they were tipped off unconsciously about what to do.

How does this affect you in real life? The basic point you should take from it is that the first decision you make may well be the right one. It also means that if you get a funny feeling about something, you might want to listen to it rather than dithering around trying to rationalize what you’re doing. For example, if you’re buying a car, and something just doesn’t feel right – something may well be wrong, even if you can’t consciously put your finger on it. Many people who get taken in by scams do so despite unconscious warning signals. They have a bad feeling about what they’re doing and know they shouldn’t be getting involved, but they do anyway because they dismiss the bad feeling as superstition. It’s not – you are processing information more quickly than you can consciously understand it. Often this comes from cues you don’t have time to actively think about in a few seconds. I’ll give you an example:

Last night I was walking with my hands full of several bags of groceries, opening the door to my apartment. A kid calls to me, telling me his arm is broken and he needs help buttoning his shirt up. He’s polite, he has a little plastic cast thing on one arm, but something just felt wrong. I look for a few seconds, don’t have any clue what he’s up to but feel like it’s got to be some scam. I notice his shirt is already buttoned up to the very top, tell him so, and go into the apartment – whereupon he starts screaming at me about how he’ll be back every day, and next time his shirt will be unbuttoned, because I’m rude. Thinking about it later on, I realize there are some other cues about what was wrong with the picture that I didn’t have time to actually process then. First, the plastic cast wasn’t even on entirely. It was around his wrist, but had loosened straps – and it might not have even been a cast in retrospect. Also, there were several other kids around waiting for a bus who he’d been talking to before he asked me to help him. Why not get one of them to help him? They didn’t have armloads full of groceries. And his other hand was completely free and uninjured – how hard is it to button a shirt one-handed? Do you really need to accost random strangers about it? My guess in retrospect is that he probably wanted me to set down the groceries so he could grab them and run off. I won’t know for sure – but I do know that there were a lot of other warning signs that I was picking up on, but didn’t consciously notice until thinking about them later. Just keep in mind that when you get one of those feelings, it’s not some superstitious old wive’s tale. Your judgment might not be right – but it may be considering little signals that you just aren’t noticing at the time.

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Rockefeller was a strange contradiction of a man – ruthless in business and yet genuinely pious, churchgoing, and generous with his money. Towards the end of his life, he had given away an immense amount of money and ended many common diseases with his medical foundations. He was notoriously frugal, and even when he was a billionaire was still penny-pinching and haggling with merchants over small amounts out of the principle of it.

The Chernow biography is a great book, and anyone who is interested in business history should take a look at it. Chernow does a good job explaining the two sides of Rockefeller’s personality and how they co-existed, and with full access to Rockefeller’s papers he has a leg up on previous historians. It’s got a lot of lessons you can apply to your own life as well – Rockefeller wasn’t a genius and built his empire mainly through a combination of hard work and hard-nosed capitalism. Not everyone can be a Rockefeller, but you can certainly better your life by understanding how he succeeded in his.

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