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by cfrover 1815 days ago
Joshua Waitzkin, US Chess Champion, Taichi Push Hands World Champion, covers the topic of intuition several times in his book the Author of the Art of Learning. I highly recommend this read (favorite book of all time). Its not a book focused on intuition specifically, but it does cover it alot .

Once you achieve a high level of mastery and experience your area of work, intuition, seems a lot more relevant and reliable. Here are some clear visual examples in sports (but they apply to all disciplines i firmly believe):

Example1: How is Cristiano Ronaldo such a phenomenal elite soccer player? - https://youtu.be/4achmhzLNoY?t=1060

  Example2: How are master level chess players able to calculate positions almost instantly or recall game positions from a long time ago?
- http://billwall.phpwebhosting.com/articles/memory_and_chess.... - https://theprint.in/pageturner/excerpt/chess-player-memory-a... - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qS5Q5KPU_No

I found this conversation with Tim Ferris and Josh Waitzkin might pique your curiosity and they talk about intuition in sports and business. - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4r6gr7uytQA

TLDR of whole response: topic mastery and experience really help develop intuition

Recent personal example of building intuition for me:

I have been doing a lot of programming contest questions. Initially I was getting stumped on how to approach the problems that kept re-appearing again and again. After so much repeated failure, I felt what I was missing was an understanding of underlying principles and patterns for certain coding questions. I found a resource online and discovered there were lots of topics I had never heard of in these programming contests / coding interview problems like “sliding window”, “2 pointer” etc….

After I started drilling down on those types of problems I struggled with, when I encountered new unseen or familiar looking questions my mind was able to *immediately suggest to me an approach towards solving the problem. Before It would take me a long time to decide how I was going to approach the problem and it was because I lacked knowledge and depth in the area I was working in.

1 comments

Thank you