This is a GREAT book.  I have enjoyed all 3 of Malcolm’s books.  They are engaging, informative, and filled with very interesting anekdotes.  In Blink he talks about how we make our decisions in life.  This is a summary that very clearly describes what he is getting at in his book.  His discovery is conterintuitive but helpful for us.

“One of the questions that I’ve been asked over and over again since Blink came out is, When should we trust our instincts, and when should we consciously think things through? Well, here is a partial answer. On straightforward choices, deliberate analysis is best. When questions of analysis and personal choice start to get complicated—when we have to juggle many different variables—then our unconscious thought processes may be superior. Now, I realize that this is exactly contrary to conventional wisdom. We typically regard our snap judgment as best on immediate trivial questions. Is that person attractive? Do I want that candy bar? But Dijksterhuis is suggesting the opposite: that maybe that big computer in our brain that handles our unconscious is at its best when it has to juggle many competing variables.Dijksterhuis did another similar experiment, only this time in the real world. He questioned shoppers coming out of a Dutch department store called De Bijenkorf, which sells relatively low-cost items, like kitchen accessories. He asked them how long they had deliberated before they bought what they bought. Then he called all the shoppers a few weeks later to find out how happy they were with their purchases. Sure enough, the people who had thought the most before buying were the most satisfied, and those who had made impulse purchases more often regretted their decision. For the second half of the experiment, Dijksterhuis went to the furniture store IKEA, where people were making much more complicated and expensive purchases. Now the reverse was true. A few weeks later, the thinkers were least happy, and those who had gone with their gut instinct were the happiest. Dijksterhuis argues that his findings represent a fundamental principle of human cognition, and that “there is no a priori reason to assume that [it] does not generalize to other types of choices—political, managerial, or otherwise.” Not long after I read the Science study, a reader sent me the following quotation from Sigmund Freud. It seems that the father of the unconscious agreed: “When making a decision of minor importance, I have always found it advantageous to consider all the pros and cons. In vital matters, however, such as the choice of a mate or a profession, the decision should come from the unconscious, from somewhere within ourselves. In the important decisions of personal life, we should be governed, I think, by the deep inner needs of our nature.”-Malcolm Gladwell, Blink