Alchemy: The Surprising Power of Ideas That Don't Make Sense

by Rory Sutherland

Our brains present us with a view that is the best-calibrated to improve our evolutionary fitness rather than the most accurate. Being ignorant about your own motivations may pay off in evolutionary terms: it is an inarguable truth that evolution cares about fitness rather than objectivity, and if the ability to present oneself in a good light has certain reproductive advantages, then it will be prioritised. I suspect that we can’t overcome these tendencies, and I am not sure that we would even want to, since life would be unrecognisable – and possibly intolerable – without them. But if we are to understand the power of alchemy, we need better words to describe these motivations, and we must allow ourselves to oppose our natural urge to attach a rational explanation to everything we do. So one of my final tips is that alchemy is not only something you do – it’s what you don’t do. I am not asking you to read this book and then perform any peculiar feat of intelligence – all that is necessary is to abandon the assumptions that you carry around with you like a comfort blanket every day. The difficult part is to abandon them all at the same time, which carries a risk of social embarrassment. For instance, given the modern open-plan office and our obsession with responding to emails as quickly as possible, it might be embarrassing or even damaging to spend 20 minutes staring blankly into space. However, without this time to disengage, it is harder to practise mental alchemy.fn1