Alchemy: The Dark Art and Curious Science of Creating Magic in Brands, Business, and Life

by Rory Sutherland

Rory’s Rules of Alchemy The opposite of a good idea can also be a good idea. Don’t design for average. It doesn’t pay to be logical if everyone else is being logical. The nature of our attention affects the nature of our experience. A flower is simply a weed with an advertising budget. The problem with logic is that it kills off magic. A good guess which stands up to observation is still science. So is a lucky accident. Test counterintuitive things only because no one else will. Solving problems using rationality is like playing golf with only one club. Dare to be trivial. If there were a logical answer, we would have found it.

The human mind does not run on logic any more than a horse runs on petrol.

This freedom is much more valuable than we realise, because to reach intelligent answers, you often need to ask really dumb questions.

It’s important to remember that big data all comes from the same place – the past.

Irrational people are much more powerful than rational people, because their threats are so much more convincing.

A rational leader suggests changing course to avoid a storm. An irrational one can change the weather.

Being slightly bonkers can be a good negotiating strategy: being rational means you are predictable, and being predictable makes you weak. Hillary thinks like an economist, while Donald is a game theorist, and is able to achieve with one tweet what would take Clinton four years of congressional infighting. That’s alchemy; you may hate it, but it works.

If you are wholly predictable, people learn to hack you.

Religion feels incompatible with modern life because it seems to involve delusional beliefs, but if the above results came from a trial of a new drug, we would want to add it to tap water. Just because we don’t know why it works, we should not be blind to the fact that it does.*

The late David Ogilvy, one of the greats of the American advertising industry and the founder of the company I work for, apparently once said, ‘The trouble with market research is that people don’t think what they feel, they don’t say what they think, and they don’t do what they say.’*

For a business to be truly customer-focused, it needs to ignore what people say. Instead it needs to concentrate on what people feel.

As the novelist Upton Sinclair once remarked, ‘It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.’

The advertisements which bees find useful are flowers – and if you think about it, a flower is simply a weed with an advertising budget.

if you never do anything differently, you’ll reduce your chances of enjoying lucky accidents.