Alchemy Quotes

“A knowledge of the human physique is considered essential in designing a chair, but a knowledge of human psychology is rarely considered useful, never mind a requirement, when someone is asked to design a pension scheme, a portable music player or a railway. Who is the Herman Miller of pensions, or the Steve Jobs of tax-return design? These people are starting to emerge – but it has been a painfully long wait. If there is a mystery at the heart of this book, it is why psychology has been so peculiarly uninfluential in business and in policy-making when, whether done well or badly, it makes a spectacular difference.”
― Rory Sutherland, Alchemy: The Dark Art and Curious Science of Creating Magic in Brands, Business, and Life

“The theory is that free markets are principally about maximising efficiency, but in truth, free markets are not efficient at all. Admiring capitalism for its efficiency is like admiring Bob Dylan for his singing voice: it is to hold a healthy opinion for an entirely ridiculous reason. The market mechanism is loosely efficient, but the idea that efficiency is its main virtue is surely wrong, because competition is highly inefficient. Where I live, I can buy groceries from about eight different places; I’m sure it would be much more ‘efficient’ if Waitrose, M&S, Lidl and the rest were merged into one huge ‘Great Grocery Hall of The People’.”
― Rory Sutherland, Alchemy: The Dark Art and Curious Science of Creating Magic in Brands, Business, and Life

“Metrics, and especially averages, encourage you to focus on the middle of a market, but innovation happens at the extremes. You are more likely to come up with a good idea focusing on one outlier than on ten average users. We were discussing this recently in a meeting when a round of sandwiches arrived. ‘This proves my point exactly,’ I said, pointing at the food. The sandwich was not invented by an average eater. The Earl of Sandwich was an obsessive gambler, and demanded food in a form that would not require him to leave the card table while he ate. Weird consumers drive more innovation than normal ones. By contrast, it is perfectly possible that conventional market research has, over the past fifty years, killed more good ideas than it has spawned, by obsessing with a false idea of representativeness.”
― Rory Sutherland, Alchemy: The Dark Art and Curious Science of Creating Magic in Brands, Business, and Life

“Even stranger than our teeth-brushing behaviour is our preference for stripy toothpaste. When it first appeared, in a product called Stripe, it aroused a great deal of debate over how it was made. Many people dissected the empty container; others froze a full tube and then cut it open in a cross section.* What was strange was that nobody ever asked ‘Why?’ After all, the moment toothpaste enters your mouth, all the ingredients are mixed together, so what was the point of keeping them separate in the tube? There are two explanations: 1) simple childish novelty and 2) psycho-logic. Psychologically, the stripes serve as a signal: a claim that a toothpaste performed more than one function (fighting cavities, tackling infection and freshening breath) was thought to be more convincing if the toothpaste contained three visibly separate active ingredients. In general, people are impressed by any visible extra effort that goes into a product: if you simply say ‘this washing powder is better than our old powder’, it is a hollow claim. However, if you replace the powder with a gel, a tablet or some other form, the cost and effort which have gone into the change make it more plausible to the purchaser there may have been some real innovation in the new contents.”
― Rory Sutherland, Alchemy: The Dark Art and Curious Science of Creating Magic in Brands, Business, and Life

“Let me give a simple example. The Uber map is a psychological moonshot, because it does not reduce the waiting time for a taxi but simply makes waiting 90 per cent less frustrating. This innovation came from the founder’s flash of insight (while watching a James Bond film, no less*) that, regardless of what we say, we are much bothered by the uncertainty of waiting than by the duration of a wait. The invention of the map was perhaps equivalent to multiplying the number of cabs on the road by a factor of ten – not because waiting times got any shorter, but because they felt ten times less irritating.”
― Rory Sutherland, Alchemy: The Dark Art and Curious Science of Creating Magic in Brands, Business, and Life

“Behavioural economics is an odd term. As Warren Buffett’s business partner Charlie Munger once said, ‘If economics isn’t behavioural, I don’t know what the hell is.’ It’s true: in a more sensible world, economics would be a subdiscipline of psychology.* Adam Smith was as much a behavioural economist as an economist – The Wealth of Nations (1776) doesn’t contain a single equation. But, strange though it may seem, the study of economics has long been detached from how people behave in the real world, preferring to concern itself with a parallel universe in which people behave as economists think they should. It is to correct this circular logic that behavioural economics – made famous by experts such as Daniel Kahneman, Amos Tversky, Dan Ariely and Richard Thaler – has come to prominence. In many areas of policy and business there is much more value to be found in understanding how people behave in reality than how they should behave in theory.”
― Rory Sutherland, Alchemy: The Dark Art and Curious Science of Creating Magic in Brands, Business, and Life

“And what is the single most important finding of the advertising industry? Perhaps it is that ‘advertisements featuring cute animals tend to be more successful than ads that don’t’.”
― Rory Sutherland, Alchemy: The Dark Art and Curious Science of Creating Magic in Brands, Business, and Life

“Engineering doesn’t allow for magic. Psychology does.”
― Rory Sutherland, Alchemy: The Dark Art and Curious Science of Creating Magic in Brands, Business, and Life

“We constantly rewrite the past to form a narrative which cuts out the non-critical points – and which replaces luck and random experimentation with conscious intent.”
― Rory Sutherland, Alchemy: The Dark Art and Curious Science of Creating Magic in Brands, Business, and Life

“It seems likely that the biggest progress in the next 50 years may come not from improvements in technology but in psychology and design thinking. Put simply, it’s easy to achieve massive improvements in perception at a fraction of the cost of equivalent improvements in reality.”
― Rory Sutherland, Alchemy: The Dark Art and Curious Science of Creating Magic in Brands, Business, and Life

“For instance, the victorious Brexit campaign in Britain and the election of Donald Trump in the United States have both been routinely blamed on the clueless and emotional behaviour of undereducated voters, but you could make equally strong cases that the Remain campaign in Britain and Hillary Clinton’s failed bid for the American presidency failed because of the clueless, hyper-rational behaviour of overeducated advisors, who threw away huge natural advantages. At one point we in Britain were even warned that ‘a vote to leave the EU might result in rising labour costs’ – by a highly astute businessman* who was so enraptured with models of economic efficiency that he was clearly unaware most voters would understand a ‘rise in labour costs’ as meaning a ‘pay rise’.”
― Rory Sutherland, Alchemy: The Dark Art and Curious Science of Creating Magic in Brands, Business, and Life

“Trust grows at the speed of a coconut tree and falls at the speed of a coconut.”
― Rory Sutherland, Alchemy: The Surprising Power of Ideas That Don't Make Sense

“The number of people who think they understand statistics dangerously dwarfs those who actually do, and maths can cause fundamental problems when badly used.”
― Rory Sutherland, Alchemy: The Dark Art and Curious Science of Creating Magic in Brands, Business, and Life

“It’s interesting that, once we leave childhood, we stop asking these apparently childish questions.”
― Rory Sutherland, Alchemy: The Dark Art and Curious Science of Creating Magic in Brands, Business, and Life

“Nature spends a great deal of resources on what might be called ‘perception hacking’ or, in business terminology, marketing. Berries and fruits that want to be eaten develop a distinctive colouration and an attractive taste when they ripen. By contrast, caterpillars that don’t want to be eaten have evolved to taste disgusting to their predators. And some butterflies produce what look like eyes on their wings because many animals react more cautiously in their presence. Such are examples of how nature is able to hack perception rather than changing reality.”
― Rory Sutherland, Alchemy: The Dark Art and Curious Science of Creating Magic in Brands, Business, and Life

“the 2008 financial crisis arose after people placed unquestioning faith in mathematically neat models of an artificially simple reality.”
― Rory Sutherland, Alchemy: The Surprising Power of Ideas That Don't Make Sense

“It is better to be vaguely right than precisely wrong’,”
― Rory Sutherland, Alchemy: The Surprising Power of Ideas That Don't Make Sense

“knowledge of human psychology is rarely considered useful, never mind a requirement, when someone is asked to design a pension scheme, a portable music player or a railway. Who is the Herman Miller of pensions, or the Steve Jobs of tax-return design? These people are starting to emerge – but it has been a painfully long wait. If there is a mystery at the heart of this book, it is why psychology has been so peculiarly uninfluential in business and in policy-making when, whether done well or badly, it makes a spectacular difference.”
― Rory Sutherland, Alchemy: The Surprising Power of Ideas That Don't Make Sense

“if we allow the world to be run by logical people, we will only discover logical things. But in real life, most things aren’t logical – they are psycho-logical.”
― Rory Sutherland, Alchemy: The Surprising Power of Ideas That Don't Make Sense

“there are no SI units for what really matters.”
― Rory Sutherland, Alchemy: The Surprising Power of Ideas That Don't Make Sense

“Don’t design for average. Metrics, and especially averages, encourage you to focus on the middle of a market, but innovation happens at the extremes. You are more likely to come up with a good idea focusing on one outlier than on ten average users.”
― Rory Sutherland, Alchemy: The Surprising Power of Ideas That Don't Make Sense

“However, misunderstandings are all too common, because Dutch conversation tends to be astoundingly direct, while British English is oblique and often coded to the point of derangement. In a business context a Dutchman might say, ‘We tried that and it was shit, so we won’t do it again,’ while an Englishman intending to say the same thing might say, ‘I think it might be a little while before we try that again.”
― Rory Sutherland, Alchemy: The Dark Art and Curious Science of Creating Magic in Brands, Business, and Life

“Japanese is a highly context-sensitive language, but then so are all languages. In British English, when said in the right context and tone, ‘You stupid fucking idiot’ can be a term of affection – something that can wrongfoot Americans, who mostly speak the same language but tend to interpret it more literally.* In translation, it is an enormous mistake to assume that what the translator conveys is what the speaker intended, and it is equally foolish to assume that what you intended to say is what will be understood.”
― Rory Sutherland, Alchemy: The Dark Art and Curious Science of Creating Magic in Brands, Business, and Life

“As I have argued, psycho-logic and psychophysics need to be applied not just to the design of televisions, but also to welfare programmes, tax, transportation, healthcare, market research, the pricing of products and the design of democracy. There is no point in struggling to create changes in objective reality if human perception can’t see it, so all these things need to be perception optimised for humans.”
― Rory Sutherland, Alchemy: The Dark Art and Curious Science of Creating Magic in Brands, Business, and Life

“A few years ago, the British chocolate manufacturer Cadbury’s received a large number of customer complaints, claiming that they had changed the taste of their Dairy Milk brand. They were at first baffled, because the formulation hadn’t been altered for years. However, what they had done was change the shapes of the blocks you would break off a bar, rounding their corners. And smoother shapes taste sweeter. Truly. Nothing about perception is completely objective, even though we act as though it is. When we complain that a room is hot, there may be no point at which we agree about what ‘hot’ means; it may merely mean ‘a few degrees warmer than the room I was in previously, to which I have become acclimatised’. ‘Time flies when you are having fun’ is an early piece of psychophysical insight. To your watch, an hour always means exactly the same thing, regardless of whether you are drinking champagne or being waterboarded. However, to the human brain, the perception of time is more elastic.*”
― Rory Sutherland, Alchemy: The Dark Art and Curious Science of Creating Magic in Brands, Business, and Life

“Like bees with flowers, we are drawn to reliable signals of honest intent, and we choose to do business where those signals are found. This explains why we generally buy televisions from shops rather than from strangers on the street – the shop has invested in stock, it has a stable location and it is vulnerable to reputational damage. We do this instinctively; what we are prepared to pay for something is affected not only by the item itself but by the trustworthiness and reputation of the person selling it.”
― Rory Sutherland, Alchemy: The Dark Art and Curious Science of Creating Magic in Brands, Business, and Life

“mentioned earlier in this book that there are five main reasons why human behaviour often departs from what we think of as conventional rationality. The first of these is signalling, the need to send reliable indications of commitment and intent, which can inspire confidence and trust. Cooperation is impossible unless a mechanism is in place to prevent deception and cheating; some degree of efficiency often needs to be sacrificed in order to convey trustworthiness or to build a reputation.”
― Rory Sutherland, Alchemy: The Dark Art and Curious Science of Creating Magic in Brands, Business, and Life

“The term affordance refers to the perceived and actual properties of the thing, primarily those fundamental properties that determine just how the thing could possibly be used. [. . .] Affordances provide strong clues to the operations of things. Plates are for pushing. Knobs are for turning. Slots are for inserting things into. Balls are for throwing or bouncing. When affordances are taken advantage of, the user knows what to do just by looking: no picture, label, or instruction needed.”
― Rory Sutherland, Alchemy: The Dark Art and Curious Science of Creating Magic in Brands, Business, and Life

“Later on, economists got their own version of the same depressing idea that nothing can be created or destroyed. ‘There’s no such thing as a free lunch,’ they said. The sad consequence is that no one believes in magic any more. Yet magic does still exist – it is found in the fields of psychology, biology and the science of perception, rather than in physics and chemistry. And it can be created.”
― Rory Sutherland, Alchemy: The Dark Art and Curious Science of Creating Magic in Brands, Business, and Life

“Geim says of his approach to science: ‘I jump from one research subject to another every few years. I do not want to study the same stuff “from cradle to coffin”, as some academics do. To be able to do this, we often carry out what I call “hit-and-run experiments”, crazy ideas that should never work and, of course, they don’t in most cases. However, sometimes we find a pearl . . . This research style may sound appealing but it is very hard psychologically, mentally, physically, and in terms of research grants, too. But it is fun.”
― Rory Sutherland, Alchemy: The Dark Art and Curious Science of Creating Magic in Brands, Business, and Life