Rory Sutherland > Quotes

“A flower is a weed with an advertising budget.”
― Rory Sutherland

“the human mind does not run on logic any more than a horse runs on petrol”
― Rory Sutherland, Alchemy: The Surprising Power of Ideas That Don't Make Sense

“Ever since, in the U.K. they banned smoking in public places, I've never enjoyed a drinks party ever again. And the reason, I only worked out just the other day, is when you go to a drinks party and you stand up and you hold a glass of red wine and you talk endlessly to people, you don't actually want to spend all the time talking. It's really, really tiring. Sometimes you just want to stand there silently, alone with your thoughts. Sometimes you just want to stand in the corner and stare out of the window. Now the problem is, when you can't smoke, if you stand and stare out of the window on your own, you're an antisocial, friendless idiot. If you stand and stare out of the window on your own with a cigarette, you're a fucking philosopher.”
― Rory Sutherland

“It is much easier to be fired for being illogical than it is for being unimaginative. The fatal issue is that logic always gets you to exactly the same place as your competitors.”
― Rory Sutherland, Alchemy: The Surprising Power of Ideas That Don't Make Sense

“Irrational people are much more powerful than rational people, because their threats are so much more convincing.”
― Rory Sutherland, Alchemy: The Dark Art and Curious Science of Creating Magic in Brands, Business, and Life

“the uber map is a psychological moonshot, because it does not reduce the waiting time for a taxi but simply makes waiting 90% less frustrating”
― Rory Sutherland, Alchemy: The Surprising Power of Ideas That Don't Make Sense

“you are not thinking; you are merely being logical”
― Rory Sutherland, Alchemy: The Surprising Power of Ideas That Don't Make Sense

“Not everything that makes sense works, and not everything that works makes sense.”
― Rory Sutherland, Alchemy: The Dark Art and Curious Science of Creating Magic in Brands, Business, and Life

“people don’t do what they say they believe, they do what’s convenient and then they repent,”
― Rory Sutherland, Rory Sutherland: The Wiki Man

“it is perfectly possible to be both rational and wrong.”
― Rory Sutherland, Alchemy: The Surprising Power of Ideas That Don't Make Sense

“It’s important to remember that big data all comes from the same place – the past. A new campaigning style, a single rogue variable or a ‘black swan’ event can throw the most perfectly calibrated model into chaos.”
― Rory Sutherland, Alchemy: The Surprising Power of Ideas That Don't Make Sense

“And in reality ‘context’ is often the most important thing in determining how people think, behave and act:”
― Rory Sutherland, Alchemy: The Surprising Power of Ideas That Don't Make Sense

“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.”
― Rory Sutherland, Alchemy: The Surprising Power of Ideas That Don't Make Sense

“The most dangerous people were the stupid and energetic people because they’ll always do things and because they’re stupid they’ll do stupid things.”
― Rory Sutherland, Rory Sutherland: The Wiki Man

“Henry Ford’s reaction to a consultant who questioned why he paid $50,000 a year to someone who spent most of his time with his feet on his desk. “Because a few years ago that man came up with something that saved me $2,000,000,” he replied. “And when he had that idea his feet were exactly where they are now.”
― Rory Sutherland, Rory Sutherland: The Wiki Man

“Engineers, medical people, scientific people, have an obsession with solving the problems of reality, when actually … once you reach a basic level of wealth in society, most problems are actually problems of perception”
― Rory Sutherland

“when you demand logic, you pay a hidden price: you destroy magic”
― Rory Sutherland, Alchemy: The Surprising Power of Ideas That Don't Make Sense

“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.”
― Rory Sutherland, Alchemy: The Surprising Power of Ideas That Don't Make Sense

“There is an important lesson in evaluating human behaviour: never denigrate a behaviour as irrational until you have considered what purpose it really serves.”
― Rory Sutherland, Alchemy: The Surprising Power of Ideas That Don't Make Sense

“if you had retroactively applied the rules of scientific rationalism to all of the major scientific discoveries of the past 500 years you would have invalidated most of them. Perhaps most (penicillin, the X-Ray, the microwave, Aspirin, radio, Archimedes in the bath)  were the product of “inspired opportunism”. As he once put it: “a methodology was an ideology Galileo could not afford.”
― Rory Sutherland, Rory Sutherland: The Wiki Man

“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.”
― Rory Sutherland, Alchemy: The Dark Art and Curious Science of Creating Magic in Brands, Business, and Life

“There is a parallel in the behaviour of bees, which do not make the most of the system they have evolved to collect nectar and pollen. Although they have an efficient way of communicating about the direction of reliable food sources, the waggle dance, a significant proportion of the hive seems to ignore it altogether and journeys off at random. In the short term, the hive would be better off if all bees slavishly followed the waggle dance, and for a time this random behaviour baffled scientists, who wondered why 20 million years of bee evolution had not enforced a greater level of behavioural compliance. However, what they discovered was fascinating: without these rogue bees, the hive would get stuck in what complexity theorists call ‘a local maximum’; they would be so efficient at collecting food from known sources that, once these existing sources of food dried up, they wouldn’t know where to go next and the hive would starve to death. So the rogue bees are, in a sense, the hive’s research and development function, and their inefficiency pays off handsomely when they discover a fresh source of food. It is precisely because they do not concentrate exclusively on short-term efficiency that bees have survived so many million years.”
― Rory Sutherland, Alchemy: The Dark Art and Curious Science of Creating Magic in Brands, Business, and Life

“To put a value on the digital world by only tallying the money that changes hands is a little like trying to place a value on sex by simply measuring the amount spent on prostitution.”
― Rory Sutherland, Rory Sutherland: The Wiki Man

“Remember, if you never do anything differently, you’ll reduce your chances of enjoying lucky accidents.”
― Rory Sutherland, Alchemy: The Surprising Power of Ideas That Don't Make Sense

“We don’t value things; we value their meaning. What they are is determined by the laws of physics, but what they mean is determined by the laws of psychology.”
― Rory Sutherland, Alchemy: The Surprising Power of Ideas That Don't Make Sense

“what matters is not whether an idea is true or effective, but whether it fits with the preconceptions of a dominant cabal”
― Rory Sutherland, Alchemy: The Surprising Power of Ideas That Don't Make Sense

“Some scientists believe that driverless cars will not work unless they learn to be irrational. If such cars stop reliably whenever a pedestrian appears in front of them, pedestrian crossings will be unnecessary and jaywalkers will be able to march into the road, forcing the driverless car to stop suddenly, at great discomfort to its occupants. To prevent this, driverless cars may have to learn to be ‘angry’, and to occasionally maliciously fail to stop in time and strike the pedestrian on the shins.”
― Rory Sutherland, Alchemy: The Dark Art and Curious Science of Creating Magic in Brands, Business, and Life

“Or take the value of Wikipedia. The creation of this is more or less akin to installing a Bodleian library in every house in Britain. Does this massive new wealth register on GDP figures? Not a blip. Or the new availability of blogs and podcasts. Tremendous writers who, just a decade ago, would have been lecturing to half-empty theatres are now read by hundreds of thousands. Again, almost no money changes hands, so not a wiggle in the GDP figures.”
― Rory Sutherland, Rory Sutherland: The Wiki Man

“No living creature can evolve and survive in the real world by processing information in an objective, measured and proportionate manner.”
― Rory Sutherland, Alchemy: The Dark Art and Curious Science of Creating Magic in Brands, Business, and Life

“a rich man is anyone who earns more than his wife’s sister’s husband.”)”
― Rory Sutherland, Rory Sutherland: The Wiki Man