Martin Raja

“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

“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

“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