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

For instance, is poetry more moving than prose because it is more difficult to write?fn3 And is music more emotionally potent than normal speech because it is more difficult to sing than to talk?fn4

meaning is conveyed by the things we do that are not in our own short-term self-interest – by the costs that we incur and the risks we take.

Quite simply, all powerful messages must contain an element of absurdity, illogicality, costliness, disproportion, inefficiency, scarcity, difficulty or extravagance – because rational behaviour and talk, for all their strengths, convey no meaning.

One of the most important ideas in this book is that it is only by deviating from a narrow, short-term self-interest that we can generate anything more than cheap talk.

Bits deliver information, but costliness carries meaning.

Water ‘tastes of nothing’, so we notice the smallest thing which deviates from this.

Effective communication will always require some degree of irrationality in its creation because if it’s perfectly rational it becomes, like water, entirely lacking in flavour. This explains why working with an advertising agency can be frustrating: it is difficult to produce good advertising, but good advertising is only good because it is difficu

we naturally assume that something that only does one thing is better than something that claims to do many things.

Many things which do not make sense in a logical context suddenly make perfect sense if you consider what they mean rather than what they are.