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

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

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

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.

the process of discovery is not the same as the process of justification.

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

‘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.

The models that dominate all human decision-making today are duly heavy on simplistic logic, and light on magic – a spreadsheet leaves no room for miracles.

By applying identical criteria to everyone in the name of fairness, you end up recruiting identical

As far as evolution is concerned, if a behaviour is beneficial, we can attach any reason to it that we like.