Alchemy summary

Business today is all about being the best in the world. Companies seeking to be the most popular choice in the market often think they need to come up with big solutions to the world’s biggest problems. 

However, success can hinge on the smallest details; getting these right can make a world of difference.  

Humans perceive the world in different ways. One person may complain that a room is too hot, while the person next to them argues that it’s too cold. Psychologists call this phenomenon psychophysics – the study of how perception varies from species to species and, most importantly, how what we see and feel differ from objective reality. Let’s illustrate this point with an example.

A few years ago, the British chocolate company Cadbury's received a barrage of complaints from customers who claimed that their beloved Dairy Milk bar didn’t taste the same as it used to. At first, the company was dumbfounded; they hadn’t altered their formula in years. What they had done, however, was change the shape of the chocolate bar. This gave customers the illusion that the taste of the product had also changed.

Humans are highly nuanced. That’s why businesses should be wary of designing products and services for what they consider to be an average consumer.

This was a problem physical anthropologist Lieutenant Gilbert S. Daniels faced when, in the early 1950s,  the US military asked him to create a cockpit for high-speed aircrafts. At the time, the prevailing wisdom in the military was that cockpits should be designed for “the average man.” 

What if someone told you that advertisements featuring cuddly animals are more successful than ones that don’t? The idea might sound like total nonsense – most of us probably think that we aren’t more likely to be swayed by ads featuring furry pets. 

The fact, though, is that we are. While we like to think that our behavior is driven by conscious and clear reasoning, our unconscious reactions influence us just as strongly. A cute koala might seem like a weird enticement to buy a product, but most of what drives us ends up being just as unlikely – that's just how we're wired.

If we were to look at life and human behavior the same way we look at a criminal investigation, we’d see that neither follow a linear path. Instead of having a clear chain of events, where one thing leads very obviously to another, our lives contain plot twists, false starts, and, sometimes, dead ends. 

Reality isn’t nearly as logical as we think. That’s why we shouldn’t look at problems through just a single lens, but many. Consider the way that detectives, while investigating a crime, have to come up with a number of possibilities for what, why, and how something took place. The worst thing that can happen is that everyone involved becomes focused on the same potentially false assumption, which could steer the case down the wrong path. 

If we cast our eyes back to some of the world’s most revolutionary discoveries – such as gravity, penicillin and the microwave – we can see that many of them were stumbled upon by accident. In other cases, breakthroughs came about by discoverers testing wacky ideas that didn’t make logical sense at first. 

Pursuing rogue ideas and taking risks is something that the world’s most successful entrepreneurs know all too well. After all, to be an entrepreneur, you have to get comfortable with testing the limits of conventional logic; an idea that sounds totally bonkers may just be the answer you’ve been searching for.