Alchemy
Click here to buy the book.🚀 The Book in 3 Sentences
Drawing on thirty years of work in the world’s biggest laboratory for human behavior, Alchemy unpacks how people really think and act.
Alchemy is a tour through the strange, often irrational world of decision-making, with surprising takeaways for both life and business.
Through real-world examples with major brands and influencers, Sutherland shows how our obsession with logic often gets in the way of solving problems—and how creative, unexpected thinking can lead to better solutions.
🧠 Key Takeaways
Will fill in after reading
✍️ Memorable Quotes
“If we allow the world to be run by logical people, we will only discover logical things. But in real life, most things aren’t logical—they are psycho-logical.”
This is the central theme of the book.
It would be nice if the world worked in a neat and orderly way without any hiccups or surprises. In that kind of world, we could apply logic to everything, and logical people could solve all of the world’s problems.
But because the world is filled with human beings—who are not perfectly logical—the world will never be perfectly predictable.
That’s why we need to change our frame of reference when it comes to problem-solving. Instead of optimizing for what makes sense, we should be optimizing for human behavior, which often doesn’t.
“There is an ostensible, rational, self-declared reason why we do things, and there is also a cryptic or hidden purpose. Learning how to disentangle the literal from the lateral meaning is essential to solving cryptic crosswords, and it is also essential to understanding human behavior.”
There are always reasons behind the things we do. But the reasons we say aren’t always the real reasons.
On the surface, we have our conscious reasoning—the logical explanations we tell ourselves and others. But beneath that, we also have our subconscious reasoning—the instinctual, human impulses that actually drive the behavior.
As an example, ask a Starbucks customer why they spend $3.50 (or probably more) on a coffee they could make at home for less than a dollar, and they might say something like, “I like the taste” or “It’s convenient on my way to work.”
Those answers are probably true, but they don’t give you the full story. The hidden purpose might actually be what the cup represents.
Walking into work with the little green emblem in your hand signals something about you. That subtle status signal might be the real driver, even if the person doesn’t consciously realize it.
In a nutshell, if you want to really understand human behavior, you can’t just take people’s self-declared reasoning at face value. You have to look beneath the surface and ask what their hidden purpose might be.
Alchemy is Rory Sutherland’s deep dive into the weird ways people make decisions, and how out-of-the-box thinking can solve problems that reason alone can’t.