If you propose any solution where the gain in perceived value outweighs the attendant expenditure in money, time, effort or resources, people either don’t believe you, or worse, they think you are somehow cheating them.

Think of life as like a criminal investigation: a beautifully linear and logical narrative when viewed in retrospect, but a fiendishly random, messy and wasteful process when experienced in real time.

What they are is determined by the laws of physics, but what they mean is determined by the laws of psychology.

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

Never forget this: the nature of our attention affects the nature of our experience.

RORY’S RULES OF ALCHEMY: The opposite of a good idea can also be a good idea. Don’t design for average. It doesn’t pay to be logical if everyone else is being logical. The nature of our attention affects the nature of our experience. A flower is simply a weed with an advertising budget. The problem with logic is that it kills off magic. A good

My word to describe the way we make decisions – to distinguish it from the artificial concepts of ‘logic’ and ‘rationality’ – is ‘psycho-logic’.

If you are wholly predictable, people learn to hack you.

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.