Sublime

The alchemy of this book’s title is the science of knowing what economists are wrong about. The trick to being an alchemist lies not in understanding universal laws, but in spotting the many instances where those laws do not apply.

What people do with their own money (their ‘revealed preferences’) is generally a better guide to what they really want than their own reported wants and needs.fn3 Had

For 35 years I have continued on the course charted by Gallup, collecting factors the way other men collect pictures and postage stamps. If you choose to ignore these factors, good luck to you. A blind pig can sometimes find truffles, but it helps to know that they are found in oak forests.

Many new ventures succeed because their founders see a new way to segment and target an existing market, often in behavioural terms. Doing so enables the entrepreneurial venture to target a behaviourally defined segment with benefits suited uniquely to that segment, benefits not offered by existing solutions.

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.

If your brand can help them save money, you’ve tapped into a survival mechanism.

I have chosen psycho-logic as a neutral and non-judgemental term.

What is proprietary, though, is your experience and how you synthesize and deliver what you know. What’s special is your demeanor or the way you deal with your best-fit clients. What’s invaluable is how you deliver great value by guiding people through massive changes in their personal life and in their business that bring them to a place they neve