Rory Sutherland’s 10 Rules of Alchemy

Rory Sutherland is a vice president at Ogilvy in the UK. His YouTube videos advertise and promote the powers of myth, emotion, creativity, and passion. He tells good stories. He nods to reason, logic, and rationality because those are the proof of known, workable solutions. Sutherland’s thesis is that if we have a problem now it must be logic-proof or it would already have been solved and would not now exist. 

This is my summary. I recommend that you watch the video for yourself with CC:Closed Captions on. 

Rory Sutherland’s 10 Rules of Alchemy

1. The opposite of a good idea can be another good idea. When we narrow down all options to the single rational choice, if it fails, no one can be blamed because they followed the data and the model. In fact, problems often have multiple solutions, different alternatives for other people whose values are not our own. 
2. Do not design for the average. Look for the extreme. The average person will reject the unknown until other people make it a trend. Go for those other people.
3. It does not pay to be logical when everyone else is logical. To overcome your competition in the market, find the errors in their models and meet those needs. He points out that every military seeks to design and implement surprises. 
4. The nature of our intentions is the source of our internal tensions. His example is extreme though telling. His best hotel experience was in an East Berlin pad that must have been a police cell. If you were looking for a Ramada Inn you were going to be disappointed, but he wanted the experience of an East Berlin vacation and he was ecstatic. Know your true intentions and it will minimize your emotional tensions.
5. A flower is just a weed with an advertising budget. Nature rewards and invests in reproductive strategies that are effective, even when seemingly inefficient. 
6.  Logic kills off magic. The payoff for magic is the change in perception. Apple changed the perception of the computer. 
7. A good guess plus empirical observation is still science. You can have a lucky guess and be right. **See below.
8. Test the counter-intuitive things because nobody else will. Businesses must mainly follow the rational and logical and the data-driven because that is what is known to work. You still must set aside space—I take that to mean organizational as well as physical—to test random journeys.
9. Rationality is a tool. If it is your only tool, then you are playing golf with just one club.
10. Dare to be trivial. The butterfly effect is that a small change can have a large consequence. Add one sentence to the script of a call center and see what change it brings. 
11. Do not limit yourself to ten rules. Rational people are everyone else. So, if there is a problem not solved now, it is logic-proof or would not exist. Be creative.
12. Dare to look stupid. “Why do people dislike standing up on trains?” In fact, some prefer it for a moderate ride of 20 to 30 minutes because they have been sitting in a chair all day. If you notice, some people still stand even after sufficient seats have been vacated. For others, it might be the physical challenge of juggling one’s kit after you are already latched on to a pole. Ultimately, now we have privileged window seating perhaps with a tray or armrest and so on, and with others forced to stand in the middle with not much to do. He asks, what if, instead, we had rows of seats in the middle with the spaces near windows specially designed for restful standing, perhaps with cellphone chargers as well. Now, it looks different.
13. Create net utility with a multivariate choice. Give people choices that optimize or minimize more than one variable and in disproportion so that whatever the outcome for the individual, you bring less regret. This is adaptive preference formation, a narrative for the support of choices.

** (Rory Sutherland cites Paul Feyerabend in asserting that advances in science have not come from applications of the scientific method but from intuition and insight. What the postmodernists ignore and would have us ignore in their program against reason is that you can only prove that your intuitive insight is truly scientific by following the scientific method so that you first and then others can test and replicate your work. Otherwise, you have nothing. The flash of insight and awareness can only be a reward for the rational, logical, empirical, experiential modes of learning as the preparation for better understanding and, ultimately, therefore, material abundance.) 

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Katherine Anne Porter

“She has simply an eye and an ear sharp, shrewd, and true as a tuning fork. She has given to this little story all her wit and observation, her blistering humor and her just cruelty; for she has none of that slack tolerance or sentimental tenderness toward symptomatic evils that amounts to criminal collusion between author and character.” From Katherine Anne Porter's Introduction to A Curtain of Green by Eudora Welty (Doubleday, 1941) in The Collected Essays and Occasional Writings of Katherine Anne Porter (Seymour Lawrence/Delacorte Press, 1970).

I sought out Katherine Anne Porter because Austin science fiction author Nnedi Okorafor spoke at Kyle’s Katherine Anne Porter Literary Center (508 West Center Street, 78640) and a review in the Hays County Free Press popped up for scrolling in my Kyle email. When I read the story, I merely recognized Porter’s name, not having read her before, but was nonetheless surprised that she is considered a local Kyle author. So, I went to the library. 

I found her pleasurable. Katherine Anne Porter is good company. I love listening to her  across our distances. In addition to a dozen essays here, some several times, I also read short stories and poems in The Collected Stories of Katherine Anne Porter (Harvest/Harcourt Press, 1965, et seq). I read “Pale Horse/Pale Rider” through three times because that is what it took to understand the sequence of events. Clearly, even  though I read several other stories ahead of that, I was not prepared for a serious engagement. Nonetheless, she was an inspiration. I could have fattened these two anthologies with post-its bearing exclamation points or quotation marks tagging the juxtapositions, the clever and insightful phrases. 

[Added 12 April 2026 8:48 PM - I checked out Ship of Fools from my local library but after about twenty pages, some even from the middle, it is going back tomorrow. She writes well. Her word portraits are cinematic. However, her sense of life is entirely negative and she only delivers a long torrent of small, spiteful insults.]

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Dude, I am so Asian.

In my family, we always knew that we Hungarians are Asian, originating in the vast steppes between the Himalayas and the Urals. A recent publication in Nature pushed our ancestral homeland even farther east: “Ancient DNA reveals the prehistory of the Uralic and Yeniseian peoples,” by Tian Chen Zeng, Leonid A. Vyazov, et al., (2 July 2025), https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-025-09189-3. 

"Uralic languages, distributed from Western Siberia to Central Europe, are geographically separated from languages of the Eastern Steppes and far Northeast Siberia, but linguists have discovered ... high levels of typological similarity with languages in the ‘Altaic’ language area (Mongolic, Tungusic and Turkic) ... To resolve this conundrum, some linguists have suggested a recent eastern origin of the population giving rise to later expansions of Uralic speakers (for example, a “pre-proto-Uralic spoken further east… probably somewhere… near both Mongolia and the watershed area between the Yenisei and the Lena, possibly as recently as 3000 bc”60)—a scenario compatible with our results. Future ancient DNA sampling from this region would allow for a more precise determination of the archaeological identity of the Proto-Uralic-speaking community, and illuminate the relationship between it and the wider social world of the West Siberian Bronze Age." (ibid)

They still name boys Attila. Among very many, consider Attila Losonczy, MD, PhD,  neuroscientist at Columbia University (briefly at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attila_Losonczy). Bela Lugosi and Bela Bartók were named for Attila’s brother, in whose honor the village of Beda/Buda was dedicated. When I was about eight or ten, at our branch library, I found The White Stag by Kate Seredy, which was honored with Newberry Medal and Lewis Carroll Shelf awards. In that retelling, when the Magyars are surrounded, the Huns come riding out of the sky to turn the battle. 

Sometime in my mid-thirties to mid-forties, my brother sent me some references to the Samoyed, Ostyak, and Vogul languages of western Siberia and I found cognates to words such as "dog" and the numbers one, two, three, that I knew in Hungarian.

(Wikimedia. Marotta Commune.)

As for the paternal line, Marotta is a commune on the east coast of Italy, opposite Croatia. How they got to Sicily is lost to history. My father told me that his parents “came from Palermo.” Decades later, my half-brother explained that Palermo was just where they got on the ship that brought them here. They really came from a village called Sant’Agata on the east side of the north coast of Sicily, near the Straits of Messina and the "toe" of Italy. 

That the commune of Marotta lies across the Adriatic from Croatia touches on the fact that my maternal grandmother’s maiden name was Kovanics (Covanič); her father was Croatian having moved into the Hungarian realm of the Austrian empire to pursue business in pottery. Her mother and her husband were ethnic Magyars. That easy interaction across tribes defines the first Asian ancestors of the Hungarians. 

“… we show that the Early-to-Mid-Holocene hunter-gatherers harboured a continuous gradient of ancestry from fully European-related in the Baltic, to fully East Asian-related in the Transbaikal. …Ancestry from the first population, Cis-Baikal Late Neolithic–Bronze Age (Cisbaikal_LNBA), is associated with Yeniseian-speaking groups and those that admixed with them, and ancestry from the second, Yakutia Late Neolithic–Bronze Age (Yakutia_LNBA), is associated with migrations of prehistoric Uralic speakers.” (ibid)

I have B-positive blood.

As the various tribes were disrupted by as-yet-undiscovered forces, individuals migrated west and merged into new, admixed populations, now tagged for convenience as Admixed Inner Eurasians, “a term designating all populations in Central and Northern Eurasia that are the product of Holocene admixtures between West Eurasian ancestries and East Asian ancestries, including present-day and ancient Mongolic, Turkic, Tungusic and Uralic populations, as well as ancient Scythians, Sarmatians and pre-Scythian nomads of the Iron Age Steppes.” (ibid) 

We have a big family. 

I believe that everyone does. Every ethnic tree you trace has tangled taproots and evidence of cross-pollination. 

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Martin Perscheid "Ceres Science" on Facebook
15 August 2024; see also
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Perscheid

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