Alchemy

Alchemy is your guide to making magic happen in business and life by teaching you how to practice irrational thinking to stand out and come up with powerful solutions to your problems and those of others.

It’s easy to compartmentalize people into little boxes of behavior or demographics. People act in just the way we think they do, right? It’s easy to correctly assume the choice a person will make in any given situation, isn’t it? Actually, this is far from the truth.

While science and reason have given us revolutionary changes upon which our society is built, they don’t give an accurate baseline for the way people choose to act. In the case of brands, for example, the majority of people favor some over others, often with no logical reason.

Take dental hygiene for example. Did you know that people prefer to use toothpaste that has different colors of stripes in it? There’s not any easily identifiable advantage to this kind, so why does it happen? It’s a matter of ingenious design.

That extra color stripe in your toothpaste bottle makes it feel like you’re getting more out of it. To our brains, it’s as if we’re getting multiple benefits. We get the illusion that it’s more effective than the regular kind. Irrationality governs the way we act, which makes it difficult to make accurate assumptions about people. This is what causes so many businesses to fail.

So now that you know the importance of abstract thinking, how can you apply it? Start by looking at the little details that most people don’t even think twice about. Many businesses today are spending a pretty penny on trying to figure out their customers. It’s as if they’re trying to get the next big breakthrough. But thinking in such gigantic terms is missing the small things that can make the most difference. The power in microscopic adjustments is in the butterfly effect, which is when one tiny change gets magnified throughout the system to make a huge difference. One example the author saw was a publisher that added just four words to a telemarketing script. This small difference made sales conversions double! It might seem difficult to wrap your head around this principle, but the sooner you do, the sooner you’ll start seeing success coming your way. Still skeptical? Take a look at the experience Best Buy had that made sales shoot up 45% with just one change of a button. The company’s online ordering process was frustrating customers who had to create an account to make a purchase. A man by the name of Jared Spool had designers remove this option for the ability to just continue without the account…