17 Quotes by Rory Sutherland

Evolved human instinct may be a much better at statistics than modern economists

An approach seeking to minimise variance or minimise downsides often involves behaviour that seems nonsensical to those who don’t understand what the actor is trying to do.

Anyone can easily build a career on a single eccentric talent, if it is cunningly deployed. As I always advise young people, ‘Find one or two things your boss is rubbish at and be quite good at them.’ Complementary talent is far more valuable than conformist talent.

Metrics, and especially averages, encourage you to focus on the middle of a market, but innovation happens at the extremes.

We naturally assume that something that only does one thing is better than something that claims to do many things

All powerful messages must contain an element of absurdity, illogicality, costliness, disproportion, inefficiency, scarcity, difficulty or extravagance – because rational behaviour and talk, for all their strengths, convey no meaning.[...] Meaning is conveyed by the things we do that are not in our own short-term self-interest – by the costs that we incur and the risks we take.

No living creature can evolve and survive in the real world by processing information in an objective, measured and proportionate manner.

It is harder to like something when you haven’t chosen it.

Our conscious mind tries hard to preserve the illusion that it deliberately chose every action you have ever taken; in reality, in many of these decisions it was a bystander at best, and much of the time it did not even notice the decision being made.