The trouble with intelligence, especially in the corporate imagination, is that it’s been cleaned up to the point of sterility. We assume smart teams must be tidy, rational, and interchangeable. As if intelligence were a kind of disinfectant, rather than a gloriously fermenting mess.

In the 1980s, the Lincoln Memorial was crumbling faster than expected. Marble was flaking off the structure, and the cause wasn’t time or weather, but something far more mundane:

I’ve always suspected that the reason people find it harder to leave a Netflix series than a religious cult is not because of the content, but because they’ve started something and haven’t finished it. Enter the Zeigarnik Effect…

Marketers love rewards. They seem like such a safe bet. Dangle a prize at the end of the rainbow and people will surely behave exactly as you hope. It's neat, logical, and delightfully cheap…in theory.

Knowledge about resources, needs, and possibilities is dispersed across individuals. It exists in fragments, often without anyone fully aware of its importance until context or circumstances change.

Reading on a screen is not the same as reading on paper, and pretending otherwise is one of the quiet failures of digital design. The difference lies in how the visual system responds to movement and light.

Walk into any Starbucks and someone will probably be paying $4.95 for a cup of hot water with a tea bag floating in it. They won't question it. They won’t even flinch.

Offer that same person a box of 20 premium tea bags for $99 in the grocery store, and they’ll act like you just tried to mug them in broad daylight.

Most people think of irrationality as a flaw to be fixed. Economists, psychologists, even self-help authors all conspire to beat it out of us with spreadsheets, mindfulness apps, and talks of efficiency. But here’s a thought: what if irrationality isn’t the noise, but the signal?

The greatest error in modern marketing is to assume that attention is democratic, fairly allocated, or guided by reason. It isn’t.