You might pride yourself in being a person of sound reasoning. Whether it’s your choice of career, partner or brand of toothpaste, every decision that you have made has been based on logic. All of which makes perfect sense in an entirely rational world. But, with news cycles continually dominated by Brexit and Mr Donald Trump, both of which follow polls where what could be viewed as the obvious, logical “right” choice did not win, it might be worth asking: how is logic working out for you?

“It’s true that logic is usually the best way to succeed in an argument, but if you want to succeed in life, it is not necessarily all that useful,” notes Mr Rory Sutherland, vice-chairman of advertising agency Ogilvy and Ted Talk icon, in his new book, Alchemy: The Surprising Power of Ideas That Don’t Make Sense.

“The drive to be rational has led people to seek political and economic laws that are akin to the laws of physics – universally true and applicable,” Mr Sutherland says. “In our addiction to naïve logic, we have created a magic-free world of neat economic models, business case studies and narrow technological ideas, which together give us a wonderfully reassuring sense of mastery over a complex world.”

There are two very basic problems with this reliance on logic: the world is more complicated than models make it appear, and people are less logical than even they realise. “Logical ideas often fail because… humans, unlike atoms, are not consistent enough in their behaviour for laws to hold broadly,” Mr Sutherland surmises, using examples of ideas that, on paper, shouldn’t work, but in reality, do. He also points out that if human psychology could be easily modelled, his job as an advertiser – knowing the best way to sell people things – would be a lot easier. “While in physics the opposite of a good idea is generally a bad idea, in psychology the opposite of a good idea can be a very good idea indeed: both opposites often work.”

Success, therefore, lies not in asking people what they want, but in showing people something that they didn’t even know they wanted: “entrepreneurs are disproportionately valuable precisely because they are not confined to doing only those things that make sense to a committee,” he says. “The trick to being an alchemist lies not in understanding universal laws, but spotting the many instances where those laws do not apply.”

Here are three examples of when the logical choice isn’t necessarily the right one.

“No big business idea makes sense at first,” says Mr Sutherland. To prove his point, he provides a thought experiment, suggesting a series of products to present to a group of skeptical investors in a world where these everyday items do not already exist. One of these products is something you might even be wearing right now, a pair of jeans. A wardrobe staple, as a pitch for a new business venture, it sounds ludicrous: “…and so I confidently predict that the great enduring fashion of the next century will be coarse, uncomfortable fabric which fades unpleasantly and takes ages to dry.” Other pairs of trousers are, of course, widely available.

From the 1950s onwards, rational ideas have been applied to streamline what we eat and drink. Eating “came to be considered more about convenience than pleasure,” Mr Sutherland says. “Some forward-thinking people had defined food’s function narrowly, in order to create a rational model of what the food industry should do. In this focus on scale and efficiency, people lost sight of what food is for.”

The rise of slow cooking, hyper-local produce and craft brewing, then, can be seen as a reaction to a model of food production based primarily on nutrition that does not take enjoyment into account. “Food has become remarkably inefficient, and the pill-promoting futurists of the 1960s would be astonished to see how wrong they were,” Mr Sutherland says. “People spend hours preparing it, eating it and watching television programmes about it. People cherish local ingredients and willingly pay a premium for foods produced without chemical fertilisers. By contrast, when we made the food industry logical, we lost sight of the reasons we value food at all.”

Much is made of Mr Donald Trump’s skills as a businessman – mostly by Mr Trump himself. Ahead of the 2016 US presidential elections, he was considered an outsider by most projections and an illogical choice by many voters. But, given that, as we’ve seen, models aren’t equipped to deal with data that exists beyond our narrow field of enquiry, and that people’s behaviour isn’t often logical, well, you know the rest.

But more than that, Mr Trump’s irrationality might just be the key to his success. “Being slightly bonkers can be a good negotiating strategy,” Mr Sutherland says. “Being rational means you are predicable, and predictable makes you weak. [Mr Trump] is able to achieve with one tweet what would take Clinton four years of congressional infighting.

“Irrational people are much more powerful that rational people, because their threats are so much more convincing,” Mr Sutherland adds. “If you are wholly predictable, people learn to hack you.”

Alchemy: The Surprising Power Of Ideas That Don’t Make Sense (WH Allen) by Mr Rory Sutherland is out 9 May