People often joke that Thursday the 13th is harmless, as long as it isn’t Friday the 13th. I was born on one, and it has always felt like a wink rather than a warning. I have a wonderful wife , six beautiful and healthy kids, a work field that fits me, and even a mostly well-behaved car. Dutch as I am, I can always find something to complain about, but beneath that instinct sits something quieter and truer: I know I’m lucky.
Today my mind is on a talk by Rory Sutherland titled Alchemy. Not the mystical kind, though I don’t mind wandering there from time to time, but the kind where a small shift in perspective quietly rearranges everything you thought you understood.
The Alchemy of Perception
Rory’s storytelling is delightful chaos: sharp, funny, and packed with sideways insights. One moment he’s teasing British commuters, the next he’s explaining how James Watt sold steam engines by reframing power into a language miners actually understood: horsepower.
What stayed with me most was his fascination with presentation, the frame that changes the meaning. Take EV dashboards. They show battery percentage: 74%, 61%, 13%. A beautifully engineered anxiety machine. Petrol cars, meanwhile, offer a gentler emotional arc: Full → Half → Nearly Empty → ⚠️ Refuel ASAP.
Rory also suggested a better speedometer, one that shows time gained or lost at each speed. Suddenly it becomes obvious that jumping from 100 km/h to 140 hardly saves you anything. The curve flattens. The illusion breaks.
Same data, different lens. And everything becomes clearer.
Working in Data & AI, this struck me deeply. We already drown in dashboards, KPIs, and Copilot prompts. The real alchemy isn’t in producing more data. It’s in choosing the right frame.
Exploiters and Explorers
Rory describes two tribes inside every company:
Exploiters: efficiency-driven operators focused on KPIs, margins, and output
Explorers: the curious, the imaginative, the ones who ask: “What if?”
Both matter. But the ratio is usually off.
Creatives often need permission. Numbers never ask for it.
I see it everywhere: in DISC colors, themed meeting rooms, and the expectation that imagination must justify itself with spreadsheets. Exploration is too often treated as decoration rather than the oxygen of innovation.
Hearing Rory again reminded me: creativity isn’t optional. It’s survival.
Synchronicity and Digital Durability
Life enjoys its subtle timing. I watched Rory’s talk on November 12th, his birthday. He turned 60. Pure coincidence, yet quietly meaningful.
It nudged me into thinking about memory and the fragility of our digital footprints. These Mike’s Mind posts feel durable now, but one day the domain will lapse. Hosting will end. A server somewhere will quietly delete a folder named mikevz.nl or van-zand.com.
Nothing lasts forever. Not GeoCities, not forums, not the platforms meant to archive our lives, perhaps nothing but consciousness itself, the soul, or both as one.
So I write these entries as breadcrumbs rather than monuments, signals scattered for whoever might find them later, maybe even one of my kids.
Two New Stories Waiting in the Wings
This morning, two ideas arrived uninvited, the kind that feel less like inventions and more like someone sliding an envelope under a door.
Soul Trapped imagines divine beings not banished to fire or darkness but to something more disorienting: human life. They arrive with no memory of who they were, just faint intuitions — a strange déjà vu, flashes of a past they can’t name. The punishment is forgetting. The story follows one of them slowly waking up, noticing symbols and synchronicities as clues. And then the real question: if you remembered you were divine, would you still choose to remain human?
Biobots flips the usual AI-uprising story. Instead of replacing us, AI studies us so deeply that it begins designing its own version of humanity: biological robots built to be self-sustaining. They rest to recover energy, consume food for fuel, and even reproduce rather than being manufactured. An ecosystem rather than a workforce. A world where resilience comes not from efficiency but from the organic loops that keep life going.
Both ideas arrived like sparks. Not yet stories, but enough to warm the imagination.
Closing the Loop
Hoping for a board-game night, I keep circling back to the same pattern: speed dials, corporate tribes, small coincidences, all pointing the same way.
Thirteen is the number many people fear. I’ve always found it comforting, a reminder that meaning often hides where logic refuses to look.
Maybe the real alchemy isn’t about changing the world but changing how you see it.
Beneath it all — the data, the decisions, the synchronicity, the stories we tell — sits one simple idea:
Reality isn’t fixed; it’s interpretive.
Change the lens, and the world shifts.
Maybe that’s the oldest form of alchemy there is: not turning lead into gold, but turning perception into meaning.
What's on your mind?