The concept of evolution shows that complexity and intelligence grows from simplicity rather than from greater complexity. This idea is indeed very counter-intuitive yet it led to enormous scientific insights. Before Darwin it was Galileo Galilei who had the counter-intuitive idea that instead of the earth the sun could be the centre of the universe.

If you look for them you can find amazing counter-intuitive ideas everywhere:

• If you have the impression that you’re slowly but steadily are getting too fat the intuitive solution is to eat less. But if you eat less the body goes to starvation-mode and stores more fat. You’ll get better results by counter-intuitively eat as you did always but take some exercises.
• If you forgot somebody’s name you get the best results by counter-intuitively stop thinking about it. The missing name eventually will pop up out of nowhere.
• If you want your reader to click a link, make it counter-intuitively hard to do so. Well, here’s the link:

So what we can derive from these insights is their application in everyday’s life:

If what you’re doing does not work, try (counter-intuitively!) something completely different, regardless whether what you did (intuitively) in the first place should have worked.