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SD#68: Solitude, friends, and the age of average

August 6, 2023

Welcome to the 68 edition of Seven Dawns, a weekly newsletter by me, Tomas Ausra, with a focus on getting better every day. A very warm welcome to the new subscribers who joined since last week. I’m glad you’re here. 

Was this newsletter forwarded to you? You deserve your own: Subscribe here.

Hi friends,

I read 30-50 newsletters every week to curate Seven Dawns. Mostly it gives me a vast array of topics and themes that emerge, but once in a while, something happens in the universe, a star falls, and multiple people independently start writing on a similar theme. This happened to me with this week’s newsletter as I started exploring solitude, first which was quickly challenged by an essay and then amplified by cases of living near friends and how to do it.

🔎 Our seven ideas this week:

1. Loneliness or solitude? The case for being alone

Loneliness is a common but uncomfortable human emotion. Loneliness is the subjective experience in which a person is alone and which produces a feeling of desolation. When fleeting, it’s perfectly fine to feel lonely. It can be a way to process some feelings, which can be difficult but necessary. However, when loneliness becomes a constant feeling, it can actually be harmful to your health. A review of the research literature suggests that loneliness increases mortality risk by 26%. And the experience hurts. We are social animals and we need to feel that we belong. Researchers have found that pain from loneliness and social rejection activates the same parts of the brain as physical pain.

In contrast, solitude is just the state of being alone. The concept of solitude doesn’t have any negative feelings attached to it. Which is why it can actually be enjoyable, or just neutral. How we perceive being alone makes all the difference in whether we will experience it as loneliness or solitude. When we focus on the feeling of isolation from others and the world, being alone can produce a spiral of negative thoughts. When appreciated as a generative moment of self-discovery and reconnection with oneself, being alone can yield powerful insights and support your mental health.

👉 Ness Labs
2. It is a cruel and fundamentally inhuman tragedy that the culture has convinced so many of us that we must be healed in isolation

Being surrounded by people — people who love us, care for us, or are willing to sit in the same room with us while we clean up our messes — is about the only way that we have ever been able to get better. 

Rather than being a gradual, non-linear journey towards realisation and fulfilment, we’ve begun to imagine “healing” as a series of personal-discovery tasks that exist to make the self more comprehensible. We’re encouraged to enumerate our flaws, systemically comb through our childhoods for neat, pert little stories that can explain how each of them came to be, and then destroy them. Of course, there’s nothing wrong with wanting to understand ourselves. But if going to therapy has taught me anything, it’s that nothing is actually solved by intellectualising and pathologising every part of what we feel — and when we try, we’re usually sort of wrong anyway. Your emotions, by and large, are not a problem to be fixed in service of producing a better, more manageable, more loveable self. They just want to be felt.

The process of becoming yourself is not a corporate desk job, it is not homework, and it is not an unticked box languishing on a to-do list. You do not have to treat your flaws like action items that must be systematically targeted and eliminated to receive a return on investment. You have no supervisor; you should not be punished when you fail. Your job is not to lock the doors and chisel at yourself like a marble statue in the darkness until you feel quantifiably worthy of the world outside. Your job, really, is to find people who love you for reasons you hardly understand, and to love them back, and to try as hard as you can to make it all easier for each other. 

👉 Internet princess
3. You’d be happier living closer to friends but there are many reasons we aren’t

A study found that friends living within a mile of each other are 25 percent more likely to feel happy (I know I know, what is happiness, etc, but you get the point). You have all the convenience that comes with knowing your neighbours; you get more adults to help with the kids and more kids to also help with the kids. You can still live alone but have the benefits of not living alone. Turns out that living close to friends is practical and lovely!

So for people in their 20s, 30s, 40s, in the thick of figuring out adulthood and family support systems and the set-ups that nurture them: why don’t we do this? The fetishisation of the nuclear family, of course, as well as the building and zoning codes that facilitate that fetishisation. If a society’s understanding of “success” is a partnership, children, and home ownership, it makes sense that so many people’s quest for the last thing on the list sometimes brings them far from their friends, because that’s the only place they feel they can find the “right” house. These are the people who often want and need to move near friends most, because they’re not just far from the people they love, they’re hours or days from anything resembling a support system. Why is this happening?

Firstly, we’re not socialised to prioritise friendship. Not over career, not over partners, especially not over parenting — even though proximity to intimate friendship can make all of those things a whole lot easier. The friends are also scattered all over the globe. 

As of 2017, US millennials had the lowest level of geographical mobility in fifty years. The stat is particularly striking given that millennials are getting married less, buying houses less, and having fewer children — all things that generally keep you tethered to a place. But millennials also have less economic stability, less of the sort of savings/wealth that would allow them to enter the housing market — and if they can, they often have very little control over where that house will be.

We also tend to seek solutions within the family unit – not outside of it. Families can be great. Families can provide so much support. And families are not enough.

👉 Culture Study
 
4. How to live near your friends

Clustering your friends is a hard problem. Otherwise, you would have done it already. There are no shortcuts here – but the end result is worth it. Here are a few ideas:

1) Host regularly. Host it because of the magical friendship group juju that arises out of regularity. But a side effect is that friends become very familiar with the neighbourhood. 2) Enable short-term stays. Usually, when we pitch friends on moving nearby, they’re curious but hesitant. They love the idea of living near friends, but they can’t see themselves here. The trick, in each of these cases, is to offer them a one-month sublet. In that month, your friends will experience the benefits of living near friends. 3) Help your friends get leases. In high-demand housing markets, finding housing is stressful. Your friends might want to move nearby, but they’re also busy with work, their social lives, or other life stuff. They know they’d be happier in a different home, but getting from point A to point B is a lot of work. 4) Roommate matchmaking. 5) Make friends nearby. 

👉 offscript
5. Stop aiming for the same obvious target as everyone else. Figure out your first principles as a person—the Lego blocks of your talents, interests, and preferences—and paint the target around them

Your first principles are often the qualities you suppress the most—because they make you weird or different from other people. At some point in your life, you were probably shamed for embodying those qualities, so you learned to conceal them. But here’s the thing: we notice things because of contrast. Something stands out because it’s different from what surrounds it. If you blend into the background—if you show no idiosyncrasy, no fingerprints, no contrast, no anomaly—you become invisible. You become the background. It’s only by embracing, rather than erasing, your idiosyncrasies that you can become extraordinary.

Bruce Springsteen readily admits that his voice isn’t amazing. He can play the guitar but there are plenty of good guitar players, many of whom are better. Instead of aiming for the same target as other musicians—trying to out-sing or out-play them—Springsteen instead doubled down on the quality that made him unique: his ability to write song lyrics. The same man initially dismissed by audiences, agents, bandmates, and just about everyone else eventually became a rock ’n’ roll sensation.

👉 Ozan Varol
6. From film to fashion and architecture to advertising, creative fields have become dominated and defined by convention and cliché. Distinctiveness has died. In every field we look at, we find that everything looks the same. It’s the age of the average

The coffee roaster Four Barrel in San Francisco looks like the Australian Toby’s Estate in Brooklyn looks like The Coffee Collective in Copenhagen looks like Bear Pond Espresso in Tokyo. You can get a dry cortado with perfect latte art at any of them, then Instagram it on a marble countertop and further spread the aesthetic to your followers, according to The Verge. Cities once felt rooted in time and place. The Victorian grandeur of London. The Art Deco glamour of New York. The neon modernity of Tokyo. But with anodyne architecture spreading across the United States, cities are beginning to lose their contextual identities. They are all starting to look the same. And it isn’t just the design of our residential buildings but our professional ones as well.

So, the places where we live and work have begun to converge upon a single style, but we’re also seeing the same trend occur in the way we travel between them. There was a time when you could identify the country the car came from. But today, basically every company makes cars for basically every country. Cars are now designed for the broadest possible audience, across the broadest number of countries, to be manufactured in the most efficient possible way. In today’s extremely-online world, the vast availability of reference imagery has, perhaps counterintuitively, led to narrower thinking and shallower visual ideation. Designers use the same online platforms, draw inspiration from the same sorts of imagery and, in turn, create broadly the same types of creative.

The interiors of our homes, coffee shops and restaurants all look the same. The buildings where we live and work all look the same. The cars we drive, their colours and their logos all look the same. The way we look and the way we dress all looks the same. Our movies, books and video games all look the same. And the brands we buy, their adverts, identities and taglines all look the same.

👉 Alex Murrell
7. Scarcity is key to irrational prices

Beachfront property is scarce and, regardless of the economic cycle, always in demand. You can also manufacture scarcity with similar results (crazy-town prices). Spoiler alert: Hermès could produce more Birkin bags and yet decides not to. The choking of supply adds heft to the narrative that this is a special bag, and it adds credibility to the urgency — you may be shit out of luck next week if you don’t plunk down $14,000 now.

The strongest brands in the world — MIT, Apple, Hermès, the U.S. — are built on the artificial choking of supply via rejectionist admissions, pricing strategies, production, and visas. The richest man in the world doesn’t make cars, rockets, or enterprise software — he makes handbags. Bernard Arnault, the CEO of LVMH, is now worth more than Warren Buffett and Mark Zuckerberg combined. He’s made his fortune not selling things people need, but things they want. LVMH controls the most prestigious luxury brands in the world, from Tiffany & Co. to Loro Piana to Louis Vuitton.

👉 No Mercy / No malice

👨‍🏫 Quote of the week:

“Remember, happiness doesn’t depend upon who you are or what you have; it depends solely upon what you think. So start each day by thinking of all the things you have to be thankful for. Your future will depend very largely on the thoughts you think today. So think thoughts of hope and confidence and love and success.“

Dale Carnegie

🎁 Fun things to click on:

With Opinionate.io you can pose questions and have the tool simulate a debate between two debaters and a moderator, providing informative introduction to important discussions on any controversial topic you ask it. Check your pace of life. Japanese manhole covers are works of art, here’s how they’re made.

Thanks for reading! If you have any learnings you’d like to share with me, or disagree with any of the ones above then do drop me a message.

Loving this newsletter? Then why not share it with your friends.

Speak soon,

Tom

in:

Newsletter

SD#67: Default definitions, creativity and fear of judgement

July 23, 2023

Welcome to the 67 edition of Seven Dawns, a weekly newsletter by me, Tomas Ausra, with a focus on getting better every day. A very warm welcome to the new subscribers who joined since last week. I’m glad you’re here. 

Was this newsletter forwarded to you? You deserve your own: Subscribe here.

Hi friends,

Today we look at some concepts that we don’t challenge that often. Are there definitions in our lives that we just never question? Is formal schooling the only way to education? Is inspiration a prerequisite for creativity? Is perfectionism always bad? Are work-imposed hours the only way to approach our daily work? Let’s delve in.

🔎 Our seven ideas this week:

1. What are your default definitions?

Since we are born, a set of defaults influences our goals, our relationships, our tastes. From fashion to friendship, many of the choices we make in life are imperceptibly constrained by default definitions. For example, the default definition of education is formal schooling. The default definition of love is monogamy. The default definition of success is wealth and power. The default definition of ageing is decline.

Those default definitions are the invisible puppeteers quietly manipulating our actions and directing our lives. Fortunately, even though those are the most commonly accepted definitions, we don’t have to stick to them. To prosper in the vast liminal space that is life is to create our own definitions of what is good, not based on top-down rules dictated by society, not based on biased moral imperatives, not based on the rigid path to success we have been told to follow, not based on the expectations of our peers — but based on our intimate experience of the world. To do so, we need to turn our default definitions into deliberate questions. Instead of simply accepting the defaults that govern our lives, we can ask ourselves what we truly want and what we truly believe so we can discover our authentic ambitions.

First, audit your default definitions, what are the ideas that you treat as facts? Turn them into deliberate questions, the focus of these questions should be what is truly meaningful to you. Lastly, answer each question, it’s okay to admit you haven’t figured it out yet too.

👉 Ness Labs
2. Inspiration isn’t a prerequisite for creativity

Thousands of years ago, it was believed that creativity wasn’t a human thing. Instead, it was something that deities bestowed on a lucky few individuals at random. Creative work was a ‘gift from the gods’ and if you weren’t paying attention, the idea might jump to someone else. From a scientific perspective, creativity as a habit is rooted in neuroplasticity. In short, even though our brains can learn new tricks at any age, they’re really, in fact, quite lazy. We’re constantly looking for the path of least resistance, so the more consistently we do anything, the easier it becomes.

But, what’s especially cool about creativity is that it sends our brain on a positive, upward spiral. It isn’t just making us get on a hamster wheel of habit-building, but instead, helping us expand our sense of time, reality and even of ourselves.

On a micro-level, being creative releases neurotransmitters like serotonin and dopamine that help us feel happier and more inspired to create. In a recent research study out of New Zealand, college students were asked to practice creativity for 15 minutes each day. Not only did they feel better at the moment – but the researchers found that those positive emotions lasted for over 24 hours. We know that inspiration doesn’t just strike at random, but in fact, can be cultivated through consistent, creative practice. And the more we defrost our creative brains, the more we can change our entire world.

👉 Daydreamers
3. Perfectionism is powerful; it’s a force. Like any power, perfectionism is dichotomous in nature; it can be constructive or destructive

Perfectionism is a highly nuanced, complicated, largely misunderstood concept. Its products are rewarded, its process is embarrassing, and when someone says “You’re being such a perfectionist about this,” they’re not usually paying you some kind of compliment. They’re telling you about something they think you should stop. 

When we think of perfectionism, we’re typically thinking of something we shouldn’t be, a thing we shouldn’t do, or what we need to correct for. But instead of seeing perfectionism as this thing that needs to be destroyed or overcome, we start looking to it as one of our superpowers and strengths.

Perfectionism isn’t about getting all the dishes done, being punctual, orderly, or rigid; perfectionism is kaleidoscopic. It’s beautiful, it’s energising, it’s a fucking nightmare, it shows up in all kinds of ways, for all kinds of reasons. It can help you or hurt you depending on how you manage it.

👉 Recovering
 
4. How will you measure your life?

Three questions: First, how can I be sure that I’ll be happy in my career? Second, how can I be sure that my relationships with my spouse and my family become an enduring source of happiness? Third, how can I be sure I’ll stay out of jail?

One of the theories that gives great insight into the first question — how to be sure we find happiness in our careers — is from Frederick Herzberg, who asserts that the powerful motivator in our lives isn’t money; it’s the opportunity to learn, grow in responsibilities, contribute to others, and be recognised for achievements. Management is the noblest of professions if it’s practised well. No other occupation offers as many ways to help others learn and grow, take responsibility and be recognised for achievement, and contribute to the success of a team. More and more MBA students come to school thinking that a career in business means buying, selling, and investing in companies. That’s unfortunate. Doing deals doesn’t yield the deep rewards that come from building up people.

A theory that is helpful in answering the second question — How can I ensure that my relationship with my family proves to be an enduring source of happiness? — concerns how strategy is defined and implemented. Its primary insight is that a company’s strategy is determined by the types of initiatives that management invests in. If a company’s resource allocation process is not managed masterfully, what emerges from it can be very different from what management intended. Because companies’ decision-making systems are designed to steer investments to initiatives that offer the most tangible and immediate returns, companies shortchange investments in initiatives that are crucial to their long-term strategies. The choice and successful pursuit of a profession is but one tool for achieving your purpose. But without a purpose, life can become hollow. Your decisions about allocating your personal time, energy, and talent ultimately shape your life’s strategy.

👉 Harvard Business Review
5. Fear of judgement: why we are afraid of being judged

Athletes may fear judgement if they do not win a race, students may dread the disappointment of others upon failing an exam, and professionals may worry that a work project will be criticised. Psychologists refer to these feelings as a “fear of negative evaluation.” For our ancestors, being evaluated favourably, rather than judged for any shortcomings, would have meant a higher chance of survival.

Nowadays researchers have also found that high fear of negative evaluation can have negative effects. For example, it causes a public speaker to focus on their awkward appearance or the number of long gaps in their speech whereas positive aspects of the performance, such as appearing confident or self-assured, were more commonly overlooked. In 2012, a study with experienced basketball players found that players who scored highly on fear of negative evaluation questionnaire displayed increased anxiety that translated into a significant decrease in performance in a high-pressure shooting situation.

How can you manage this situation? 1) Find out more about yourself and why you feel that way. 2) Write positive affirmations to restore self-confidence and feelings of self-worth. 3) Start saying yes to situations that provoke anxiety. 4) Make a personal investment in a public speaking course, a career coach or a gym membership – whatever might instil more confidence.

👉 Ness Labs
6. You will never see a statue of a committee

If there was ever a law in advertising (or other crafts of life), it would be the following sentence – the chance of an idea surviving is inversely proportional to how many people are in the room.
 
There is a simple reason for that. More people, more suggestions and more considerations. Invariably, these suggestions are coming from what is important to each individual. That many perspectives just give you a laundry list of things to do, rather than an idea. Or, to put it another way, you end up trying to find a needle by building a haystack.

👉 Campaign Brief
7. How a nonlinear workday might help you get more done

According to the 2022 Brain Health Report from Muse, a meditation tool provider, people with the highest self-reported brain health scores— which include memory, focus, sleep, mood, productivity, and creativity — are those who make minor lifestyle changes, like adopting a nonlinear workday, says Nadia Kumentas, a doctor of naturopathic medicine and Muse’s vice president of marketing.
 
A nonlinear day works with your natural energy levels. People experience different energy and productivity levels at various times of the day. For example, if you’re most productive in the morning, you might want to start your day earlier than 9 a.m. to maximise those hours of productivity. Trying to force yourself into a lot of output during the back half of the day to try to do more, isn’t going to be the best use of your time, says Kumentas. The opposite approach would work for those who are most productive in the afternoon. If possible, start the workday later and use the first half of the day for less important work.

👉 Fast Company

👨‍🏫 Quote of the week:

“The most important conversations you’ll ever have are the ones you’ll have with yourself.”

David Goggins

🎁 Fun things to click on:

A megathread of useful concepts you should know. Billions of celestial objects revealed in gargantuan survey of the Milky Way. Data visualisation of AI vs human chess Elo ratings over time.

Thanks for reading! If you have any learnings you’d like to share with me, or disagree with any of the ones above then do drop me a message.

Loving this newsletter? Then why not share it with your friends.

Speak soon,

Tom

in:

Newsletter

SD#66: Curiosity, banking and Right Now Lists

July 9, 2023

Welcome to the 66 edition of Seven Dawns, a weekly newsletter by me, Tomas Ausra, with a focus on getting better every day. A very warm welcome to the new subscribers who joined since last week. I’m glad you’re here. 

Was this newsletter forwarded to you? You deserve your own: Subscribe here.

Hi friends,

Is all stealing bad? What if it’s someone else’s work that didn’t succeed but you have ideas for improving it? It’s a fine line. Even my newsletter has taken inspiration from many other newsletters or ideas. Do I aim to copy my way to success? Absolutely not, I’m creating my own thing and success is what I define myself but there is skill in taking inspiration from others.

🔎 Our seven ideas this week:

1. Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better

The good poet welds his theft into a whole of feeling which is unique, utterly different from that from which it was torn; the bad poet throws it into something which has no cohesion. 

In other words, despite the common saying, imitation is not flattery. It’s the transformation that is flattery: taking what you’ve stolen and turning it into something new. If it feels cheap or wrong to you, it probably is. I advocate an “elevator gut check” for one’s own work: If you met the artist you’re stealing from in a stalled elevator, would they shake your hand or punch you in the face?

👉 Austin Kleon
2. What you hate in others is usually what you hate most in yourself. The people who drive you crazy do so because they reflect at you the worst aspects of yourself that you have either tried to deny or overcome

If you measure your life by your family relationships, then you will measure others by the same standard – how close their family is to them. If they’re distant from their family or don’t call home enough, you’ll judge them as deadbeats, ungrateful or irresponsible, regardless of their lives or their history. If we believe that we’re hard workers and we earned everything we have, then we will believe that everyone else earned what they have. And if they have nothing, it’s because they earned nothing.

This isn’t to say that judging is wrong. There are plenty of values worth judgment. We judge people who are violent and malicious. But that is a reflection of who we are. We judge violence and malice within ourselves too. A big part of our development is to recognise our fixation, to recognise how we measure ourselves and consciously choose our metric for ourselves.

But another big part of development is to recognise that everyone has their metric. And that metric is likely not going to be the same as ours. And that’s (usually) fine. Most metrics people choose are fine. Even if they’re not the same metrics you would choose for yourself.

👉 Mark Manson
3. Banking, and by extension the economy, is not built on gold, labour, machinery, or spreadsheets, but on trust. Trust that deposits will be there when needed

Banks need your trust because they don’t actually have your money. When you deposit cash at the bank, it loans it to someone else. In fact, banks loan out more than they take in. It is a miracle and the cornerstone of our economy — turning short-term deposits into long-term loans. This is a good thing: Money sitting dormant does not fund startups, expand existing companies, or encourage consumers to … consume. It’s not useful.

Every bank is vulnerable to a run if enough people ask for their money on the same day. If Bank of America’s 67 million customers simultaneously withdrew their funds, in the same day/week/month, it would fail.

👉 No Mercy / No Malice
 
4. Green hydrogen could be a solution to reduce carbon emissions in heavy industries like steel making, shipping and cement

Perhaps one of the most important science experiments on the planet is happening in a remote stretch of the Australian outback, 100 miles away from the nearest town. A consortium of energy companies led by BP plans to cover an expanse of land eight times as large as New York City with as many as 1,743 wind turbines, each nearly as tall as the Empire State Building, along with 10 million or so solar panels and more than a thousand miles of access roads to connect them all. 

But none of the 26 gigawatts of energy the site expects to produce, equivalent to a third of what Australia’s grid currently requires, will go toward public use. Instead, it will be used to manufacture a novel kind of industrial fuel: green hydrogen. Green hydrogen is made by using renewable electricity to split water’s molecules (currently most hydrogen is made by using natural gas, a fossil fuel). The hydrogen is then burned to power vehicles or do other work. Because burning hydrogen emits only water vapour, green hydrogen avoids carbon dioxide emissions from beginning to end. It is widely seen as a potential solution to reduce carbon emissions in heavy industries like steel making, shipping and cement.

👉 NY Times
5. Curiosity helps you learn, keeps you young, and fosters better relationships

Children have an incredibly inquisitive mind. “Why?” they keep asking. They explore new things for no other reason except that they just want to know. Researchers tried to figure out how often kids ask questions. Turns out, a lot: on average, children ask 107 questions per hour!

But it seems that as adults we tend to fall into fixed and convenient cognitive patterns. Susan Engel’s, author and senior lecturer in psychology, research shows that what she calls “episodes of curiosity” — such as asking direct questions, manipulating objects, or intent and directed gazing — occurred 2.36 times in two hours in kindergarten and only 0.48 times in a fifth-grade classroom.

Some evidence suggests that this dramatic decrease in curiosity could be caused by our increase in knowledge as we grow up. Once we feel like there’s no gap between what we know and what we want to know, we just stop being and acting curious. However, there are a few simple activities that will help you foster your curiosity and by extension increase your creativity: ask questions; read outside of your field; be inquisitive with people; practice saying less; immerse yourself in a topic; write; carry a notebook; learning about yourself – are all valuable things to do to foster it.

👉 Ness Labs
6. Writing prompts that are actually unique

A few American poet Bernadette Mayer’s famous writing prompts to students:

– Write what cannot be written; for example, compose an index. 
– Attempt writing in a state of mind that seems least congenial. 
– Find the poems you think are the worst poems ever written, either by your own self or other poets. Study them, then write a bad poem. 
– Choose a subject you would like to write “about.” Then attempt to write a piece that absolutely avoids any relationship to that subject. Get someone to grade you. 
– Set yourself the task of writing in a way you’ve never written before, no matter who you are. 
– Write a work that intersperses love with landlords.

👉 Subtle Maneuvers
7. Use a Right Now List to trick your inner procrastinator

Lazy solutions can be smart. Light switch, remote control, escalators, smart speakers… Laziness has been the source of many innovations. Frank Gilbreth Sr. famously said: “I will always choose a lazy person to do a difficult job because a lazy person will find an easy way to do it”. Unproductive time helps us manage our stress and makes us less prone to burnout. Research suggests that procrastinating away from work and spending unproductive time can help us cope with stress. It is particularly true of teenagers. Activities (or lack thereof) that may be perceived as lazy by adults are necessary for the mental health of young people.

Lazy time also encourages diffuse thinking. Our mind has two modes of thinking: the diffuse mode and the focused mode of thinking. We need to maintain constant oscillation between the two modes to be our most creative and productive. Mind wandering, a form of diffuse thinking, is a useful mechanism for our brains to process information — sometimes leading to non-obvious solutions. When manipulated as a tool — with caution and control, but no unnecessary shame — laziness can be used to be more productive and more relaxed over the long run. Being lazy can lead to smarter decisions, innovative solutions, and better mental health.

👉 Ness Labs

👨‍🏫 Quote of the week:

“Stillness is not an excuse to withdraw from the affairs of the world. Quite the opposite – it’s a tool to let you do more good for more people.”

Ryan Holiday

🎁 Fun things to click on:

A breathing infographic describes different breathing practices to help master your nervous system and down-regulate anxiety. Learn history visually through maps. The biggest stock market crash I’d never heard of.

Thanks for reading! If you have any learnings you’d like to share with me, or disagree with any of the ones above then do drop me a message.

Loving this newsletter? Then why not share it with your friends.

Speak soon,

Tom

in:

Newsletter

SD#65: Regret, breathwork and laziness

June 25, 2023

Welcome to the 65 edition of Seven Dawns, a weekly newsletter by me, Tomas Ausra, with a focus on getting better every day. A very warm welcome to the new subscribers who joined since last week. I’m glad you’re here. 

Was this newsletter forwarded to you? You deserve your own: Subscribe here.

Hi friends,

Could breath be the most underutilised weapon of our body? We all breathe automatically. Except now… as I made you aware that you’re breathing and you’re cussing me silently. But did you know we can use breath to make us feel more relaxed or alternatively alert?

🔎 Our seven ideas this week:

1. Regret is the best definition of risk

Regrets are a dangerous liability because their final costs are often hidden for years or decades. And decisions that are easiest in the short run are often the most costly in the long run.

Daniel Kahneman once said an important part of becoming a good investor is having a well-calibrated sense of your future regret. You need to accurately understand how you’ll feel if things turn out differently than you hoped. Maybe regret is the best definition of risk. Risk isn’t how much money you might lose. It’s not even necessarily how you’ll feel when you lose it – over time, a lot of painful experiences turn into cherished lessons. The real risk is the regret (or lack thereof) that might come years or decades later.

We spend so much time trying to quantify risk when the answer is just figuring out what you will or won’t regret. The anonymous Twitter account FedSpeak wrote, “The purpose of life is to experience things for which you will later experience nostalgia.” The opposite of regret.

👉 Morgan Housel
2. Focus on effort, not outcomes

It’s a strange paradox. The people who are most successful in life, who accomplish the most, who dominate their professions — they don’t care that much about winning. They don’t care about outcomes.
 
As Marcus Aurelius said, it’s insane to tie your wellbeing to things outside of your control. Success, mastery, sanity, Marcus writes, comes from tying your wellbeing, “to your own actions.” If you did your best, if you gave it your all, if you acted with your best judgment — that is a win…regardless of whether it’s a good or bad outcome.

👉 Ryan Holiday
3. No matter how intense an external situation might be, whether it’s dealing with screaming children or a boardroom confrontation, there is always a grounded centre of calm available to you through consciously shifting your breathing rhythm

Techniques for tactical mindfulness — using mind-based or “top-down” tools to influence our thoughts and feelings — have exploded in popularity. But when our nervous systems are hijacked and adrenaline is coursing through our veins, unless we have thousands of hours of mindfulness training, it can be hard to avoid panic mode, let alone drop into meditation. Fortunately, it is possible (and far more efficient) to leverage your physiology — known as “bottom-up” practices — by using breathwork to self-regulate and positively impact your internal state in real time.

Deep inside your brain lies a piece of biological hardware known as your insula cortex. It interprets signals from your breathing rhythms, serving as a central hub for somatic (bodily) and interoceptive — or internal — signals. When you breathe through the mouth and into the upper lungs, signals are relayed to activate the sympathetic or activating part of your nervous system, creating a cascade effect that communicates to your endocrine system to secrete adrenaline and cortisol — which, in turn, generate measurable shifts in your blood chemistry. 

These shifts in blood chemistry impact the emotions you feel and even the tone of thoughts that will arise—like impulsive actions, anxious thoughts, and feelings of frustration. We can fall into a trap as these unproductive thoughts and feelings reinforce or even exacerbate the breath pattern that activates the sympathetic response in the nervous system. If we deliberately change the way that we breathe, for example, using exhales that are twice the length of the inhale, we consciously send different signals to the medulla oblongata (the brain’s control centre), just as we might change the input channel on a television remote. This part of our brain responds with instructions to the endocrine system to produce a neurotransmitter that slows down our heart rate, regulates blood pressure, and returns our body to homeostasis.

👉 Every
 
4. Online tracking is a danger to the integrity of democratic institutions

In recent years we have seen a serious wedge driven into the political life of the USA and several European countries. There is a direct link between tracking by the online ad industry and the polarisation of democratic societies. 

A study by a group of Facebook executives in 2018 reported that almost 2/3 of people who joined extremist groups on Facebook were directed there by recommendations from Facebook’s algorithms. And where do these systems get the data that informs their algorithms? From tracking us. Professor Hany Farid, an expert at the University of California, Berkeley, has said, “They didn’t set out to fuel misinformation and hate and divisiveness, but that’s what the algorithms learned.”

Tracking is also a national security threat. In April of 2021, a bipartisan group of U.S. Senators wrote, “This information [from adtech data] would be a goldmine for foreign intelligence services that could exploit it to inform and supercharge hacking, blackmail, and influence campaigns.” They went on to say, “Few Americans realise that [adtech companies] are siphoning off and storing…data to compile exhaustive dossiers about them…we must understand the serious national security risks posed by the unrestricted sale of Americans’ data to foreign companies and governments.”

👉 Bob Hoffman
5. To be creative, you have to be okay with doing absolutely nothing

In a recent interview with Rick Rubin, he was talking about working with AC/DC. Rubin was saying how when he was producing them, they’d just sit around all day in the studio drinking coffee and smoking cigarettes. Rubin would get antsy, point to his watch and the lead guitarist, Angus Young –– who was really the heart and soul of the band –– would just point to the cigarette in his hand like… What the fuck do you want me to do? I’m smoking? I can’t play guitar while I’m smoking? What Rubin later realised was that AC/DC’s genius didn’t just come from them “doing” but from them “doing nothing”. The band knew they only had 3-4 creative sprints in them a day and so, like a pride of lions, they’d lie around for hours at a time, shooting the shit until inspiration struck. Then, they’d put down their cigarettes, pick up their instruments and hunt. 

There’s a lot to hate about cigarettes. What’s to love, however, is that cigarettes give the smoker an excuse to sit around and do nothing. Holier-than-thou kale-eating fucks like to talk shit about cigarettes––and they have every right to do so because, well, cancer –– but sometimes I wonder if humanity isn’t worse off spending 12 hours a day staring owl-eyed at their screens. To be a decent writer, you have to be okay with either writing or doing absolutely nothing. I’m a firm believer that the only way to be creative is to sit around and do nothing until you get bored enough to entertain yourself. That’s writing, though. Some days you do nothing. Other days, you do something. But, the only way to have the days where you do something is to be okay with the days where you do nothing.

👉 Cole Schafer
6. AI has the potential to greatly enhance students’ abilities to think critically and expand their soft skills

Five predictions for the future of learning in the age of AI:
1) Getting one-on-one support for services like tutoring, coaching, mentorship, and even therapy was once only available to the well-off. AI will help democratise these services for wider audiences. 2) With AI, it will become possible to personalise everything from learning modalities and needs (e.g., visual versus text versus audio) to content types (e.g., easily bringing in a kid or adult’s favourite character or favourite hobby/genre) to the curriculum. 

3) A new generation of AI-first tools for both teachers and students will rise. Historically, students and educators are natural trendsetters when it comes to productivity software. 4) Assessment and credentialing will need to evolve. Many educators argue that ChatGPT is a technology that should be integrated with learning and teaching and that leveraging AI will be a crucial career skill in the future. To realise this, we’ll need to make a series of adjustments in the classroom and in how we assess classroom achievement — and make adjustments, just like we did when Wikipedia, calculators, the internet, personal laptops, and more came onto the scene and eventually became pivotal classroom technologies. 

5) Fact-checking will become critical as the “truth” gets distorted. Today’s AI-generated responses are especially dangerous because they can easily compose coherent prose and it’s level of polish can fool us into believing it to be factually accurate and true.

👉 a16z 
7. Far from a fatal flaw, laziness can be beneficial. From increased wellness to better work efficiency, being lazy can lead to a more relaxed but also more productive life

Lazy solutions can be smart. Light switch, remote control, escalators, smart speakers… Laziness has been the source of many innovations. Frank Gilbreth Sr. famously said: “I will always choose a lazy person to do a difficult job because a lazy person will find an easy way to do it”. Unproductive time helps us manage our stress and makes us less prone to burnout. Research suggests that procrastinating away from work and spending unproductive time can help us cope with stress. It is particularly true of teenagers. Activities (or lack thereof) that may be perceived as lazy by adults are necessary for the mental health of young people.

Lazy time also encourages diffuse thinking. Our mind has two modes of thinking: the diffuse mode and the focused mode of thinking. We need to maintain constant oscillation between the two modes to be our most creative and productive. Mind wandering, a form of diffuse thinking, is a useful mechanism for our brains to process information — sometimes leading to non-obvious solutions. When manipulated as a tool — with caution and control, but no unnecessary shame — laziness can be used to be more productive and more relaxed over the long run. Being lazy can lead to smarter decisions, innovative solutions, and better mental health.

👉 Ness Labs

👨‍🏫 Quote of the week:

“Faith is universal. Our specific methods for understanding it are arbitrary. Some of us pray to Jesus, some of us go to Mecca, some of us study subatomic particles. In the end we are all just searching for truth, that which is greater than ourselves.”

Dan Brown

🎁 Fun things to click on:

8 ways to read (a lot) more books this year. “Let’s face it—artists are always working, though they may not seem as if they are. They are like plants growing in winter. You can’t see the fruit, but it is taking root below the earth.” How to reduce carbon emissions at home.

Thanks for reading! If you have any learnings you’d like to share with me, or disagree with any of the ones above then do drop me a message.

Loving this newsletter? Then why not share it with your friends.

Speak soon,

Tom

in:

Newsletter

SD#64: Making friends, purpose anxiety, and truffle oil

June 11, 2023

Welcome to the 64 edition of Seven Dawns, a weekly newsletter by me, Tomas Ausra, with a focus on getting better every day. A very warm welcome to the new subscribers who joined since last week. I’m glad you’re here. 

Was this newsletter forwarded to you? You deserve your own: Subscribe here.

Hi friends,

I once heard that to become truly niche at what you do you have to combine several specialisms into your unique one. Say you do finance and love football. Are there ways you could take inspiration from how football teams manage their youth academies as an investment for future success into your financial modelling? Or perhaps the way teams look at match statistics and compute winning probabilities can give you an edge as you compare yourself to your business competitors? Today’s newsletter takes inspiration from a variety of sources, can we crossmatch it to what we do every day?

🔎 Our seven ideas this week:

1. Do the more difficult thing

Whenever we come to a little crossroad — a decision about how to do things and what things to do — Marcus Aurelius said to default to the option that challenges you the most. He writes in Meditations about holding the reins in his non-dominant hand as both an exercise to practice and a metaphor for doing the difficult thing.

Jump into the colder pool. Walk instead of drive. Pick up the book instead of your phone. Take responsibility instead of hoping it goes unnoticed. In matters big and small, courage is choosing the more difficult option. Make it a habit. Iron sharpens iron, after all. You’ll be better for it — not only for the improvement that comes from the challenge itself but for the willpower you are developing by choosing that option on purpose.

👉 Ryan Holiday
2. Instead of treating satisfaction as a consequence of particular outcomes, leaving it to the whims of unhealthy correlations with things like wealth, status, or more trophies (I’ll be satisfied when…), we should treat it like a skill, a learned behaviour (I’ll be satisfied because…). In essence, we need to see success and satisfaction as independent variables

Many successful professionals struggle to enjoy their accomplishments. For example, one study found that 72% of successful entrepreneurs suffer from depression or other mental health concerns. And CEOs may be depressed at more than double the rate of the public at large. 

And when it comes to fuelling our obsession with acquiring more money, expensive toys, professional successes, or prestige, we have help. Our brains’ reward system, especially the neurotransmitter dopamine, drives us to achieve goals and rewards us with a great sense of pleasure when we do. But that pleasure is short-lived, as our brains are hardwired to also seek balance from extreme emotional states. That leaves us with an empty longing to repeat whatever experience brought us that pleasure in the first place. This ostensibly addictive cycle throws our “enoughness” barometers completely out of whack, preventing us from being able to objectively gauge if what we’ve achieved is, in fact, satisfying. That’s why, although most of us intuitively know that happiness isn’t realised from the pursuit of money, status, or fame, we can’t stop ourselves from trying.

If you’re prone to dissatisfaction in moments when you expect to be satisfied, only to then double down on the same choices that made you dissatisfied in the first place, you must redefine your relationship with satisfaction. Learning to be satisfied, then, must begin by dismantling your dissatisfaction apparatus. You must reformulate your enoughness gauges so that they collect and measure the right data.

👉 Harvard Business Review
3. Never put truffle oil in the microwave

Quality is an actual thing that has value. We are obsessed with quantity over quality but ask yourself what you remember. The number of ads that ran or the impression they made? Cadbury Gorilla first ran 13 years ago. And we still remember it. What is that worth? Making something of quality matters. And I think it matters today more than ever. Quality is a massive factor for the products we sell. It should also be true for the communications we make about those products. Consumers can tell when you have cut corners.

👉 One of the 11 immutable laws of advertising from  Damon Stapleton.
 
4. Treat success and failure the same

Some days, Marcus Aurelius wrote, the crowd cheers and worships you. Other days, they hate you and hit you with brickbats. You get a lucky break sometimes — get more credit and attention than you deserve. Other times you’ll get held to an impossibly unfair standard. They’ll build you up, and then tear you down — and act like it was your fault you got way up there in the first place. They’ll criticise you in public and privately tell you it’s all for show. 

There will be good years and bad years. Times when the cards fall our way, times when the dice keep coming up snake eyes. That’s just the way it goes. The key, Marcus said, is to assent to all of it. Accept the good stuff without arrogance, he writes in Meditations. Let the bad stuff go with indifference. Neither success nor failure says anything about you. A rock thrown in the air gains nothing by going up, Marcus said, and nothing by falling down.

👉 Ryan Holiday
5. We overestimate our short-term ability but underestimate our long-term ability

We overestimate our short-term ability. We think we’re capable of doing far more in a short space of time. But the reality is, life is busy! We have so many commitments, and creative deadlines will inevitably get missed or scrapped entirely.

But we underestimate our long-term ability. Working out is something you can’t do a ton of all at once without severe physical repercussions — you have to pace yourself. But the effects quickly build, and the changes are really noticeable.

👉 Paavan Design
6. The fear of not knowing your purpose in life can lead to existential distress which is known as purpose anxiety

There is no magic bullet to finding a purpose in life, but we can make the search a lot less excruciating by applying simple strategies to minimise purpose anxiety.

When searching for a purpose in life, it can be tempting to compare ourselves to others, especially if we’re surrounded by people who seem to have found their calling. However, social comparison may inflate negative emotions and lead to purpose anxiety. Instead, practice self-reflection to understand your intrinsic motivations and explore the inner questions that fuel your curiosity. 

Embrace the liminal. Our time between life and death is an extended liminal space. It can be scary to not know where we’re going, which may lead us to desperately cling to a ladder of linear goals, where each next step is clearly defined to achieve success. But this liminal space can also be seen as a playground, full of opportunities for growth and discovery. Enjoy the journey by exploring different paths and learning about yourself along the way.

Practice deliberate experimentation. Purpose is action-oriented. Even if you don’t know yet what your purpose in life is, you can take steps towards investigating potential sources of purpose. Just like a scientist, design short experiments where you try working on a new project, meeting new people, or learning a new skill. Use metacognitive strategies to document the process and how it makes you feel so you can keep on adapting your experiments until you find a direction that feels stimulating and fulfilling.

👉 Ness Labs
7. It’s possible to be acquaintances with someone for years, but never actually become friends. You need to spend serious time with people, over a compressed period. As it turns out, it’s not simply time spent together, but rather “Time Density” that is key

Now that you’re older, wiser, and more emotionally intelligent, it should be easier to connect with people. But it’s not. Since the 1950s sociologists have considered three things crucial to making close friends: proximity; repeated, unplanned interactions; and a setting that encourages people to let their guard down.  

Knowing how crucial time together is for building friendships, you can probably see why children have a much easier time making friends. We simply don’t have long stretches of time as adults. The research suggests that — we need to spend 33 hours/week, for 6 weeks straight — to build a strong relationship. How are you supposed to do that with a 40+ hour a-week job?

If time was the whole story, we would be best friends with all of our coworkers. A turning point in every relationship is the context switch. If you go to a run club each week — but the only time you see the people there is during your run — you will not become friends. Until you change the context, the relationship is stuck. As children, we did this all the time. We would connect to people through school, but would change the context by hanging out at each other’s houses, having dinner with their families, joining sports teams together. This leads us to the last reason it’s harder for adults to make friends – fear. As a child, asking an acquaintance from school to go to the mall with you was not a big deal. But somewhere along the line, our adult brains broke and we became fearful and guarded.

👉 Startup Social

👨‍🏫 Quote of the week:

“When we tune out the opinions, expectations, and obligations of the world around us, we begin to hear ourselves.”

Jay Shetty

🎁 Fun things to click on:

15 people on the most important question they’ve ever been asked. Vacation & Travel Chat Assistant – this AI-assistant can design a custom trip, give you inspiration on where to go, and even generate local recommendations for hotels, restaurants, and attractions. Qigong: moving meditation for creatives who can’t sit still. 

Thanks for reading! If you have any learnings you’d like to share with me, or disagree with any of the ones above then do drop me a message.

Loving this newsletter? Then why not share it with your friends.

Speak soon,

Tom

in:

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SD#63: Perception, wealth, and introspection

May 28, 2023

Welcome to the 63 edition of Seven Dawns, a weekly newsletter by me, Tomas Ausra, with a focus on getting better every day. A very warm welcome to the new subscribers who joined since last week. I’m glad you’re here. 

Was this newsletter forwarded to you? You deserve your own: Subscribe here.

Hi friends,

Our brains are the most magnificent creations. They can adapt to changes and make parts of the brain take over functions from others. They process millions of things happening around us at all times and flag what needs to be most important to us. They have also adapted to processing sight and filling in details before we actually see them. Isn’t it crazy that we see things as they happen only because our brain pre-processed what should be happening 50 milliseconds in advance?

🔎 Our seven ideas this week:

1. (Psychology) Our brains unconsciously bend our perception of reality to meet our desires or expectations. And they fill in gaps using our past experiences

“It’s really important to understand we’re not seeing reality,” says neuroscientist Patrick Cavanagh, a research professor at Dartmouth College and a senior fellow at Glendon College in Canada. “We’re seeing a story that’s being created for us.” Most of the time, the story our brains generate matches the real, physical world — but not always. Our brains also unconsciously bend our perception of reality to meet our desires or expectations. And they fill in gaps using our past experiences.
 
“The dirty little secret about sensory systems is that they’re slow, they’re lagged, they’re not about what’s happening right now but what’s happening 50 milliseconds ago, or, in the case of vision, hundreds of milliseconds ago,” says Adam Hantman, a neuroscientist at Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Janelia Research Campus. If we relied solely on this outdated information, though, we wouldn’t be able to hit baseballs with bats or swat annoying flies away from our faces. We’d be less coordinated, and possibly get hurt more often.
 
The big principles that underlie how our brains process what we see also underlie most of our thinking. Illusions are “the basis of superstition, the basis of magical thinking,” Martinez-Conde says. “It’s the basis for a lot of erroneous beliefs. We’re very uncomfortable with uncertainty. The ambiguity is going to be resolved one way or another, and sometimes in a way that does not match reality.”

👉 Vox
2. (Marketing) Good creative is still the most important contributor to driving sales

For every ad campaign they execute, brand and agency leaders have to decide on an array of variables: how much to spend on creative development and testing; whether to seek high reach or more precise targets; the context for the message; and how to add an element of recency to deliver the ad before the next expected purchase. But it wasn’t too long ago that creative was the most important part of the mix by far. It was a pretty simple formula: Good creative sold products, bad creative didn’t. In 2006, Project Apollo found that 65% of a brand’s sales lift from advertising came from the creative.
 
While creative remains the undisputed champ in terms of sales drivers, new research from NCSolutions highlights how the other elements of factor into the overall sales picture. While the equation today involves several factors, good creative is still the most important element. The findings also highlight how media is playing a more important role than ever. Because of breakthroughs in data and technology, the elements of targeting, reach and recency can significantly affect sales outcome of a campaign. In fact, the effect of media on sales has increased to 36% from 15% over the past 11 years.

👉 Nielsen
3. (Wealth) Which resources you consider valuable is just as important as the abundance of resources themselves. The key is optimising for the right form of wealth

What comes to mind when you think of wealth? Money doesn’t have a monopoly on wealth. Wealth is defined as “an abundance of valuable material possessions or resources,” but nowhere in this definition is money listed as the singular valuable possession or resource. Money is the simplest, most obvious form of wealth because it can be quantified. Subconsciously, money becomes a competition. Like any other competition, we want to beat our peers. Make more money. Acquire more possessions. Indulge in more pleasures. Anything to win the game. What gets missed is that beyond a certain point, money is a seductive scoreboard but a poor measure of wealth. It has diminishing returns.
 
The biggest problem with pursuing monetary wealth over everything else is the opportunity cost associated with it. How many hours will it take to scale your income from $250k to $500k? $1M? $10M? Will any amount of money ever be enough? What other forms of wealth will you have to sacrifice to get there? The key is optimising the right form of wealth.
 
1) Knowledge. Like money, knowledge is an accumulated form of wealth. However, unlike money, it is difficult to compare “knowledge” from person to person. 2) Time. We only become aware of the value of time when ours is almost gone. 3) Health. Much like time, we rarely think of health while we have it. But once you lose it? It is the only thing that you can think about. Confucius put it best when he said, “A healthy man wants a thousand things, a sick man only wants one.” 4) Relationships. We are social creatures, and relationships are critical for the soul. 5) Experiences. Experiences are our opportunities to cash in our other forms of wealth for something memorable. Some experiences cost money, but the most valuable experiences aren’t defined by their price tags.

👉 Young Money
 
4. (Philosophy) Finding beauty within the shrubs

In 1819, in the morning after a horrific March storm, John Adams was hit with an epiphany. Even though the storm had ruined his farm’s harvest, all he could see was beauty. He could see it in the utterly ordinary and plain winter landscape:
 
“The icicles on every sprig glowed in all the luster of diamonds. Every tree was a chandelier of cut glass. I have seen a Queen of France with eighteen millions of livres of diamonds upon her person and I declare that all the charms of her face and figure added to all the glitter of her jewels did not make an impression on me equal to that presented by every shrub. The whole world was glittering with precious stones.”
 
There’s no anguish, despair, or discontent present in the marvelling mind. There’s complete tranquillity and stillness—the height of brilliance. It’s always within our reach. Beauty surrounds us. The flame dancing atop the candle’s wick. The arm hairs standing up when it’s a little colder than usual. The brake lights moving in perfect unison when green turns to yellow. The leaves floating, swirling, and bouncing off the sidewalk on a crisp fall morning. The rising sun’s light piercing through your curtains and waking you up before the alarm was supposed to. The beautiful and the simple, the extraordinary and the mundane—never assume that you comprehend. Instead, marvel. Delight.

👉 Daily Stoic
5. (Psychology) You could spend an infinite amount of time in introspection without emerging with any more insight than before you started – this is known as the introspection trap

We think that introspection will automatically give us the answers we need, and we go for the most obvious answers — the ones that feel simple and plausible. This often results in confirmation bias, our natural tendency to interpret and remember information in a way that confirms our prior hypotheses or personal beliefs. Another way we tend to go for the easiest answers is by only considering the most recent information, a form of memory bias known as the recency effect. This is particularly the case when we practice self-reflection right after an event, instead of giving our minds some time to process the experience.
 
For instance, let’s say that you had a fight with a colleague. You decide to grab your journal or open your daily notes to write about the conversation and how it made you feel. In that scenario, you are likely to seek justifications for why your colleague was wrong and to be influenced by the strong emotions you are still feeling after the fight that just happened. In contrast, if you wait until the next morning to practice self-reflection, you will create more distance between your present self who is journaling and your past self who went through the unpleasant event, which will allow you to consider your experience more objectively.

👉 Ness Labs
6. (Marketing) Research shows that products with a 4 to 4.5-star rating have higher sales than the same product with a 4.5+ star rating

Product purchases were most influenced by reviews with an average star rating between 4.2 and 4.5, according to research from GetApp. Products with five-star ratings were less influenced, likely due to today’s sceptical consumers’ “ too good to be true” sensibilities. Having a few less-than-perfect reviews decreases a product’s average star rating, but grows the business more.
 
There’s a healthy cynic in us all. We know nothing is perfect. So when a consumer sees only five-star reviews, they smell something fishy, something that causes their BS meter to go off. They know that some negative opinions about a product, service or place are to be expected, and become suspicious when something is marketed as “perfect.”

👉 Tech Crunch
7. (Psychology) Anxiety is conductive. It wants to travel from one person to another person

Once a client becomes anxious, their primary goal becomes to make you anxious, because that justifies their anxiety. So if they’re freaking out and they can get you to freak out then omg we should all be freaking out! And then nothing gets done. Or worse, shit gets done but it sucks. Anxiety doesn’t produce good work. That person was probably yelling at you because someone had just finished yelling at them. So before you mention this issue to anyone on your team make sure you’re calm. Don’t repeat the pattern. Go for a walk around the block. Watch some kitten videos. Take a swig of whiskey. Smoke a bowl on the roof. Just make sure the anxiety ends with you.
 
They say advice comes from the unlikeliest of places. The above was written in a newsletter for design students on how to deal with panicking clients. It just sounded like a thought piece we could all read.

👉 Dear Design Student

👨‍🏫 Quote of the week:

“You can’t build a reputation on what you’re going to do.”

Henry Ford

🎁 Fun things to click on:

27 Life-changing micro habits that require only a few minutes. Ongoing thread of unusual party ideas (some great, some terrible). How Americans spend their money by age group. 

Thanks for reading! If you have any learnings you’d like to share with me, or disagree with any of the ones above then do drop me a message.

Loving this newsletter? Then why not share it with your friends.

Speak soon,

Tom

in:

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SD#62: One thing a day, going through the motions and brand revitalisation

May 14, 2023

Welcome to the 62 edition of Seven Dawns, a weekly newsletter by me, Tomas Ausra, with a focus on getting better every day. A very warm welcome to the new subscribers who joined since last week. I’m glad you’re here. 

Was this newsletter forwarded to you? You deserve your own: Subscribe here.

Hi friends,

The topic of change has been in my mind a lot lately as I’ve been reading through Marcus Aurelius ‘Meditations’. They say the only constant thing in life is change and it’s inevitable, then why do we fear it so much? 

“Is any man afraid of change? What can take place without change? What then is more pleasing or more suitable to the universal nature? And can you take a hot bath unless the wood for the fire undergoes a change? And can you be nourished unless the food undergoes a change? And can anything else that is useful be accomplished without change? Do you not see then that for yourself also to change is just the same, and equally necessary for the universal nature?”

🔎 Our seven ideas this week:

1. (Philosophy) Just do one thing every day

Seneca wrote a lot of letters to his friend Lucilius. “Each day,” he told Lucilius, you should “acquire something that will fortify you against poverty, against death, indeed against other misfortunes, as well.” 

Just one thing. One nugget. And that’s what most of Seneca’s letters to his friend are about. They have a quote in them. Or a little prescription. Or a story. One little thing to make Lucilius stronger, smarter, wiser, calmer. This is the way to improvement: Incremental, consistent, humble, persistent work. Your business, your book, your career, your body—it doesn’t matter—you build them with little things, day after day.

This is how the newsletter Seven Dawns was born. The idea that we can learn something new every day and improve our lives little by little. I hope you’re enjoying this journey with me.

👉 Daily Stoic
2. (Productivity) Building a reward system is a powerful way to boost your productivity, reducing the need to rely on intrinsic motivation to complete the work you need (and want) to do

It is becoming more widely accepted that having a separate incentive to reach a goal has many benefits. Far from being frivolous, rewards are considered by researchers to be “the most crucial objects for life.” Rewards are needed to encourage us to eat and drink, and even to mate. In evolutionary terms, the better we are at striving for rewards, the greater our chances of survival. Rewards that are related to the task are likely to be more effective. This is known as “proximity to the reward”, and scientists have noted that a related reward can be a particularly salient factor in enhancing motivation.

It can take time and multiple adjustments to build a reward system that will work for you. For operant conditioning to occur – when an association is made between a behaviour and a consequence – the scheduling of rewards must be carefully planned to assist us in establishing new habits.

A study conducted in 2018 compared the benefit of receiving frequent rewards for completing small tasks with the promise of a reward for finishing a long project. The researchers, Kaitlin Woolley and Ayelet Fishbach, found that when a small, regular reward was available, participants experienced greater interest and enjoyment in their work than those waiting for the delayed reward. Although Woolley and Fishbach demonstrated that regular rewards incentivized individuals to keep going with a project, to build a successful reward system you should first consider trying continuous reinforcement.

👉 Ness Labs
3. (Psychology) Live differently to live better

To live better means that you’ll live differently—somehow, you’ll make some kind of change. Your life will be different tomorrow than it is today. Naturally, some changes are easier than others. By regularly exposing yourself to new ideas and practices, you can learn to think and live differently. Here are a few ideas to try:
 
– Get better at taking notes. Find a system that works for you (there’s no one-size-fits-all solution) and use it every day. If you don’t write things down, you’ll forget the majority of what you learn. Use spaced repetition to reinforce what you learn.
– Think about the political party or group you most identify with, and consider what you disagree with them about. Do the same for any religious affiliation, nationality, organization, and so on. You’ll never learn to think independently if you adopt a platform without scrutinizing it.
– Exercise isn’t always enjoyable, but feeling strong and healthy is. When you’re trying to decide if you should work out, think about how you’ll feel after it’s over.
– Stick to a schedule most days, and once in a while, break it entirely. Both are critical to success. Some of the most ambitious people live the most boring lives—they know what they need to do, so they keep their head down and focus on that. But if you do that all the time, you risk becoming stagnant and stuck in your ways.

👉 The art of non-conformity
 
4. (Copywriting) Going through the motions is the artist’s great secret for getting started

If you don’t know what to write in your diary, you write the date at the top of the page as neatly and slowly as you can and things will come to you. “Going through the motions” is often thought of as a bad thing, but it is the artist’s great secret for getting started.

If we just start going through the motions, if we strum a guitar, shuffle sticky notes around a conference table, or start kneading clay, the motion kickstarts our brain into thinking. Get your pen moving, and something will come out. (It might be trash, but it will be something.)

👉 Austin Kleon
5. (Society) A 4-day-work week has been a success in virtually every dimension: performance, productivity, and overall experience

2022 has been the year of the 4-day week. It was named by CNN for its prestigious “Risk Takers” as one of the nine most important new ideas in business. Many national governments have announced sponsored trials of 4-day weeks. Interest from companies, employees, nonprofits, and researchers has surged around the world. As people struggle to recover from the pandemic, workplace stress, long hours and the pressures of daily life have emerged as urgent problems.

As the most popular form of work time reduction, a 4-day, 32-hour work week has been gaining momentum in recent years. Given this growth in interest, 4 Day Week Global began supporting companies and non-profit organisations that wanted to try a 4-day, 32-hour work week with no reduction in pay. In 2022, their efforts led to the world’s first coordinated trials and the large-scale independent research effort on the impacts of a 4-day week. 

The results are now in: The trials have been a resounding success in virtually every dimension. Companies are extremely pleased with their performance, productivity and overall experience, with almost all of them already committing or planning to continue with the 4-day week schedule. Revenue has risen throughout the trial. Sick days and absenteeism are down. Companies are hiring. Resignations fell slightly, a striking finding during the “Great Resignation.” Employees are similarly enthusiastic. And climate impacts, while less well-measured, are also encouraging.

👉 Boston College, University College Dublin and Cambridge University
6. (Marketing) Less glamorous, more sensitive and 9 times out of 10, more likely to prove ultimately successful, brand revitalisation is the better choice than repositioning or rebrand

Repositioning is one of those business topics that everyone loves until it comes to finding successful examples of brands that have changed – completely – what they stand for in the market. If you understand the nuances of perception, if you appreciate the time it takes to actually build brand image, and if you have any conception of what branding costs, then repositioning is almost immediately wiped off the whiteboard of strategic options.

Rebranding – in which we not only attempt to change the perception of the brand but also its name and livery – is an even more unpalatable option. Take all the disadvantages of repositioning and then add the massive additional disadvantage of losing all awareness, salience and familiarity, and then having to build them from scratch, and you begin to glimpse the enormous fallacy of rebranding. You do it for only one reason – because for legal reasons you have to.

So, what does an organisation dissatisfied with its current brand do instead? Suck it up? No. There is a third option. Less glamorous. More sensitive. And 9 times out of 10, more likely to prove ultimately successful. The right path is brand revitalisation.

👉 Marketing Week
7. (Society) A judge in Colombia used ChatGPT to make a court ruling, in what is apparently the first time a legal decision has been made with the help of an AI text generator

This is a more newsy learning than I usually include in Seven Dawns but I thought it was damn cool.

Judge Juan Manuel Padilla Garcia, who presides over the First Circuit Court in the city of Cartagena, said he used the AI tool to pose legal questions about the case and included its responses in his decision. Garcia included the chatbot’s full responses in the decision, apparently marking the first time a judge has admitted to doing so. The judge also included his own insights into applicable legal precedents, and said the AI was used to “extend the arguments of the adopted decision.” After detailing the exchanges with the AI, the judge then adopts its responses and his own legal arguments as grounds for its decision.

Colombian law does not forbid the use of AI in court decisions, but systems like ChatGPT are known for giving answers that are biased, discriminatory, or just plain wrong. This is because the language model holds no actual “understanding” of the text—it merely synthesises sentences based on probability from the millions of examples used to train the system. Although the Colombian court filing indicates that the AI was mostly used to speed up drafting a decision and that its responses were fact-checked, it’s likely a sign that more is on the way.

👉 Vice

👨‍🏫 Quote of the week:

“Human beings, it seems, are at their best when immersed deeply in something challenging.”

Cal Newport

🎁 Fun things to click on:

10 little-known websites that give you superpowers. Good book recommendations are hard to come by. Readow.ai uses reviews from readers to give unbiased suggestions on what to read next. It’s time to talk to yourself: The Guardian’s Chris Clarke shares his technique for problem-solving.

Thanks for reading! If you have any learnings you’d like to share with me, or disagree with any of the ones above then do drop me a message.

Loving this newsletter? Then why not share it with your friends.

Speak soon,

Tom

in:

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SD#61: Disruptive technologies, breathing, and power

April 30, 2023

Welcome to the 61 edition of Seven Dawns, a weekly newsletter by me, Tomas Ausra, with a focus on getting better every day. A very warm welcome to the new subscribers who joined since last week. I’m glad you’re here. 

Was this newsletter forwarded to you? You deserve your own: Subscribe here.

Hi friends,

Are we over ChatGPT yet? I doubt it. It’s likely here to stay as the possibilities remain mostly uncovered. People are fretting about how it will take away our jobs, but what does history tell us about new technology and job creation? Usually, it creates more jobs than it takes as new areas of work are imagined. Fear not though as today’s newsletter also looks into breathing and how we can control our emotions through different ways of breathing. Let’s dive in.

🔎 Our seven ideas this week:

1. (Society) Disruptive technologies cause employment instability for only short periods. The market crisply reorganises itself around innovation and job growth increases from there

A technology is introduced — say, the car — and an existing sector is made irrelevant overnight (e.g., horse and carriage). In the short term, we’re fixated on how many horses will be out of a job. Harder to imagine, however, is how many jobs the car will create — as well as the different kinds of jobs it will create. It’s hard to envision radios, turn-signal lights, motion sensors, and heated seats. Let alone NASCAR, The Italian Job, and the drive-through window. In other words, disruptive technology results in demand for things we never knew we wanted.

The anxiety for the past couple of decades has been over robots and automation. And it’s true that many routines and low-skilled jobs were automated away. What’s also true is that new jobs, again, filled the void. One study found that between 1999 and 2016, automated technology created roughly 23 million jobs in Europe — that’s half the increase in employment during that period. McKinsey estimates that future advances in automation will kill a third of American jobs and that it will create more than it kills. Specifically: tech jobs, care-worker jobs, building jobs, education jobs, management jobs, and creative jobs. Net-net, technology expands employment.

👉 No Mercy / No Malice
2. (Marketing) Online ad fraud is costing marketers tens of billions annually

Nobody knows the exact extent of ad fraud, but several credible organisations estimate worldwide ad fraud in the range of $60 to $80 billion. Juniper Research has estimated it at $68 billion. Ad Age magazine estimated it at 20% of online ad spending – about $80 billion today. The ANA (Association of National Advertisers) in the U.S. estimated it variously at $80 billion and $120 billion. The WFA (World Federation of Advertisers) said that by 2025 ad fraud could become the second largest source of criminal income in the world, after drug trafficking. According to experts, the bulk of online ad fraud occurs in programmatic advertising where tracking provides the data that fuels most activity.

👉 The Ad Contrarian
3. (Psychology) There are as many ways to breathe as there are foods to eat and each way we breathe will affect our bodies in different ways

Breathing is both an automatic function and a voluntary one. Humans discovered long ago, first intuitively and then systematically, that they could hack their bodies with their breath. “We can’t control our kidney function, or our liver function, or our stomachs,” says Nestor, “but by controlling our breathing, we can influence all those functions.” Breathing affects how we feel, but we can also use it to change how we feel. The healthiest people are the ones who can immediately turn on their stress—and quickly turn it off. Unfortunately, most of us are not in such great shape. Once we feel anxiety it can take more than an hour for us to come back down to our normal resting level.

For 21st-century digitally augmented humans, that life-preserving jolt of cortisol has turned into something else. Everything has become a perceived threat. Looking at the news 20 times a day, it’s this constant drip of stress into our lives, which is extremely injurious to our health. 

When your inhale is longer than your exhale, your heart speeds up; when your exhale is longer, it slows down. If you’re stressed out at work the easiest thing you can do with breathing is to exhale more than you’re inhaling. Many experts believe that most people inhale too much. In our anxiety and distraction, with bad posture and laptops propped on kitchen tables, we gasp for air as if we were drowning. Many of the world’s spiritual traditions have practices that train the mind to both slow respiration and even it out. Instead of thinking about breath in binary terms, in or out, these practices encourage a view of breathing as a continuous gesture—the inhale flowing into the exhale, and so on.

👉 The Mind at Work
 
4. (Productivity) Form habits through emotion, not repetition

Before making a decision, ask yourself these two questions: Will it help you do what you already want to do? Will it help you feel successful? The answers to those questions are freeing because if the change program doesn’t satisfy these two requirements, it’s not worth your time.

Form habits through emotion, not repetition: habits can form very quickly, often in just a few days, as long as people have a strong positive emotion connected to the behaviour… Speaking about human behaviour, it can be boiled down to three words to make the point crystal clear: emotions create habits. Not repetition. Not frequency. Not fairy dust. Emotions.

👉 Tiny Habits by BJ Fogg
5. (Psychology) Power, over time, makes one more impulsive, more reckless and less able to see things from others’ points of view. It also leads one to be rude, more likely to cheat on one’s spouse, less attentive to other people, and less interested in the experiences of others

The historian Henry Adams described power as “a sort of tumour that ends by killing the victim’s sympathies.” This may sound like hyperbole, but it has been borne out by years of lab and field experiments. Dacher Keltner, a psychology professor at UC Berkeley, has been studying the influence of power on individuals. He puts people in positions of power relative to each other in different settings. He has consistently found that power, over time, makes one more impulsive, more reckless and less able to see things from others’ points of view. It also leads one to be rude, more likely to cheat on one’s spouse, less attentive to other people, and less interested in the experiences of others.

Does that sound familiar? It turns out that power actually gives you brain damage. This even shows up in brain scans. Sukhvinder Obhi, a neuroscientist at McMaster University in Ontario, recently examined the brain patterns of the powerful and the not-so-powerful in a transcranial-magnetic-stimulation machine. He found that those with power are impaired in a specific neural process — mirroring — that leads to empathy. Perhaps most distressing is that in lab settings the powerful can’t address this shortcoming even if told to try. Subjects in one study were told that their mirroring impulse was the issue and to make a conscious effort to relate to the experiences of others. They still couldn’t do it. Effort and awareness made no difference in their abilities.

👉 Andrew Yang shares his experience from running for president
6. (Marketing) Ads that perform well at short-term activation are conspicuously bad, for the most part, at building brand over the long term. But the same cannot be said for long-term brand building ads – there are many cases where an ad that builds the brand for the long term also drives short-term sales

This relationship is significant. Not only is it possible for long-term brand building ads to also deliver short-term sales activation, but we can conclude that the better an ad is at brand building, the more likely it becomes that it will deliver on short-term sales too. We can refer to this as the ‘asymmetry of long and short effects’. The short of it, for the most part, does little for long-term brand building in most cases. But the long of it delivers on both fronts. And the implication for marketers is doubly significant.

First, we can reframe the risk of short-termism in even clearer terms. Marketers should continue to invest in short-term sales activation because it shifts more units, usually with splendid efficiency and ROI. For those reasons, the short of it will always have a place in every marketer’s armoury. But the danger of overinvesting or only investing in short-term tactical activation now becomes all the more apparent, given the general inability of this kind of advertising investment to build brand for future sales. It leaves the brand at risk of ever-decreasing circles of demand while mopping up the current in-market potential.

In contrast, the case for brand building is now strengthened further. Partly because the harmonious growth of any brand depends on the right balance of long and short investments. Partly because in most contexts the optimal budget allocation usually favours more spend on brand building than short-term activation. But also because long-term ads can also have a significant short-term impact.

👉 Marketing Week
7. (Psychology) The paradox of goals: setting goals is a guarantee for disillusionment whether we reach the desired state or not, and yet working toward goals is an important part of evolving as a person

When we talk about goals, we suggest a desired outcome attained through some form of prolonged effort. Goal-setting usually goes like this: we define a target state, and then we map our journey to get there. It all sounds sensible: goal-setting allows you to decide where you want to go, and to define how you will get there. Then, we expect to reach our goal. And this is where things start to go wrong. See, there are only two possible outcomes: either we successfully reach our goal, or we fail. It’s easy to see why failure leads to disappointment. When any outcome other than the expected one is perceived as a failure, it’s no wonder we start questioning our self-worth, wondering what went wrong, or blaming external factors — rightly so or not.

Two key ingredients are required to pursue a goal: the will and the way. The will is our motivation — a reason why we want to achieve the goal, which gives us the energy to push ourselves. The way is our ability to map out the steps to take and acquire the skills we need to execute the required actions. In simple situations, or when following a default path as prescribed by society, the will and the way are fairly easy to define. For instance, your goal might be to get a promotion, and the steps might even be outlined in a corporate handbook with a clear rating scale. However, life is rarely this simple — and you may not want to live such a life where your goals are predefined and the way to achieve them is preprocessed for you.

What if we don’t know where we are and where we want to go? What happens when the will and the way are unclear? The solution, inspired by nature itself, is to design growth loops by practising deliberate experimentation. A teleological approach consists in choosing your next action based on its end goal. In contrast, growth loops can be viewed as making small changes to something in an attempt to improve it. If the first attempt works, that’s great. If it doesn’t, we try again. This process sets in motion a cycle of deliberate experimentation: First, we commit to an action. Then, we execute the target behaviour. Finally, we learn from our experience and adjust our future actions accordingly.

👉 Ness Labs

👨‍🏫 Quote of the week:

“To be simple means to make a choice about what’s important, and let go of all the rest. When we are able to do this, our vision expands, our heads clear, and we can better see the details of our lives in all their incredible wonder and beauty.”

John Daido Loori

🎁 Fun things to click on:

A Manifesto by Ai Weiwei — The artist’s 10 rules for life and creativity. This live feed of a watering hole in the Nabib Desert streams live 24/7. Where does your time go? Use Harvest’s Google doc template to keep track of the day.

Thanks for reading! If you have any learnings you’d like to share with me, or disagree with any of the ones above then do drop me a message.

Loving this newsletter? Then why not share it with your friends.

Speak soon,

Tom

in:

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SD#60: Killing brands, planting trees and practising memory

April 16, 2023

Welcome to the 60 edition of Seven Dawns, a weekly newsletter by me, Tomas Ausra, with a focus on getting better every day. A very warm welcome to the new subscribers who joined since last week. I’m glad you’re here. 

Was this newsletter forwarded to you? You deserve your own: Subscribe here.

Hi friends,

Observant marketers might have noticed that there are recurring themes in the marketing learnings I put within the newsletter. That is on purpose. I believe there are fundamental learnings that we should repeat over and over again till they are fully engrained in our work. I do not believe our discipline is at that point yet. Similar observations could be made within productivity or health topics and this is what helps us shape ourselves. What recurring themes can you see in your thinking?

🔎 Our seven ideas this week:

1. (Marketing) The single outcome of advertising that is most likely to result in business success is fame

Nothing about advertising is absolute. All we have are likelihoods and probabilities. No ad we make is guaranteed to work. No strategy we concoct is guaranteed to be successful. Some are more likely to work than others, and that’s the best we can do. Believing we have certainty about our advertising activities is foolish and delusional. If it is true that all we have are likelihoods and probabilities, we should ask ourselves what the single outcome of advertising is that is most likely to result in business success? I believe the answer is obvious. Fame.

All of the world’s hugely successful brands have one common characteristic. They are famous. A famous brand has enormous advantages over its competitors that are not famous. Fame has many positive but not necessarily logical associations. These include trust, social acceptance, and credibility. Any brand can try to differentiate or position itself by claiming to engender “trust, acceptance, and credibility.” But only fame has the unique ability to communicate these attributes without having to say them. Does this mean that fame is a guarantee of success? Certainly not. Business success is related to several factors that have nothing to do with advertising. But fame is the most likely contribution to success that advertising can affect.

👉 PR Week
2. (Productivity) Flip between two projects to practice productive procrastination

Engineer, inveterate inventor, and energy expert Saul Griffith shared his technique for productive procrastination – flip between two projects to prevent focus fatigue. What does this mean? Well, to start with, Griffith notes that he too is a terrible procrastinator. He can’t stick to his to-do list. He’ll beaver away at his work attentively for a while, but then “focus fatigue” will creep in — and he’ll drift away.

But here’s the thing: Rather than fight these hummingbird tendencies, he works with them. What Griffith does is set up a few side tasks that require him to acquire a new skill: “Learning projects,” as he calls them. Often these are weird, offbeat and not immediately related to anything that he’s doing for pay. But the side projects are all — in some way — creatively intriguing, and better yet, they require him to pick up and practice a new skill. That means they’re fun to pivot toward. So whenever he feels the urge to procrastinate — whenever he can’t bring himself to work on his main job — he turns to one of those side projects instead. Griffith still procrastinates a ton! The difference is that he now winds up doing some cool, enlightening and ultimately useful things during those bouts of work avoidance.

👉 Clive Thompson
3. (Philosophy) Essentialism isn’t about getting more done in less time. It’s about getting only the right things done

Have you ever found yourself stretched too thin? Do you simultaneously feel overworked and underutilised? Are you often busy but not productive? Do you feel like your time is constantly being hijacked by other people’s agendas? If you answered yes to any of these, the way out is the Way of the Essentialist. 

The Way of the Essentialist isn’t about getting more done in less time. It’s about getting only the right things done. It is not a time management strategy or a productivity technique. It is a systematic discipline for discerning what is absolutely essential and then eliminating everything that is not, so we can make the highest possible contribution toward the things that really matter. By forcing us to apply more selective criteria for what is essential, the disciplined pursuit of less empowers us to reclaim control of our own choices about where to spend our precious time and energy — instead of giving others the implicit permission to choose for us. Essentialism is not one more thing; it’s a whole new way of doing everything. It’s about doing less but better—in every area of our lives. 

👉 Essentialism via Weekend Briefing
 
4. (Marketing) Well-managed brands should not just enjoy a successful, profitable existence. Their excellence should extend to their extinction. Learning when to kill a brand, and then how to kill it, are vital skills

In marketing, we tend to follow the Western/Christian approach to life and death. We venerate and overstate the former and ignore and avoid the latter. That’s crazy because, apart from a few very old luxury brands, death is just as common as creation in the world of brand management. Companies keep launching new brands but, unless I am missing something, they must be shutting down just as many. We just don’t talk about it in marketing. The focus is always on launching, scaling up and growth hacking. Nobody in our profession talks about killing products or sending them off into that good night with an appropriate farewell, finishing the brand story with a final moment of consistency and leaving employees and consumers feeling the fulfilling catharsis of a perfect end.

Saving a company 10 million quid by stopping a shit product from being launched is just as valuable as making the same amount from a successful launch. We just don’t think about it that way in marketing. About the brands we killed. The products we destroyed. The money we saved. There is a stigma about killing products that we need to get beyond. Let us embrace the idea that brands, like all of us, must die. And, as marketers, take pride in both that killer fact and the expert manner that killing demands of us. It is the perfect coda to all the optimistic talk of launch and innovation that occupies our industry too much. As a marketer, make sure you consider what lies on the other side of the curtain and the ideal moment for it to fall.

👉 Marketing Week
5. (Psychology) Planting trees reduces mortality rates

Previous studies have linked exposure to nature with an array of human health benefits. Access to nature is a major factor for mental health, and that doesn’t necessarily require the greenery to be primaeval wilderness. Research shows urban forests and street trees can offer comparable benefits. Several longitudinal studies have shown that exposure to more vegetation is associated with lower non-accidental mortality, the authors of the new study note, and some have also linked exposure to greenery with reduced cardiovascular and respiratory mortality. “However, most studies use satellite imaging to estimate the vegetation index, which does not distinguish different types of vegetation and cannot be directly translated into tangible interventions,” says Payam Dadvand, a researcher with the Barcelona Institute for Global Health (ISGlobal) and senior author of the new study.

For their study, Dadvand and his colleagues capitalised on a well-documented tree-planting campaign that unfolded in Portland, Oregon, between 1990 and 2019. Using data from the Oregon Health Authority, they then associated each census tract’s tree data with its mortality rate, due to cardiovascular, respiratory, or non-accidental causes. The results reveal lower mortality rates in neighbourhoods with more trees planted, and the researchers report this negative association is significant for both cardiovascular and general non-accidental mortality, especially among males and anyone above the age of 65.

👉 Science Alert
6. (Copywriting) Trying to be too clever is dangerous when people can’t see the thinking behind your actions

It’s obviously important to capture people’s attention with your advertising copy. You can do this with plays on words, rhymes, metaphors and a myriad of seriously fun stuff. But the cleverer you try to be, the harder your message might be to understand.

As Jay Abraham has said: “Sometimes, the best copy to sell a horse is ‘Horde for Sale.’” It’s fine to keep things simple. Clear, direct copy almost always converts better than a clever turn of phrase.

👉 The Word Man
7. (Psychology) Even if you consider yourself a forgetful person, memory is a skill that can be practised and strengthened

The responsibilities of modern life mean there are more priorities than ever vying for your attention. Absentmindedness is one of memory researcher Daniel Schacter’s “seven sins of memory,” common weaknesses in memory everyone experiences. This is when you don’t pay attention to where you put your keys or are so scatterbrained you miss an important doctor’s appointment. 

A method to help you pay closer attention to the tasks at hand is what is called the PLR technique: pause, link, and rehearse. This can help you both remember someone’s name and recall the reason you walked into a room. If you’re hiding a birthday present for your kid but fear you won’t remember where you put it, take five seconds to pause and focus on where you’re putting the gift. And use technology to your advantage: Put meetings in your phone’s calendar (be detailed about who you’re meeting, where, and why) and make sure alerts are turned on, set reminders, and take photos of events to refer to later. Events that occur during heightened emotional states — fear, joy, anxiety, excitement, sadness — are more memorable. It’s why you remember your wedding day and perhaps not your 10th date. To remember more mundane things — where you’re storing dress shoes you wear once a year, a name, an item you need to pick up at the store — make these things extraordinary, says five-time USA Memory Champion and memory coach Nelson Dellis.

Another one of Schacter’s seven sins of memory is transience, which refers to forgetting over time. For example, the more time that passes after you watch a movie, the more details you’ll forget. But if you study or reflect on things you want to remember, the more likely these memories will be strengthened.

👉 Vox

👨‍🏫 Quote of the week:

“The greatest impediments to changes in our traditional roles seem to lie not in the visible world of conscious intent, but in the murky realm of the unconscious mind”

Dr. Augustus Napier

🎁 Fun things to click on:

No one spends more time around the world’s most famous artwork than the security guards who protect it. But did you know many of those security guards are artists themselves? A stop motion video on how hard it is to switch off from work. 2022 in search trends.

Thanks for reading! If you have any learnings you’d like to share with me, or disagree with any of the ones above then do drop me a message.

Loving this newsletter? Then why not share it with your friends.

Speak soon,

Tom

in:

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SD#59: Habits, happiness and GPT-3

March 26, 2023

Welcome to the 59 edition of Seven Dawns, a weekly newsletter by me, Tomas Ausra, with a focus on getting better every day. A very warm welcome to the new subscribers who joined since last week. I’m glad you’re here. 

Was this newsletter forwarded to you? You deserve your own: Subscribe here.

Hi friends,

Today’s newsletter delves into many topics. The recent craze about GPT-3 has so far fascinated me but one topic I didn’t expect to see it at – journaling. It makes sense when you think about it, right? If we’re speaking to an intelligent robot for search results, why can it not help us better understand our emotions? Not only that, it can take on various forms whether it’s Jungian ideas or a modern counsellor. If you’ve been struggling to get into journaling just like me, perhaps this will be a guided gateway that will open up many doors.

🔎 Our seven ideas this week:

1. (Productivity) When you start a new habit, it should take less than two minutes to do

The Two-Minute Rule states “When you start a new habit, it should take less than two minutes to do.” You’ll find that nearly any habit can be scaled down into a two-minute version: “Read before bed each night” becomes “Read one page.” “Do thirty minutes of yoga” becomes “Take out my yoga mat.” “Run three miles” becomes “Tie my running shoes.” 

The idea is to make your habits as easy as possible to start. Anyone can meditate for one minute, read one page, or put one item of clothing away. This is a powerful strategy because once you’ve started doing the right thing, it is much easier to continue doing it. A new habit should not feel like a challenge. The actions that follow can be challenging, but the first two minutes should be easy. What you want is a “gateway habit” that naturally leads you down a more productive path. You can usually figure out the gateway habits that will lead to your desired outcome by mapping out your goals on a scale from “very easy” to “very hard.” For instance, running a marathon is very hard. Running a 5K is hard. Walking ten thousand steps is moderately difficult. Walking for ten minutes is easy. And putting on your running shoes is very easy. Your goal might be to run a marathon, but your gateway habit is to put on your running shoes. That’s how you follow the Two-Minute Rule.

👉 James Clear (author of Atomic Habits)
2. (Psychology) If you know how to use it correctly and want to use it for this purpose, GPT-3 is journaling on steroids

Journaling is already an effective personal development practice. It can help you get your thoughts out of your head, rendering them less scary. It shows you patterns in your thinking, which increases your self-awareness and makes it easier for you to change. But journaling has a few problems. For one, it’s sometimes hard to sit down and do it. It can be difficult to stare at a blank page and know what to write. For another, sometimes it feels a little silly—is summarising my day really worth something?

Journaling in GPT-3 feels more like a conversation, so you don’t have to stare at a blank page or feel silly because you don’t know what to say. The way it reacts to you depends on what you say to it, so it’s much less likely to get stale or old. (Sometimes it does repeat itself, which is annoying but I think long-term solvable.) It can summarise things you’ve said to it in a new language that helps you look at yourself in a different light and reframe situations more effectively. In this way, GPT-3 is a mashup of journaling and more involved forms of support like talking to a friend. It becomes a guide through your mind—one that shows unconditional positive regard and acceptance for whatever you’re feeling. It asks thoughtful questions and doesn’t judge. It’s around 24/7, it never gets tired or sick, and it’s not very expensive.

👉 Every
3. (Marketing) The single most effective way to improve corporate profitability is not to increase unit sales or cut costs. It is to raise prices. Even a single percentage point bestows dramatic fiscal benefits

The world of business is fixated on top-line revenues. Most managers mistakenly believe this figure to be the ‘lifeblood’ of their business. And yet, it is clearly no such thing. Revenue is a distracting means to a much more valuable end. Just look at sales promotions. If you think the purpose of marketing is to generate revenues, you cannot do enough promotional activity and discounting.

But if you relish the higher focus on profit, you’d run as few sales promotions as possible because, while they may drive demand, they eviscerate immediate and longer-term profits. Those who are more revenue-minded scratch their heads and worry about losing customers, or the declining unit sales that might occur if we put prices up. Both are likely consequences of price increases, but so are higher profits. And research has confirmed that, in most cases of incorrect price setting, most marketers err on the volume side of the equation at the expense of value. They sell more stuff but make less money.

👉 Marketing Week
 
4. (Investing) What worked in the past 20 years might not work for the next

As always, the below is not investment advice.

David Swensen is the famous CIO who ran the Yale endowment from 1985 until he died in 2021. His big innovation was that long-term funds, like college endowments, should stay away from low-return asset classes like fixed income and commodities and allocate heavily to equity-related asset classes, especially private equity. Over time equities should outperform bonds and are better at protecting against inflation. Later in 1990 when Swensen was CIO he shifted the Yale portfolio from a traditional allocation of 65% domestic stocks and bonds to just 10% with the rest in PE, VC, natural resources and international equities. The defining move though was the outsized allocation to private equity and venture capital. That is the allocation which made Swensen famous and why most colleges follow his approach.

The problem with the Swensen approach is that what was edgy and innovative 30 years ago has become crowded and consensus. Everyone is copying the private equity and VC overweight, which has created record inflows into the private equity asset class. Hartnett has this view the inflation paradigm has changed from deflation to inflation and potentially everyone is invested in the wrong assets. To perform in the next ten years you need to sell what worked (Tech, PE, VC, Growth) and buy what didn’t (International, EM, Commodities, Gold, Value). The good thing is if this switch to international and EM public equities is correct the trade will work for years. It will take the mega funds overallocated to private equity years to get out of their positions and years for the board of directors to think about changing the allocation targets. So after 5 years of EM and International outperforming there will still be another 5 years of outperformance still to go as Yale and Stanford have finally disposed of their money-losing fintechs and are ready to buy.

👉 Your Weekend Reading
5. (Philosophy) Do less, better

Matthew McConaughey in the Daily Stoic podcast said he shut down his production company and his music label because he was making B’s in five things, but he wanted to make A’s in three things. Those three things: his family, his foundation, and his acting career. Marcus Aurelius would say that doing less “brings a double satisfaction.” You figure out what’s really essential and you do those things better. 

“If you seek tranquillity,” he said, “do less.” And then he follows the note to himself with some clarification. Not nothing, less. Do only what’s essential. “Which brings a double satisfaction,” he writes “to do less, better.” So much of what we think we must do, so much of what we end up doing is not essential. We do it out of habit. We do it out of guilt. We do it out of laziness or we do it out of greedy ambition. And then we wonder why our performance suffers. We wonder why our heart isn’t really in it.

👉 The Daily Stoic
6. (Marketing) When your buyers are inundated with copycat marketing campaigns, you have to stand out. Use pattern interrupts to stop buyers in their tracks and make them notice your brand

Perception is relative. We don’t see things as they are but how they compare to others things in the same environment. When something breaks the pattern of what’s expected, we pay attention. We like the familiar. It makes our lives easier by taking less mental energy. It’s the reason we prefer to take the same route to work every day, shop at the same grocery store, order takeout from the same restaurants. But, this familiarity can get interrupted by an unexpected stimulus (like a hilarious meme). When you’re looking through baby pics, boring business advice, and generally “meh” content online, you’re in a pattern of scrolling. And when a pooping unicorn suddenly appears on your screen, it breaks the pattern. You freeze for 1/25th of a second trying to figure out what is happening.

But if your ad blends into the organic feed—rather than breaking the pattern—people may also scroll right by it. Buyers need a Pattern Interrupt to notice your content. When your buyers are inundated with copycat marketing campaigns, you have to stand out. Use pattern interrupts to stop buyers in their tracks and make them notice your brand. When done right, a pattern interrupt can make people fall in love with your brand—even if it’s a poop-y product.

👉 Customer Camp
7. (Society) Agriculture, logging and forestry have the highest levels of self-reported happiness and lowest levels of self-reported stress of any major industry category

Envy the lumberjacks, for they perform the happiest, most meaningful work on earth. Or at least they think they do. Farmers, too. Agriculture, logging and forestry have the highest levels of self-reported happiness — and lowest levels of self-reported stress — of any major industry category, according to our analysis of thousands of time journals from the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ American Time Use Survey.

While our friends the lumberjacks and farmers do the least-stressful work, their jobs are well-known to be particularly perilous, and they report the highest levels of pain on the job. To puzzle out why, we zoomed out to look at activity categories beyond work. The most meaningful and happiness-inducing activities were religious and spiritual, which doesn’t tell us much about farming or forestry — at least not as it’s commonly practised in the United States. But the second-happiest activity — sports, exercise and recreation — helps crack the case.

The most stressful sectors are the industry including finance and insurance, followed by education and the broad grouping of professional and technical industries, a sector that includes the single most stressful occupation: lawyers. Together, they paint a simple picture: A white collar appears to come with significantly more stress than a blue one.

👉 Washington Post

👨‍🏫 Quote of the week:

“The stock market is a device for transferring money from the impatient to the patient”

Warren Buffet

🎁 Fun things to click on:

10 powerful visuals that will make you think. Futurepedia.io is a great way to keep up with all the AI tools as they’re released and currently available in categories like Image, Text, Writing, Video, Design, etc. How to become a truly excellent gift giver – an article delves into three tips how to become good at gift giving. I’m definitely taking notes.

Thanks for reading! If you have any learnings you’d like to share with me, or disagree with any of the ones above then do drop me a message.

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Speak soon,

Tom

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