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SD#58: Brand familiarity, typos and intermediacy

March 12, 2023

Welcome to the 58 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,

Welcome to March, when the weather has no clue what to do and neither do we. Today’s newsletter is a bit more business’y than usual, don’t hate me for that. We’ll delve into brand growth and typos within emails (who knew they’re useful at times?) and how we can keep learning despite hitting a wall.

🔎 Our seven ideas this week:

1. (Marketing) Brands are successful because they’re familiar

Before launching a new campaign, marketers, branding experts, and advertising practitioners often spend months trying to define what a brand should stand for. They are very fond of the concept of “brand meaning.” This is driven by the belief that consumers impute specific attributes to brands and exercise their buying prerogatives based on the meaning they assign to the brand, and how well that meaning aligns with their values. Or something like that. This is largely horseshit.
 
Research shows us that for the most part, consumers are annoyingly impervious to understanding the finer points of product differentiation and brand meaning. Stop someone on the street today and ask them what the difference is between BMW and Mercedes-Benz? Ask them for the difference between Coke and Pepsi? Their responses will have little to no correlation to the strategic documents floating around those brands’ offices. Each of those brands has spent tens of millions of dollars over the years concocting fantasies of “differentiation.” They believe their brands are successful because of their unique “brand meaning.” But the main reason they’re successful is because they’re familiar.
 
The real power of advertising is in having enormous numbers of people familiar with and comfortable with your brand. Getting a lot of people familiar with your brand and comfortable with it has a much higher probability of building your brand than any other theory of marketing — including the theories of brand meaning or personalisation.

👉 Bob Hoffman
2. (Psychology) A typo in a neutral email lowers your perceived intelligence by 30%. But typos in emotion-filled notes amplify perceived emotion

Email and text communication have become ubiquitous. Recent findings suggest emotional sameness between face-to-face and email communication, there is limited evidence of nonverbal behaviours in text-based communication. Especially the kinds of unintentional displays central to emotion perception in face-to-face interactions.
 
Researchers showed that typos amplify perceptions of email sender’s emotions—both negative and positive. By contrasting perceptions of message senders who make mistakes in emotional versus unemotional contexts, it was shown that people partially excuse message sender communication errors in emotional (versus unemotional) contexts, attributing such mistakes to the sender’s emotional state rather than solely their intelligence level. These studies suggest that nonverbal behaviour in text-based and face-to-face communication may be more comparable than previously thought.

👉 Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin
3. (Marketing) For B2B firms, investing in brand marketing is the best bet in good times, and it’s an even better bet in bad times when the pool of current buyers shrinks

The most fundamental principle in B2B (and B2C) marketing is the 95/5 rule, as articulated by Professor John Dawes of the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute. The concept is simple: at any given time, 95% of customers are out-of-market, and only 5% of customers are in-market. Most buyers are future buyers, and marketing’s main job is to increase future sales.
 
But during a recession, most big B2B purchases get delayed as businesses cut costs to manage their margins. Delays in purchases reduce the number of buyers in market – that’s what a recession is after all: a reduction in economic activity for two successive quarters. So the 5% of current buyers shrinks to more like 1%. We all know that marketing budgets are usually the first line item that gets cut during a recession, but the cuts are not evenly distributed. Brand advertising often gets cut the deepest, and those freed-up funds are often reallocated to lead-generation activities. But that doesn’t make much sense, because the pool of leads has contracted. So most companies are competing to serve “act now” messages to buyers, at a time when most buyers literally cannot act now.

👉 Marketing Week
 
4. (Philosophy) Where you look is where you go

When you’re biking you have to look out for a thing called “target fixation”:

Target fixation is an attentional phenomenon observed in humans in which an individual becomes so focused on an observed object (be it a target or hazard) that they inadvertently increase their risk of colliding with the object. It is associated with scenarios in which the operator is in control of a high-speed vehicle or other modes of transportation, such as fighter pilots, race-car drivers, paragliders, and motorcyclists. In such cases, the observer may fixate so intently on the target that they steer in the direction of their gaze, which is often the ultimate cause of a collision.

As with biking, so with life. Thoreau said that we find the world we look for, but if he rode a bicycle, he might’ve said, “where you look is where you go.”

👉 Austin Kleon
5. (Productivity) After a phase of intense difficulties and incredible progress, we enter the intermediacy phase of learning where we see diminishing returns from additional study and practice

The intermediate plateau contrasts sharply with the beginning phase of immersive language learning. While those early efforts are marked by some intense difficulties, they are also a period of incredible progress. In a narrow window of time, you go from total incompetence to being able to do quite a bit. In contrast, intermediacy is frustrating. You don’t feel good enough to claim the work of learning is over, but you see diminishing returns from additional study and practice.

There are three theories for why we get stuck: 1) knowledge grows exponentially with the level of expertise. That means we learn key aspects quickly which results in fast growth but as we get to more intricate details our learning stalls. 2) Progress comes to rely more on unlearning than new learning. Our lack of progress is due to getting ever-more proficient in mediocre methods, whereas progress requires interrupting this natural process and rebuilding it. 3) Creative problem-solving overtakes imitating others. Humans are excellent imitators and only lacklustre problem-solvers, so when we reach those points where we can no longer imitate others but need to learn ourselves, our progress hits a wall.

How can we move beyond intermediacy? 1) Exponential knowledge requires exponential effort. 2) Unlearning requires deliberate practice. 3) Expert mentorship nurtures creativity.

👉 Scott H. Young
6. (Society) Noncompete agreements in the workforce only serve to dampen growth

We’re in general agreement that “anti-competitive” behaviour is bad, and have laws against it. Yet companies have been able to convince regulators to look the other way on an increasingly popular weapon of mass entrenchment. They’re passing out OxyContin during an AA meeting. The Oxy? Noncompete agreements. Noncompete clauses are what firms use to sequester your human capital from competitors. When a new employee signs a noncompete with, say, Johnson & Johnson, they agree that when their employment ends, they won’t work at another pharmaceutical company for a designated period — usually one to two years.

The irony of noncompetes is they only serve to dampen growth. The FTC estimates that noncompetes reduce employment opportunities for 30 million people and suppress wages by $300 billion per year. Multiple studies also show that noncompetes reduce entrepreneurship and business formation. Which makes sense — it’s difficult to start a business when talent pools are not accessible or allocated to their best use. Downstream, the lack of competition leads to entrenchment, which eventually results in higher prices for consumers — as one study found has occurred in health care. Everybody loses. Except, of course, the incumbent’s shareholders.

👉 No Mercy / No Malice (Scott Galloway)
7. (Psychology) The best way to get the right answer on the internet is not to ask a question, it’s to post the wrong answer

This phenomenon is called Cunningham’s Law. The writer Kevin Donnellan tested out the law and reported his findings in “I spent a week being wrong online.” The results were a bit inconclusive, and it’s worth noting that Ward Cunningham, the law’s namesake, denies its paternity, and claims it is a “misquote that disproves itself by propagating through the internet.” What seems even more valuable is taking the position of the idiot, ignorant, but curious.

Besides getting people riled up, claiming ignorance is a good way to overcome people’s “they must already know about X” rarity threshold. They don’t think they need to be special, obscure, or original in their replies.

👉 Austin Kleon

👨‍🏫 Quote of the week:

“It’s not enough to be busy; so are the ants. The question is: What are we busy about?”

Henry Davis Thoreau

🎁 Fun things to click on:

Come for the gear recommendations for wildlife photography, stay for the cute pictures of baby seals. Goodbuy is a free browser extension that finds small business alternatives to Amazon and other mega-retailers. How Spotify’s Wrapped campaign for 2022 came together.

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#57: Education, habit trackers and change

March 5, 2023

Welcome to the 57 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 has an increased focused on education and learning. Our education system has been long ripe for a transformation with our ways of learning not changing for decades. The 2000s technology behemoths transformed the way we shop, communicate, consume entertainment, eat, ride and many other aspects of our lives. Yet education remains untouched.

🔎 Our seven ideas this week:

1. (Society) Higher education has turned into a luxury good: exclusive, scarce, expensive. In 2020, it looked as if an accelerant (the pandemic) and a disruptor (technology) would change this. It hasn’t

The middle class and capitalism are the gears that turned back Hitler and AIDS, and the lubricant for the middle class is education. We are now throwing sand in the gears of upward mobility. For the first time, 30-year-olds are worse off than their parents were at 30. Kids aren’t getting into schools as prestigious as their parents’. For many families, this is the first encounter with Technicolor inequality, where being in any cohort other than the top 1% means the leaves of opportunity are shedding prematurely from your family tree.

How many in our generation say, about the college we attended, “I couldn’t get in today”? From 2006 to 2018, the acceptance rate among the top 50 U.S. universities fell 36%, and it declined even more among the top 10 universities (60%). Stanford has an admissions rate of 4%; Harvard, 5%. 61% of high school graduates from families earning more than $100,000 a year attend a four-year university, compared to only 39% of students from families earning less than $30,000. However, the cost to attend a four-year university has increased eight times faster than wages in the U.S.

What happened? How did the lubricant of our prosperity become the caste(ing) of our country? There are several macro factors, as pedestrian as population growth and the increase in the number of girls attending (70% of high school valedictorians are girls), that are raising demand. But the hard truth is that much of the sand in the gears comes from a seemingly more benign source.

👉 No Mercy / No Malice (Scott Galloway)
2. (Productivity) There is evidence showing that tracking behaviour (habit tracking) can increase the likelihood that habits will become established, as establishing healthy habits makes it easier for us to repeatedly make the right choices

Establishing habits can feel like a struggle, and there’s often a gap between intention and execution. This is why habit trackers are such popular tools to help us stick to our goals. One of the key advantages of using a habit tracker is that it allows you to visualise your progress and identify any recurrent setbacks. This form of metacognition can help you adapt your approach and keep on improving your habit formation strategies.

One of the mechanisms through which habit tracking can benefit your mental health is by celebrating micro-wins throughout your personal growth journey. If your habit tracker shows that you have eaten healthily for a whole week or that you got eight hours of sleep for three nights in a row, you can experience some sense of accomplishment before the effects of such good habits start to show. 

Gradually, as the habit forms, the process will become automatic. However, not all is rosy in the world of habit trackers, and you should not blindly assume that tracking your habits using any method or app will necessarily help you stick to your goals. Some of the aspects that make habit trackers so powerful can also be detrimental to habit formation.

The key to developing a habit is to find a way to ensure the desired behaviour becomes automatic. For habit tracking to be successful, it must therefore be simple and flexible, as well as encourage self-control and goal-directed behaviour.

👉 Ness Labs
3. (Psychology) Was 2022 a much-needed correction to all the hype around crypto?

Cryptocurrencies have had a calamitous year, littered with hacks, bankruptcies, and precipitously declining prices. Poor risk management practices and the incestuous nature of crypto trading meant the failure of a single entity (Three Arrows Capital) sent ripples through the entire crypto industry. The summer saw a series of crises, with crypto exchanges and lenders freezing withdrawals and companies filing for bankruptcy, most notably major crypto lender Celsius Network.

Among all the doom and gloom, some are also saying that this year’s crypto crash was a much-needed corrective to all the hype that had built up around the industry, and could go a long way to weeding out speculators and charlatans. It’s also increased calls for regulation of the sector, which in the long run could help it become more sustainable. Ultimately, despite the depth of the crisis, many in traditional finance think cryptocurrencies are likely to rebound in 2023, although it may be a slow and gradual recovery. Tellingly, they are predicting that projects, like Ethereum, that can be used to support practical real-world applications, rather than just financial speculation, will be the drivers of growth in crypto’s next phase.

👉 Singularity Hub
 
4. (Philosophy) The more comfortable you become in your skin, the less you need to manufacture the world around you for comfort

Cory Muscara meditated 15 hours a day for 6 months and wrote a list of 36 things he learned. Here are a couple I enjoyed:

A sign of growth is having more tolerance for discomfort. But it’s also having less tolerance for bullshit.
Who you are is not your fault, but it is your responsibility.
The moment before letting go is often when we grip the hardest.
The belief that there is some future moment more worth our presence than the one we’re in right now is why we miss our lives.
Meditation is not about feeling good. It’s about feeling what you’re feeling with good awareness.
There are 3 layers to a moment: Your experience, your awareness of the experience, and your story about the experience. Be mindful of the story.
You can’t life-hack wisdom. Do the work.

👉 Twitter
5. (Society) There is no correlation between key skills of the future (risk-taking, coping with uncertainty, and empathy) and levels of education and outsider talent (the minorities, immigrants, disabled or anybody that doesn’t “fit the mould”) has been honing some of the most critical skills for the future of work

For the last few centuries, “outsider talent” has been honing some of the most critical skills for the future of work. Unfortunately, our educational and corporate institutions still handicap talent with the skills of the past. The psychologist Jonathan Haidt in his book “The Coddling of the America Mind” highlights the focus of elite parents on de-risking and micromanaging children’s experiences in the name of achievement. “Efforts to protect kids from risk prevent them from gaining experience. Such protections come with costs, as kids miss out on opportunities to learn skills, independence, and risk assessment.”  

This phenomenon is explored in a McKinsey study done last year that looked at the correlation between key skills of the future (risk-taking, coping with uncertainty, and empathy) and levels of education. It found that these skills are completely uncorrelated to education. In America, there are nearly two job openings for every candidate, and according to reports from companies like Manpower Group, the result is a significant talent shortfall. While this may be true, we are missing something else. Major employers continue to be distorted by credentialism and Ivy League education, while higher education continues to rely on outdated measures of success like test-taking skills. These all reveal very little about “soft skills.”

👉 The Hill
6. (Psychology) All changes, even positive ones, come at a cost, we don’t simply observe change, we change ourselves in the process, and each change recruits our mental and physical adaptive systems

All changes, even positive ones, come at a cost. Whether we deal with personal transitions — a new role, a newborn, a new city — or experience the wider societal shifts that impact our daily lives, each change forces our brain to adapt, altering its neural pathways to encode new patterns and reduce uncertainty. This is why change feels effortful: we don’t simply observe change, we change ourselves in the process, and each change recruits our mental and physical adaptive systems. This is why many of us currently feel so tired: these systems are mostly designed to deal with sudden change, not long, drawn-out periods of change.

Change fatigue mostly arises when we feel like we’re not in control of the never-ending chaos that keeps on derailing our routines and forces us to constantly adapt. Very often, it is the case that change itself is unavoidable. What we have some control over, however, is how we react to change. Instead of resisting change, adding to the load we put on our adaptive systems, we can strive to accept, embrace, and even foster change in a way that leads to personal growth.

👉 Ness Labs
7. (Society) Gamifying education could help bridge the gap for new generations to reach their potential

Efficacious Edutainment is an emerging consumer category of learning products using best-in-class technology to help people learn skills, knowledge, and values. Technological and cultural change have melded both concepts into a powerful combination with huge potential to educate the next generation and build a massive new industry.

Learning, while never easy, doesn’t need to feel impossibly hard and dull. 

The gap between the stagnant status quo in classrooms and the promise of an immersive future has never been more enormous. Kids spend seven hours a day on social media, and the trend continues to grow when gaming is added to the mix. Big media companies have seen the opportunity.  #LearnOnTikTok has over 403 billion views. YouTube announced its Player for Education with two priorities that anticipate the future. They now have a distraction-free player for curated content. They added an authoring tool for creators to make courses.

👉 Obviously the future

👨‍🏫 Quote of the week:

“I’m not saying that you have to be a reader to save your soul in the modern world, I’m saying it helps.”” 

Walter Mosley

🎁 Fun things to click on:

Get insights and inspiration from this film collection celebrating 5 storytellers who dug deep. Take the journey with them as they explore found footage and photos, cave drawings, pyrotechnics, and even bugs. Work from home desk inspiration. Kings of the underground: the last coal miners of Wales.

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#56: Motivation, technology and fresh starts

February 26, 2023

Welcome to the 56th 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,

Last week’s newsletter had a slight undertone of change, whereas this week the newsletter has changed itself. Not massively as you can see, but in a way that should give you slight quality improvements plus a small new section of quotes of the week. That’s where I’ll pretend to look smart noting what all these people smarter than me have said. Let me know what you think of the changes!

🔎 Our seven ideas this week:

1. (Productivity) Motivation starts to build again once we have taken the first steps and gained some momentum in our task

In the words of Lao Tzu: “The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.” Motivation is all about getting started and consistently taking action, making sure we get back on track when we fall off the bandwagon. There are two types of motivation: intrinsic and extrinsic. When interest or enjoyment in activity comes from within us, we experience intrinsic motivation. A violinist, for example, may desire to improve as a musician because playing brings intense joy, rather than pursuing fame or awards. Extrinsic motivation, conversely, is driven by influences outside of us. You may want to progress in your career to earn more money, achieve recognition within the workplace, or avoid sanctions.

Writing in the American Psychologist journal, Richard Ryan and Edward Deci highlighted the three innate psychological needs which must be satisfied to enhance self-motivation and mental health: competence, autonomy and relatedness. If we feel competent in our behaviour, either as a result of feedback, communication or rewards, our intrinsic motivation will be greater. However, this is only the case if we have a sense of autonomy over the action. Relatedness is often more relevant to extrinsic motivation. If a behaviour is valued by a manager, client, or friend, we will feel a sense of connectedness with them, which will lead to the internalisation of extrinsic motivation.

By focusing on the right goals, using self-reflection, and implementing safety nets, you can boost your motivation and ensure a prompt comeback at times of demotivation.

👉 Ness Labs
2. (Investing) What really matters in investing is the performance of your holdings over the next five or ten years (or more) and how the value at the end of the period compares to the amount you invested and to your needs

Some people say the long run is a series of short runs, and if you get those right, you’ll enjoy success in the long run. They might think the route to success consists of trading often to capitalise on relative value assessments, predictions regarding swings in popularity, and forecasts of macro events.
 
Most individual investors and anyone who understands the limitations regarding outperformance would probably be best off holding index funds over the long run. Most people would be more successful if they focused less on the short-run or macro trends and instead worked hard to gain superior insight concerning the outlook for fundamentals over multi-year periods in the future.

👉 Howard Marks from Oaktree Capital
3. (Psychology) There are times in our life, within the year, when it’s easier to have a fresh start

Change is hard. If you’ve ever tried to build a new habit or kill an unhealthy one, you already know that. But according to Katy Milkman, there are specific times of the year when it’s easier to change. In her book “How to Change: The Science of Getting from Where You Are to Where You Want to Be”, Milkman introduces a psychological phenomenon called the “Fresh-Start Effect.”

The idea is simple… There are moments in life when we feel like we can wipe the slate clean from past failures and have a fresh start. The Fresh-Start Effect gives us a motivation boost which can make it easier to commit to our goals. A new year is a common time to adopt new habits. But fresh starts can happen at other times too such as birthdays, the beginning of a school year, a new business quarter, a new month, or even a week.

Research shows that starting something new in landmark moments lets us leave our “old selves” in the past, help us see the bigger picture of our long-term life vision, and motivates us to finally make the change that aligns with that vision.

👉 Customer Camp
 
4. (Society) Reasons to be tech-optimistic for 2023

To some people, it may sound ideologically blinkered to gush about technology after a year in which tech stocks took a nose-dive and one whole sector of the industry turned out to be mostly a self-devouring ouroboros of financial scams. But the profits of tech companies are not the same as the social benefit of technology — witness how little profit solar manufacturers make, even though solar is changing the world.

Here are a couple of technological developments that are either changing the world or seem likely to do so soon. 1) The A.I. breakout. One of the biggest pieces of tech news last year was the release of a bunch of generative AI apps, including art applications like Stable Diffusion and Midjourney, and text generators like ChatGPT. But the key reason to be optimistic about AI is that it isn’t slowing down. In the past, AI development was marked by repeated “winters” in which both interest and technical progress seemed to slow down. But the field seems to have blown right past those predictions, both in the quantitative and qualitative senses.

2) The energy revolution rolls onward. The solar revolution is going from theoretical to actual, with a huge surge of global investment. Electricity is especially powerful because you can put it into a battery and move it around. In addition to providing daily energy storage and replacing internal combustion cars, batteries promise a whole host of other improvements in energy transport. In particular, combining batteries and AI seems likely to herald a robotics revolution — we may finally get that Jetsons robot future we’ve all been waiting for. Batteries are also going to be useful for high-powered, cheap-running appliances.

3) Biotech boom. Biotech is strange because the big advances are happening in a bunch of different directions — mRNA vaccines, synthetic bio, stem cells, Crispr, etc. These are all being enabled, to some extent, by cheap gene sequencing combined with cheap computing (and maybe soon with AI, as DeepMind shows). But there is just a whole lot of human brainpower going into a whole lot of different kinds of biotech, and it’s apparently paying off.

👉 Noahpinion
5. (Psychology) Six forces that fuel friendship

Though every bond evolves in its way, Julie Beck, who interviewed over 100 friendship couples, has come to believe that six forces help form friendships and maintain them through the years: accumulation, attention, intention, ritual, imagination, and grace.

The simplest and most obvious force that forms and sustains friendships is time spent together. One study estimates that it takes spending 40 to 60 hours together within the first six weeks of meeting to turn an acquaintance into a casual friend, and about 80 to 100 hours to become more than that. So friendships unsurprisingly tend to form in places where people spend a lot of their time anyway: work, school, church, and extracurricular activities.

One thing that seems to make keeping up with friends easier is ritual. The effort of coordinating hangs (or even phone calls) could be the biggest barrier to seeing friends. It’s much easier when something is baked into a schedule, and all we have to do is show up.

👉 The Atlantic
6. (Investing) When deciding on where to focus your efforts over the next year, prioritise your income. Prioritise taking action.

With the dreadful investment year of 2022 behind us, we can now shift our focus to the future and how we can bounce back financially. Unfortunately, for many people, this means falling into the trap of spending countless hours trying to find the right investments to maximise their returns. However, the truth is, such attempts are usually wasted time and energy. Too many people spend too many hours chasing alpha that would be better spent in some other productive activity.

Assume someone with $10,000 invested spends 10 hours a week doing stock research looking for the best investments. Let’s also assume that their research is good and they are able to beat the market by 10% a year as a result. While this is impressive, unfortunately, their 520 hours of work (10 hours per week * 52 weeks per year) only netted them an additional $1,000 (10% alpha * $10,000). This means that our star analyst was doing stock research for under $2 an hour ($1,000/520 hours).

If the analyst’s ultimate goal was to build wealth, you can see how they would’ve been far better off by picking up a part-time job instead of analyzing 10-Ks. Even if we were to increase the analyst’s portfolio size to $100,000, their 10% alpha (i.e. $10,000) is roughly equivalent to what they could have made driving for Uber in the same amount of time.

👉 Of Dollars and Data
7. (Psychology) Be cringe in 2023. Your life will legit get better on every front

If you constantly chase your edge of cringe you are probably getting closer to truth and authenticity because that is precisely what cringes people out. Conquering the fear of being cringe is fully a rite of passage to living life on your own terms.

This comes back to self-image. by solving for a positive self-image (high intrinsic opinion of yourself), you can do anything without worrying about being cringe. we cringe when we think about ourselves in the context of external approval.

👉 Twitter thread

👨‍🏫 Quote of the week:

“We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.” 

Aristotle

🎁 Fun things to click on:

A content creator gets into taxis and tells the driver to choose a place to go while keeping the meter running. Bloomberg’s 2022 jealousy list, a collection of stories they wish they had written. What an great initiative. Digital art inspired by the Iranian protests. 

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#55: Mimicry, childhood, and creativity

February 19, 2023

Hi friends,

We’re halfway into February and am I the only one who can’t get used to writing 2023 yet? Today’s newsletter has a slight undertone of change. How can we change the way we think about creativity? How can we stop focusing on things we can’t change? The timeless and timed change between childhood and adulthood.

Our seven ideas this week:

1. (Creativity) We can improve our creative thinking by understanding the processes behind it and influencing them

Researchers generally believe that creativity is a two-part process. The first is to generate candidate ideas and make novel connections between them, and the second is to narrow down to the most useful one. The generative step in this process is divergent thinking. It’s the ability to recall, associate, and combine a diverse set of information in novel ways to generate creative ideas. Convergent thinking takes into account goals and constraints to ensure that a given idea is useful. This part of the process typically follows divergent thinking and acts as a way to narrow in on a specific idea.

So how can you influence your creative system for the better?

Build a good “memory bank” full of materials for creation. Read voraciously and engage deeply with a wide variety of content to build a richer memory bank for you to tap. Then interact with your materials. If you read a lot but never revisit or use that information later, some of it may get into your memory, but the connections between the ideas in what you’ve just read and your existing knowledge will likely be weak and fade over time. Taking notes, making highlights, and revisiting that material when it’s related to what you’re currently thinking about is a good way to maintain and strengthen connections.

Our mental state also has a large influence on our creativity. The complete picture is nuanced, but the best state for doing creative thought work depends on the type of work, your attentional state, your mood, and how engaged you can be. Lastly, pay attention to attention. In a productivity-obsessed culture, it’s easy to think that if we just buckle down and focus, we can churn out more creative thought work. Counterintuitively, the more we try and force ourselves to focus, the narrower our thinking may become. Mind wandering is what allows us to explore, retrieve, and experiment with connecting our memories in different ways. So give yourself a break the next time you feel like you’re “spacing out.”

Every
2. (Productivity) No matter what hustle culture says, you don’t need to milk productivity out of every moment

As a productivity nerd, I’ve been guilty of trying to optimise every moment for usefulness. Jumping from one activity to another just to optimise my time and do what feels more productive. But lately, I’ve been trying to induce a healthy level of slowing down because ultimately it helps us be productive when we need it.

Because we’re humans, not machines. We need time to catch a breath, relax our minds, and feed our brains some fun candy. It’s okay not to work all the time. If you’re struggling to wind down and allow yourself to not work, try to schedule and enjoy downtime rather than optimise it. How?

By not trying to squeeze productivity out of every waking minute. When you’re in the mood for some good music, try to immerse yourself in the listening experience. During bedtime, swap reading articles and self-improvement books with biographies or fiction books that don’t demand too much brain power and are a soothing experience. Be okay with slowing down and not doing anything productive during your downtime. Enjoy a warm bath, a cup of tea, moments of solitude or an engaging conversation with your loved one. There’s more to life than just work. Cherish your downtime.

Hulry
3. (Marketing) When you match your tone and style to mimic prospective buyers, they’re more likely to be open to your message

Social scientists have long been intrigued by the human tendency to mimic the behaviour of others. But new studies show that mimicry isn’t just a subconscious reflex — it’s a sales technique. In one study, researchers observed that simply watching someone else eat a certain snack food caused the viewer to choose the same snack themselves 71% of the time.

Humans are hardwired to gravitate towards people who are more like us. Subconsciously we seek to “belong” to a social group, which is why we can quickly adapt to new social environments — like inadvertently mimicking someone’s accent. Being the social creatures that we are, we’re more likely to respond to a suggestive message positively when it comes from someone who looks like us.

Humans instinctively like people who are more like them. When you match your tone and style to mimic prospective buyers, they’re more likely to be open to your message. Mimicry is a persuasive sales technique. It can be highly effective when used honourably. That said, you also want to be on the lookout for people who may use it against you.

Customer Camp
 
4. (Career) The three-step framework to introduce yourself

Many of us dread self-introduction, be it in an online meeting or at the boardroom table. Here is a practical framework you can leverage to introduce yourself with confidence in any context, online or in person: present, past, and future. You can customise this framework both for yourself as an individual and for the specific context. Perhaps most importantly, when you use this framework, you will be able to focus on others’ introductions, instead of stewing about what you should say about yourself.

Start with a present-tense statement to introduce yourself:  Hi, I’m Ashley and I’m a software engineer. My current focus is optimising customer experience. The second part of your introduction is past tense. This is where you can add two or three points that will provide people with relevant details about your background. It is also your opportunity to establish credibility. Consider your education and other credentials, past projects, employers, and accomplishments. My background is in computer science. Before joining this team, I worked with big data to identify insights for our clients in the healthcare industry. The third and last part of this framework is future-oriented. This is your opportunity to demonstrate enthusiasm for what’s ahead. If you’re in a job interview, you could share your eagerness about opportunities at the firm. If you’re in a meeting, you could express interest in the meeting topic. If you’re kicking off a project with a new team, you could talk about how excited you are, or share your goals for the project. I’m honoured to be here. This project is a significant opportunity for all of us.

Harvard Business Review
5. (Productivity) Focus on what you can change

In his very first season as the New York Giants coach, Bill Parcell was hit with a rash of injuries. He worried incessantly about the impact of the injuries on the team’s fortunes, as it is difficult enough to win with your best players let alone a bunch of substitutes. When his friend and mentor Raiders owner Al Davis called Parcells to check in, Parcells relayed his injury issues. Parcell’s: “Al, I am just not sure how we can win without so many of our best players. What should I do?” Davis replied: “Bill, nobody cares, just coach your team.”

That might be the best CEO advice ever. Because you see, nobody cares. And they are right not to care. A great reason for failing won’t preserve one dollar for your investors, won’t save one employee’s job, or get you one new customer. It especially won’t make you feel one bit better when you shut down your company and declare bankruptcy. All the mental energy that you use to elaborate your misery would be far better used trying to find the one, seemingly impossible way out of your current mess.

A16z
6. (Marketing) If cheap share of voice is available in recessions, it’s a good value way to buy a bigger share of your sector later on

But what that share is worth depends on how big your sector is now, and after the recession. If the payoff is a slice of a smaller pie, share of voice has to be very cheap to make spending worth it. In this calculation, the cost of media matters, and so does what competitors do. But whether to go dark in a recession or not also depends on the trajectory your category is and will be on.

The “Don’t go dark” advice is advertising’s equivalent of a strategy investors use – buying the dip. You buy an asset for cheap when no one else is buying, in this case, mental availability. Then you sit back and enjoy the profits when demand recovers, and with it, the value of your asset. This strategy works as long as your sector is secure. In FMCG, which was a secure sector during COVID, advertisers followed the advice. They increased spending at a time when media costs were low, and they got high returns per £1 spent.

Magic Numbers
7. (Society) Childhood, as a time of innocence, is a modern creation

Traditionally, for Christians at least, humans were thought to be born with corrupted souls and harboured within them the nastiest and meanest of instincts. Childhood, as a time of innocence, is a modern creation. As pointed out by French historian Phillipe Aries, in Centuries of Childhood, before the 17th-century children were thought to be merely small adults, possessing the same qualities and natures as grownups. Children weren’t little darlings or cute cherubs, as we often refer to children today. Rather they were fallen angels, like Lucifer.

One of the earliest observations of children’s spontaneous inclination towards sympathy came in the early 18th century, near the beginning of the Romantic period. It was as though for the first time people could see their children other than as little beasts. What happened to cause this change? Under a series of changes wrought by the Renaissance and Reformation and propelled by the development of a market economy and burgeoning capitalism, the feudal system, in place for more than a thousand years, cracked and crumbled. This opened up the possibility of directed change based on the optimistic idea that the human condition could be improved through human effort.

Psychology Today

Fun things to click on:

On Screeplays you will find thousands of screenplays for movies and TV shows. It’s easy to search and a fun way to look “behind the scenes” of your favourite movies and shows. The creative legacy of GIFs. A tool for seeing your internet latency (rather than just bandwith in similar sites).

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#54: Negative capability, desire, and time poverty

February 5, 2023

Hi friends,

Today we delve into some of the fundamentals of our lives, starting from the capacity to hold conflicting ideas in our heads and what that brings to inner desires and what drives them. We don’t venture far from our bodies as we look at time management, commitments and the importance of friendships. Hope you enjoy it.

Our seven ideas this week:

1. (Philosophy) The world is complicated, ambiguous, paradoxical, and contradictory. To make sense of it, to survive it, one must be able to balance conflicting ideas

The poet John Keats called it “negative capability”—the mental fortitude to be able to entertain multiple contradictory ideas in your head at the same time. Or as F. Scott Fitzgerald famously wrote, “The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposing ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function. One should, for example, be able to see that things are hopeless, yet be determined to make them otherwise.”

How do you cultivate the kind of negative capability Keats was talking about?

1) Read widely and from people you disagree with. 2) Study deeply. Marcus Aurelius chided himself “not to be satisfied with just getting the gist of it.” 3) Put yourself in rooms where you’re the least knowledgeable person. Observe and learn. Ask questions. 4) Understand that timing and context are everything. 5) Embrace epistemic humility. Epictetus reminds us that “it’s impossible to learn that which you think you already know.” To the Stoics, particularly Zeno, conceitedness was the primary impediment to wisdom. 6) Keep your identity small. the more you identify with things—being a member of a certain political party, being seen as smart, being seen as someone who drives a fancy car or someone who belongs to this club or that ideology—the harder it is for you to change your mind or entertain new points of view. 7) Don’t always have an opinion. It’s possible, to not have one. 8) Flexibility is key.

Ryan Holiday 
2. (Psychology) The four desires driving all human behaviour: acquisitiveness, rivalry, vanity, and love of power

Bertrand Russell endures as one of humanity’s most lucid and luminous minds — an oracle of timeless wisdom on everything from what “the good life” really means to why “fruitful monotony” is essential for happiness to love, sex, and our moral superstitions.

Man differs from other animals in one very important respect, and that is that he has some desires which are, so to speak, infinite, which can never be fully gratified, and which would keep him restless even in Paradise. Russell points to four such infinite desires — acquisitiveness, rivalry, vanity, and love of power. 

Acquisitiveness — the wish to possess as much as possible of goods, or the title to goods — is a motive which has its origin in a combination of fear with the desire for necessaries. However much you may acquire, you will always wish to acquire more; satiety is a dream which will always elude you. The world would be a happier place than it is if acquisitiveness were always stronger than rivalry. But in fact, a great many men will cheerfully face impoverishment if they can thereby secure complete ruin for their rivals. Hence the present level of taxation.

Vanity is a motive of immense potency. Anyone who has much to do with children knows how they are constantly performing some antic, and saying “Look at me.” It is scarcely possible to exaggerate the influence of vanity throughout the range of human life, from the child of three to the potentate at whose frown the world trembles. But the most potent of the four impulses, Russell argues, is the love of power: Love of power is closely akin to vanity, but it is not by any means the same thing. What vanity needs for its satisfaction is glory, and it is easy to have glory without power… Many people prefer glory to power, but on the whole, these people have less effect upon the course of events than those who prefer power to glory… Power, like vanity, is insatiable.

The marginalian
3. (Productivity) Time poverty doesn’t arise from a mismatch between the hours we have and the hours we need; it results from how we think about and value those hours

Time poverty affects all cultures and crosses all economic strata. Time-poor people are less happy, less productive and more stressed out. They exercise less, eat fattier food and have a higher incidence of cardiovascular disease.

The most obvious explanation is that we simply spend more time working than previous generations but the evidence doesn’t support this theory. Time diaries show that men’s leisure time in the US, for instance, has increased by six to nine hours a week in the past 50 years, while women’s has increased by four to eight hours a week. Why, then, do we feel more time-poor than ever?

Time poverty doesn’t arise from a mismatch between the hours we have and the hours we need; it results from how we think about and value those hours. It’s as much psychological as it is structural. We are ceaselessly connected. When the free time arrives, we are unprepared to use it so we waste it. Or, we tell ourselves we shouldn’t take a break so we work right through it. The first step to becoming time smart is to identify the time traps in your life.

TED
 
4. (Marketing) Humans’ desire to stay consistent with our commitments is a mega-driver for buying decisions

Your buyers have an identity aligned with how they perceive themselves currently and who they want to grow into in the future. Buyers are committed to their current identity and take actions that are consistent with maintaining it. If buyers are committed to their health, they’ll consistently take supplements that align with acting as the healthiest version of themselves. Buyers also want to make commitments that align with their future desired identity and want to make consistent habits that bring it to fruition. Creating consistency behind these commitments tells their mind they’re likely to reach that identity, despite distractions along the way.

Aligning the messaging for your products with buyers’ current identity and desired future identity activates commitment and consistency in their minds. Do your clients resonate with being the hacker-style entrepreneur that wears sweatpants and flip-flops to VC meetings? Or do they relate to the go-getters running at 5 am before their all-hands meeting? Get to know your customers through research and then tie your products or services to their identity. You can speak to who they are today and illustrate how you can help them to remain consistent with their commitments or highlight your product as a stepping stone to the kind of person they wish to become.

Why we buy
5. (Investing) Bullshit in investing, be it wild over-optimism, deception or fraud, is as old as time, precisely because it is hard to resist the promise of easy returns and to tell the difference between innovation and make-believe

“What bothers me isn’t that fraud is not nice. Or that fraud is mean. For fifteen thousand years, fraud and short-sighted thinking have never, ever worked. Not once. Eventually, you get caught, things go south. When the hell did we forget all that?” — Mark Baum, The Big Short. The investing industry is ridden with bullshit. The most common and insidious form is over-optimism: offers of tantalizing risk/reward that defy any notion of reality, often based on misinformation or deception. Less common but even more dangerous are outright frauds.

The problem is inherent to the product. Most consumer goods – apples, hotel rooms, laptop computers – are tangible objects or services that you can see, taste, feel, or experience, so you can judge how much they are worth to you. Investments represent claims about some future probability distribution of monetary outcomes which are not verifiable. The best an investor can do is form a reasonable judgment about the uncertainty around those claims, based on historical evidence and details about the mechanics of how those claimed outcomes are generated.

The first step in avoiding being taken for a ride is to recognise that you are a mark for people trying to get rich off your money. Burn the principle into your brain that financial markets are large and competitive and have a lot of smart people in them. Easy money-making opportunities are seldom real; professional mercenaries would have found and exploited them first. High returns with low risk explained away by complicated and non-transparent strategies deserve great scrutiny.

Benn Eifert
6. (Psychology) The importance of friendships

Loneliness registers an impact on your well-being similar to that of smoking 15 cigarettes a day and rivals alcohol and smoking as a cause of early death. Since 1990, the percentage of Americans who report having less than three close friends has doubled, from 16% to 32%. The share who report having no close friends at all has gone from 3% to 12%. Put another way, 20 million Americans have begun smoking a pack a day. Several factors inspired this perfect storm of loneliness: Covid; political polarisation; fewer random encounters, as we no longer go to the mall/theatre/office; social media raising a generation of disconnected people who feel worse about themselves; and a lack of Third Spaces.

Men and women approach friendship differently. Men have it drilled into us from an early age that vulnerability and emotional connections are signs of weakness. They aren’t, and men with influence should cleanse this bullshit version of masculinity from the zeitgeist. But to be clear: Declining friendships is an everyone problem. The decline in friendship is insidious, as it feeds on itself. Friendship is a muscle that strengthens with use but atrophies with age. We have so many more opportunities and so much more fuel for our friendships when we are children and even as young adults.

Scott Galloway
7. (Marketing) During periods of inflation brands work to prove their worth to consumers by showcasing their premium offer, despite it seeming counterintuitive for business

Diageo – owner of alcohol brands such as Guinness and Baileys – has reported the staggering success of its choice to focus on its most premium brands to drive growth last year. In its financial year ending 30 June, the company’s ‘premium plus’ brands like Johnnie Walker, Don Julio and Tanqueray contributed 57% of reported net sales and drove 71% of organic net sales growth. In March last year, Diageo CMO Cristina Diezhandino told Marketing Week’s Festival of Marketing that rising costs in the year ahead meant price rises were inevitable. However, she argued that consumers are more likely to accept these price increases from premium brands because these are viewed as “special” or “treats” already.

Outside of the FMCG sector, travel company On the Beach increased its booking value by 31% compared to pre-pandemic levels as it focuses on capturing a greater share of the premium market. The Bank of England doesn’t expect inflation to fall until the middle of 2023, so prices aren’t likely to come down soon. And with a recession taking hold, brands will have to stand out in other ways to win consumer spending next year. As such, premiumisation is likely to continue.

Marketing Week

Fun things to click on:

“20 simple things I wish I could tell my 20-year-old self”. Visualise location of emotions in the body. What if everything you shared on social media, for one month, was about something other than yourself?

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#53: How to be successful, memorisation, and faces

January 29, 2023

Hi friends,

The year is in full swing now and we can finally settle down and focus on things that matter. Today’s newsletter focuses on a few fundamentals including how to be successful (one of my favourite articles of all time), how to improve our thinking processes, and love. Who doesn’t like a bit of romance in the end?

Our seven ideas this week:

1. (Career) How to be successful

Every year I try to reread this brilliant piece from Sam Altman on how to be successful. Here are a few excerpts:

1) Compounding is magic. Look for it everywhere. Exponential curves are the key to wealth generation. You don’t want to be in a career where people who have been doing it for two years can be as effective as people who have been doing it for twenty — your rate of learning should always be high. As your career progresses, each unit of work you do should generate more and more results. There are many ways to get this leverage, such as capital, technology, brand, network effects, and managing people.

2) Have almost too much self-belief. Self-belief is immensely powerful. The most successful people believe in themselves almost to the point of delusion. Cultivate this early. As you get more data points that your judgment is good and you can consistently deliver results, trust yourself more. If you don’t believe in yourself, it’s hard to let yourself have contrarian ideas about the future. But this is where most value gets created.

3) Make it easy to take risks. Most people overestimate risk and underestimate reward. Taking risks is important because it’s impossible to be right all the time — you have to try many things and adapt quickly as you learn more. It’s often easier to take risks early in your career; you don’t have much to lose, and you potentially have a lot to gain. Once you’ve gotten yourself to a point where you have your basic obligations covered you should try to make it easy to take risks.

I strongly encourage you to read the rest here.
2. (Productivity) Memorisation isn’t antithetical to critical and analytical thinking, it’s what lays the foundation for it

Memorising facts is generally seen as less important than developing skills like critical thinking. In fact, having information stored in your memory is what enables you to think critically. Many teachers don’t even try to get students to remember information they can Google. They’ve been trained to believe it’s best to go straight for “higher-order skills” like analysing and synthesising — rather than wasting time on supposedly “lower-order” ones like knowing and understanding information.

But scientists who study the process of learning have found something quite different: the more factual knowledge people have about a topic, the better they can think about it critically and analytically. This has to do with “working memory,” which is somewhat like short-term memory. The important point about working memory is that it can only hold a limited number of items for a limited period of time. Long-term memory, on the other hand, is virtually unlimited. The more items you can simply withdraw from long-term memory — because you’ve memorised them — the fewer items take up precious space in working memory, leaving more space there for absorbing and analysing new information.

Minding the Gap
3. (Marketing) Twitter spies on us all the time

It was reported late last year that Twitter has spyware (known in the dark art of adtech as “ad tracking pixels”) embedded in over 70,000 websites. This means that every time you go to one of these websites, they report your activities back to the great and powerful Musk. Do you need to have a Twitter account to be in Musk’s files? No. Do you need to have ever had a Twitter account to be spied on by Twitter? No. Are you aware that information about you is being reported to Twitter by tens of thousands of companies? No. Have you ever given Twitter informed consent to collect this information about you from tens of thousands of websites? No.

According to The Register…”In addition to sharing info on their visitors including cookie IDs, IP addresses, and browsing data with Twitter, Adalytics … also observed some websites sharing hashed emails and phone numbers with the platform.” What does Twitter do with all this data about you after they get it? Who the hell knows. But if you want to get paranoid…remember that Musk’s partners in Twitter include the sovereign fund of Saudi Arabia and some other lovely people who were promised special access to Twitter data in return for their investments.

The Ad Contrarian
 
4. (Productivity) Writing can be used as a thinking tool. Not only for personal management, but for ideation as well. From consuming information to creating your own content, writing can be used every step of the way

“What is clearly thought out is clearly expressed” once said Boileau (1636-1711), a French writer. Anytime you struggle to write about something you just read, watched, or listened to, make sure to take the time to understand it properly. The fact that you’re struggling to express it in your own words often means you haven’t completely grasped the new idea.

Writing is being kind to your future self. The generation effect, which was described in a research paper published in 1978 in the Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior, is the phenomenon where information is better remembered if it is actively created from one’s mind rather than simply read in a passive way. Instead of passively taking notes, writing what you want to learn in your own words ensures you are in active learning mode and form connections between new and pre-existing knowledge, which will make it easier to retrieve information later on.

Ness Labs
5. (Marketing) Buyers are instinctively drawn toward faces, which is what makes them such a magnetising part of advertising

Ads and content featuring faces are 11x more likely to get noticed. By running thousands of experiments, Netflix figured out that faces showing an emotion aligned with the genre of the movie or show performed best, showing the villain over the hero performed better, and people react differently to faces around the world. Your buyers will notice faces in your content. But, it only takes them 40 milliseconds to come to a conclusion after looking at a face in a photo.

You can use faces in your content to grab attention by strategically having them look at the buyer, gaze at a value proposition, call-to-action, or product, or depict a specific emotion. People will naturally follow the eye gaze and are more likely to read the copy or notice the product.

Why we buy
6. (Marketing) Businesses must invest in their brands to drive sustainable growth in the long term, and resist falling into the vicious cycle of chasing short-term sales boosts with excessive performance marketing and promotions

Last year, online fashion giant Asos confessed to getting the balance wrong. In October, the retailer reported a loss before tax of £31.9m for 2022 – down 118% versus 2021. For new CEO José Antonio Ramos Calamonte, Asos’s problem can be nailed down to “insufficient” brand investment over recent years, resulting in a customer acquisition slowdown. More than 80% of its marketing investment had been spent on performance, he revealed.

But Asos wasn’t the only business to re-evaluate its spending in 2022. In August, travel firm Expedia announced plans to no longer spend the majority of its marketing budget on performance, switching its attention towards brand-building creative, loyalty and CRM to trade “modest short-term disruption” for “significant long-term growth”. Following its split from efficiency-focused pharmaceuticals company GSK earlier this year, consumer healthcare giant Haleon is also planning to “reinvest” in brand building, having previously sacrificed quality of reach in pursuit of lower cost.

Marketing Week
7. (Relationships) We can fall into an error of seeing love as a passive mysterious gift that we are in no position to generate, direct or guarantee, rather than conceiving of it as an emotion that for the most part flows fairly logically, steadily and naturally on from things we are in a position either to do or not do

We can spend a lot of time in relationships to which we are ostensibly committed wondering, maybe with a fair amount of anxiety: do they love me? Is this solid? Might it all suddenly end? But perhaps less time asking the more salient question: what can I do to help this valued relationship endure?

We can fall into the error of seeing love as a passive mysterious gift that we are in no position to generate, direct or guarantee, rather than conceiving of it as an emotion that for the most part flows fairly logically, steadily and naturally on from things we are in a position either to do or not do. And, to come to the central thesis, love tends to be a consequence of a partner feeling cared for and heard — in the way they have almost certainly frequently signalled to us that they need to feel, to be inwardly assured that they are in safe and tender hands.

To maintain love, we need more than anything to follow a few simple-sounding rules: 1) the partner must feel heard. 2) They must feel we are on their side. 3) They must feel appreciated according to their distinctive love language. 4) The partner must know we are making an effort in their name. 5) They must feel wanted, emotionally and physically. 6) In so far as we are difficult to be around (and we all are) we must explain why; we need to give our partner an accurate map to our areas of immaturity. 7) We must strive to remain calm around their most trying sides.  

The School of Life

Fun things to click on:

Greg Isenberg asked 1 billionaire, 1 PhD math professor and 1 99-year-old man what self-reflection questions they asked themselves. Their list of questions to make you feel more fulfilled in life, love & career. The growth of Singapore 2012-2020. Bakers create a life-sized Han Solo out of bread.

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#52: The flow, harmful reactions and marketing budgets

January 22, 2023

Hi friends,

Today’s newsletter has a few learnings on productivity. Starting from understanding the flow state, how can we trigger it and maximise it. And then we discuss actions that have the most long-term benefits for us. Finishing off with a few interesting facts about the world population, as we’ve recently hit 8 billion people in the world. Isn’t it crazy how many of us there are now?

Our seven ideas this week:

1. (Productivity) Motivation is what gets us into the game. Learning allows us to continue to play. Creativity is how we steer. And flow, which is optimal performance, is how we amplify all the results beyond all reasonable expectation

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi is often referred to as the Godfather of Flow Psychology. He was very interested in the sort of well-being and meaning of life, and he went around the world talking to people about the times in their lives when they felt their best, and they performed their best. Everywhere he went, people said the same thing. “I’m in this altered state of consciousness where every action, every decision I make, seems to flow effortlessly, perfectly, seamlessly from the last.” Flow actually feels ‘flowy.’ More specifically, it refers to any of those moments of rapt attention and total absorption. You’re so focused on the task at hand, so focused on what you’re doing, everything else just seems to disappear.

One way to explore flow triggers, there’s a cluster of them, is through dopamine triggers. They drive focus, they drive attention, they drive alertness and excitement, and there are a lot of different ways to get dopamine. Novelty produces dopamine. We see the same thing with unpredictability, complexity, and the experience of awe. You look up at the night sky and you see stars everywhere and you know those stars are actually universes, and you get sorta perceptual vastness. We get dopamine, not as a reward for taking a risk, which is what some people used to believe, but now we know it’s to drive motivation. Now, there are lots of different intrinsic motivators, but from a motivation standpoint, there are five and they’re all designed to be built into one another and work in a specific order, in a specific sequence. The most basic human motivator is curiosity. One of the things we get from curiosity is focus. When we’re curious about something, we don’t have to struggle. We don’t have to burn a lot of calories trying to pay attention to it. Curiosity is designed, biologically again, to be built into passion. 

Now, passion is incredibly useful, but as a motivator, you can go one better, which is purpose. Everyone’s talking about, “Oh, I have a purpose,” and it’s this big altruistic thing and it’s good for the world, and all those things may be true, but from a peak performance perspective, it’s very, very selfish. Once you have a purpose, the system demands autonomy. I want the freedom to pursue my purpose. And once you have that freedom, the system wants the last of the big motivators, mastery. Mastery is the skill to pursue that purpose well.

Big Think
2. (Marketing) If you can meet your customer’s expectations, they’re likely to spend 140% more after a positive experience

Psychologically speaking, our brains are pattern-seeking machines. We develop expectations to help us make sense of and evaluate the world around us. Expectations are based on our past experiences. But our expectations can change depending on the environment, our mood, or our perception of a product or situation. The problem with expectations is that when they don’t match up with reality, we’re disappointed.

Everything about the product, from the packaging to the website copy, will set the expectations in the mind of your buyer. If you can meet your customer’s expectations, they’re likely to spend 140% more after a positive experience.

So how can we manage buyers’ expectations? Setting expectations early and often will help you manage the relationship with your customer. Packaging and presentation are key to setting expectations through non-verbal communication. Be sure your product’s ability exceeds the buyer’s expectations for your specific industry. And lastly, use unhappy customers as a research opportunity.
 
Why we buy
3. (Psychology) It’s not what happens to us that bothers us – it’s the reaction we have to what happens that bothers us. Letting go of our harmful reactions is important if we want to live a joyful life

Long before Freud and other psychologists posited that implicit orientations and patterns subconsciously guide behaviour, the yogic concept of samskara provided a sophisticated explanation for the causal forces that shape our unwitting actions and future responses. While we cannot escape the creation of these unconscious imprints, we can work to overcome them through conscious awareness and self-reflection. In this way, we can transform our lives from being driven by unconscious habits and tendencies toward more fulfilling ones.

The path of yoga offers a systematic method to foster self-awareness and to replace maladaptive samskaras with healthier patterns of orienting. Healthier samskara can be formed by actively replacing maladaptive patterns with more wholesome responses (for example, when experiencing feelings of not being good enough, sending oneself thoughts of loving-kindness and perhaps stating an affirmation such as, “may I know that I am enough”). Although samskara continue to exist in the self-realised practitioner, they no longer hold the power to bind or influence action or behaviour, having been brought into the light of awareness. Such is the experience of liberation.

Yoga Basics
 
4. (Productivity) Short-term easy is long-term hard. Short-term hard is long-term easy

We’d rather do the easy thing than the hard thing. That’s natural and normal. We can call this the mountain. You can climb it, or you can avoid it, but it’s not going away. There is always a mountain. There is always something in front of us that we know we should do, but it just seems so … hard. On any given day, we can avoid the climb. We can stand at the bottom, look up, and say, “I’ll wait. Hopefully, the mountain isn’t here tomorrow.” But we all know the mountain is still there tomorrow. And instead of looking smaller, it’s even larger.

Jerzy Gregorek said about the mountain “Easy decisions, hard life. Hard decisions, easy life.” The easy path today makes a hard path tomorrow. The hard path today makes an easier path tomorrow. The choice is yours, but the mountain isn’t going away. The longer you put off the hard thing you know you need to do, the harder it becomes to get started. The climb is the fun part.

Brain Food
5. (Marketing) Most budgets are set too low, most marketing departments aren’t confident enough in their plans, and profitable opportunities are being misseds

Most businesses don’t spend 5-10% of revenue on advertising. In other words, most budgets are set too low, most marketing departments aren’t confident enough in their plans, and profitable opportunities are being missed. Part of the reason for this seemingly chronic underinvestment in advertising is, no doubt, the risk involved where something hard to control – creativity – has a big impact on returns. Big advertising budgets are not an easy sell when the CFO has much more certain ways to spend the same money.

But a difficult selling task shouldn’t be a barrier to senior marketers. After all, most CMOs and marketing directors got there because they had at least a bit of a knack for convincing people to buy stuff. When the sell is internal and to the CFO, having evidence and numbers on expected returns is an important step.

Magic Numbers
6. (Learning) Some of the most important topics are the hardest to teach, and real-world experience is the only school

The most important decisions in your life may be whether to marry, who to marry, and whether to have kids. But none of those topics are taught in school. They’re hardly even discussed. How could they be? They aren’t problems you can distil down to an equation, or even a broad principle.

People have different personalities, goals, experiences, levels of chance and serendipity, all of which make universal truths hard to find and difficult to teach. No matter how smart the world becomes, the best answer will always be, “You’ve got to figure it out for yourself.” A lot of things work like that.

A few others: how to get along with people you disagree with; how to respect the views of people who’ve had different life experiences than you; how to recognize that your views would be different if you were born in a different country or era; how to recognise and appreciate luck; how to deal with regret; where to live; how to advertise your skills and accomplishments without being insufferable.

Morgan Housel
7. (Society) We’ve hit peak child – there will never again be more children alive than there are today, with fertility rates plummeting across the globe

Homo sapiens have roamed the Earth for roughly 300,000 years, give or take (no one left a diary back then). We evolved to have big brains and long legs, but our population grew relatively slowly at first. There were perhaps 230 million of us on Earth at around the time of Cleopatra’s death, as the ancient Egyptian civilisation came to an end. The population had more than doubled by the Renaissance in 1500 and doubled again by 1805 when the ancient Egyptian civilisation was rediscovered with the help of the Rosetta Stone.

The 2 billion mark was reached just before the Great Depression in 1925, and it took just 35 years from there to get to the third billion. Since then, the population has been rising by another billion every 10 to 15 years.

Under its most likely scenario, the UN projects the world population will reach about 10.4 billion in the 2080s. We’re getting older and older, which means there are fewer people able to work to support more people who can’t. We’re seeing a major shake-up of the huge population centres of the world. 

ABC

Fun things to click on:

Visualising Berkshire Hathaway’s holdings over the years. Tree.fm plays the sounds of forests, recorded by people who’ve visited them. Observe the growth of Singapore 2012-2020.

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

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SD#51: Single-tasking, non-coercive marketing and greatness

January 15, 2023

Hi friends,

Hope you’re having a good start to the year. Today we delve into the philosophy of travelling and politics within friendships. Both everyday subjects yet we don’t think about the deeper meanings often. We’ll also look at some ways to practice self-care when you feel anxious, which we all do let’s be honest.

Our seven ideas this week:

1. (Marketing) More messages mean less effectiveness

If we were to look at ads that just went with a single key message we can treat this singular message as our index of 100. Add a second message and those remembering the first message now falls by a third but this is offset by equivalent levels of recall for the second message. Add a third message and the original message loses a little recall, the second message loses a lot, and the new third rights message makes very little impact at all. Add the fourth message and all four causes take a major hit and – for the first time – the total number of recalled messages declines. We are now officially throwing shit against the wall.

There is usually one – perhaps two – big, hairy important drivers of brand switch or trial that need to be communicated. Other arguments exist but have significantly less persuasive power. By communicating four things badly, you lose the opportunity of communicating one or two more powerful arguments well. Less is therefore more.

Mark Ritson via Marketing Week
2. (Productivity) The case for single-tasking

Psychiatrist Edward Hallowell defined multitasking as a “mythical activity in which people believe they can perform two or more tasks simultaneously as effectively as one”. Trying to multitask can not only hurt our productivity but also our ability to learn. Fortunately, there is an alternative way to boost your efficiency: single-tasking.

Researchers Kevin Madore and Anthony Wagner investigated what happens to the brain when trying to handle more than one task at a time. They found that “the human mind and brain lack the architecture to perform two or more tasks simultaneously.”

That’s why multitasking leads to decrements in performance when compared to performing tasks one at a time. Furthermore, it is worrying that those who multitask often inaccurately consider their efforts to be effective, as studies have demonstrated that multitasking leads to an over-inflated belief in one’s own ability to do so. Not only are we bad at multitasking, but we can’t seem to be able to see it.

Ness Labs
3. (Marketing) Non-coercive marketing: A new philosophy of marketing, rooted in letting go of control, and trusting people to be their own authority

Non-coercive marketing places full authority and trust in people. It creates the conditions under which they can make empowered decisions for themselves, and do so in their own time. It doesn’t seek to persuade, manipulate, or pester people into a decision that’s already been made for them. It merely opens new doors, tells the truth about what’s behind those doors, then surrenders the outcome, trusting that the right people will step through when they’re ready. In that way, non-coercive marketing is a leap of faith, rooted in the idea that if you stop trying to control people, and encourage them to be their own authority, you can build positive sum relationships that lead to organic and mutually-enriching transactions. This relational shift is also at the heart of how we begin healing the emotional wounds lying beneath humanity’s many problems.

The key ingredient in non-coercive marketing is the golden rule. We should market to others the way we’d want to be marketed to ourselves. But when we’re at war with ourselves and when we treat ourselves in shitty, coercive ways, we often end up treating others that way without realizing it. Self-coercion and distrust are the emotional water our society swims in, and our external world reflects that. Turns out, when your inner world is full of conflict, and when your actions are rooted in insecurity and distrust, the golden rule isn’t worth a whole lot.

Ungated
 
4. (Productivity) Greatness is not about overnight successes or flashes of excellence, but periods of repeatable habits

The first step in becoming great is recognising that you’re likely not already great. It comes from recognizing that there is no such thing as greatness at a specific instance in time. Greatness is instead a reflection of a period of effort since greatness in a single instance can be reduced to luck.

Moreover, being “great” is not about being better than someone else. It is about being dependable and disciplined, and ultimately it is earned. There’s a false impression that success or notoriety comes with being flashy. This notion comes from the media focusing on outliers, whether it be events or personalities which diverge from the norm. Not only can this encourage people to aim for notoriety just for the sake of it (think Elizabeth Holmes), but it makes the rest of us believe that correlation (of those outliers) is causation; in other words, the success of those individuals is due to their offbeat ways. But here’s another storyline: the surest and therefore the best way to “success” is through consistency.

There is no “magic moment” when you become great, so if you are looking for your path towards greatness, stop looking for “greatness” and consider that your most probable path there is just to focus on what’s good.

If you have an understanding of what inputs equal favourable outputs then continue moving in that direction. As you move past the local minima and maxima, you’ll soon be beating out the 50% that quit at X time, the 75% that quit at Y time, and the 90% that quit at Z time. Soon enough, you’ll be the great one that was once just “good” among the rest, but stuck with it and learned something along the way.

Steph Smith
5. (Psychology) We travel initially, to lose ourselves; and we travel, next, to find ourselves

Getting lost in a foreign land is one of the best ways to get perspective on your own life. We travel “initially, to lose ourselves; and we travel, next, to find ourselves,” as Pico Iyer writes. The breath of foreign air jolts you out of your entrenched ways and opens you up to new ways of being.

The French call this dépaysement, the disorientation you feel when you travel to a strange land. Your world becomes topsy-turvy. Your sense of proper and improper shifts. You learn to laugh at things that would anger you at home. The majority becomes the minority. Surrounded by the echoes of a language you don’t know, you return to infancy when your mother tongue was foreign to you. You become a young fool again.

Ozan Varol
6. (Friendships) When politics is understood as war, genuine friendship becomes difficult because friendship contributes nothing to the cause

All around us, friendships old and new are coming to grief over politics. What is the cause of this? Part of the problem relates to how we practice politics today: we have become more warlike and tribal. Another part of the problem stems from our contemporary understanding of friendship. Genuine friendship places weighty demands on us, and most of us prefer relationships that are quicker and easier, and thus less enduring.

Politics and friendship are deeply connected. As strange as it sounds, how we understand what politics is, affects the kinds of friendships we are likely to enjoy. And, conversely, how we understand friendship will affect our practice of politics.

What exactly is the connection between politics and friendship, and how should we assess the relative value of each when they come into conflict?

Comment
7. (Psychology) Ways to practice self-care when you feel anxious

In an evolutionary sense, anxiety is designed to grip us, and not let us take our eye or our mind off the source of the threat. In modern times, when we’re anxious, we tirelessly overthink, trying to resolve the sense of threat we’re feeling. This is exhausting. It often disrupts sleep, relationships, and concentration. And it usually clouds our thinking rather than makes us feel clearer.

Modern anxiety is usually about threats that we fear will spiral into catastrophes. For example, an imperfection within your performance is revealed, and you worry it will be the start of many mistakes and losing your status, career, and whatever else you have worked hard for.

One simple but effective strategy, say to yourself, “there’s no emergency right now. I can allow myself to take my eye off this threat for the next minute.” Permit yourself to take a single minute off from stressing about the problem. Then, extend this, to five minutes or 10 minutes. Another technique is to think about what would someone who is just as smart or conscientious as you, but who thinks differently than you, think about the topic of your anxiety. What would they think are your options for resolving it or moving forward with your anxiety?

Psychology Today

Fun things to click on:

5 things you should always block time for in your calendar. How medieval carpenters are rebuilding Notre Dame. The ultimate coffee vs tea smackdown.

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

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SD#50: Belief-bias, principles, and creativity

January 8, 2023

Hi friends,

Happy New Year and welcome to 2023 and to the 50 edition of Seven Dawns. How time flies. Hope you had some rest over the festive period. 

A new year is a strange time when all of us come energised with hundreds of new goals we’ll achieve in the year ahead. Let’s remember that it’s okay to take things slowly too, allow things to settle down before we roll our sleeves so cheers to that.

Our seven ideas this week:

1. (Marketing) If something seems far-fetched or too good to be true, we assume it is. This is Belief Bias at work

Buyers are sceptical of big, audacious claims. They believe that if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is. When evaluating your solution, they’re biased by their own beliefs and past experiences. Buyers are wired to avoid making decisions they’ll regret, and making huge promises can trigger alarm bells.
 
Don’t say your products are life-changing or that you’re the absolute best in the business. Claims like these feel like too much of a stretch and scare buyers away. Instead, explain exactly what will change in their lives and use numbers to show you’re a pioneer of your industry. Realistic claims build trust between the brand and the buyer.
 
Having other people back up your big promises naturally makes them more believable. Especially when those people are everyday folks like them (customers) or people they already know, like, and trust (authorities in your niche).
 
Why we buy
2. (Productivity) It’s easier to hold your principles 100% of the time than it is to hold them 98% of the time

Take, for example, a diet. If you’re only 98% committed to a diet, then that means you haven’t yet made the decision. If you haven’t made the decision, but are only partially committed, then you don’t know what the outcome will be in future scenarios. Not knowing the outcome of your behaviour can create problems in your confidence and identity.
 
Motivation requires simplicity. Complexity kills motivation. Consequently, you want to make a decision, have a clear outcome, and carve a clear path to getting what you want. As you make progress, you’ll begin to develop efficacy or confidence that you can complete.
 
Instead of dealing with decision fatigue at 98%, one could make a decision at 100%. Although difficult, this could solve a lot of willpower problems. By committing 100% to something, like say, a diet, even for a short period of time, you can predict your behaviour in future situations. You can know that regardless of what is being offered, the decision has already been made. That decision was made in better conditions than in the heat of the moment. Therefore, you don’t have to deal with the back-and-forth struggle of decision fatigue in unideal decision-making conditions, such as when your best friend is offering you a soda.
 
Psychology Today
3. (Creativity) Anyone can be trained to be creative

Researchers from Ohio State University developed a new method for training people to be creative, one that shows promise of succeeding far better than current ways of sparking innovation. This new method, based on narrative theory, helps people be creative in the way children and artists are: By making up stories that imagine alternative worlds, shift perspective and generate unexpected actions.
 
The narrative method of training for creativity uses many of the techniques that writers use to create stories. One is to develop new worlds in your mind. For example, employees at a company might be asked to think about their most unusual customer — then imagine a world in which all their customers were like that. How would that change their business? What would they have to do to survive?
 
The point of using these techniques and others like them is not that the scenarios you dream up will actually happen. Creativity isn’t about guessing the future correctly. It’s about making yourself open to imagining radically different possibilities.
 
Science Daily
 
4. (Marketing) Don’t try to price promote during a recession. Discounting is more likely to damage profits, particularly as competitors follow, rather than maintain sales. Dropping price won’t save you from a recession

There is considerable evidence that relative prices matter, this isn’t to say that brands have to have similar prices, only that you should maintain an appropriate differential between your brand and competitors (depending on relative quality). So in a time of rising costs, if competitors raise their prices you are very safe to do likewise.
 
Analysis suggests a fairly straightforward relationship between price level compared to rival brands and market share. If the differential is increased a brand’s market share moves down to a new level, not immediately but gradually over a year or so. If the differential is reduced the brand’s market share moves up a level, also gradually. This shift overlays the brand’s current sales trajectory (up, down or, more usually, stable). Thus lowering the price of a brand that is declining boosts sales without altering the fundamental trend downwards. The same pattern has been observed for price promotions, they cause sales spikes but once these are accounted for the brand’s fundamental share trend is unaltered.
 
Ehrenberg-Bass Institute
5. (Productivity) Animals that meet their survival needs with the least amount of work are most likely to survive

Idle Theory says that the least idle animals have the highest chance of survival. In other words, animals that meet their survival needs with the least amount of work are most likely to survive (due to energy conservation). The Siberian Tiger weighs up to 600 lbs. It can survive in sub-zero temperatures. It has night vision. It can run 50 mph. It can leap 16 feet in the air and broad jump 25 feet. It can swim up to 7 miles a day. It can bite at 6x the force of a human being. It can shatter the jaw of a bull with the swipe of its pall.  
 
Yet, its superpower is this… The Siberian Tiger sleeps up to 20 hours a day. If we look at how hard top performers really work, we will see they work more like Siberian Tigers than the start-up founders humanity seems to be so obsessed with.  
 
In Rework, the authors argue that Charles Darwin worked only four hours a day and Kobe Bryant six hours a day yet the former was able to produce the masterpiece The Origin of Species and the latter was able to win 5 championship rings. When you look at these two examples, you feel a bit silly working 40, 50 and sometimes 60-hour weeks, lying to yourself that it’s helping you get ahead.  
 
Cole Schafer
6. (Technology) If the proximate purpose of technology is to reduce scarcity, the ultimate purpose of technology is to eliminate mortality

At first, that sounds crazy. But let’s start with the premise: is the proximate purpose of technology to reduce scarcity? Think about how a breakthrough is described: faster, smaller, cheaper, better. All of these words mean that with this new technology, one can do more with less. In the digital world, Google made information on any topic free to anyone with an Internet connection, and WhatsApp made it free to communicate with anyone. In the physical world, innovations like the Haber Process or the Green Revolution allowed us to produce more with less. In a real sense, these technologies reduced scarcity.
 
Now for the second half of the sentence, the logical implication. Is the ultimate purpose of technology to eliminate mortality? Well, mortality is the main source of scarcity. If we had infinite time, we would be less concerned with whether something was faster. The reason speed has value is because time has value; the reason time has value is because human life has value, and lifespans are finite. If you made lifespans much longer, you’d reduce the effective cost of everything. Thus insofar as reducing scarcity is acknowledged to be the proximate purpose of technology, eliminating the main source of scarcity – namely mortality – is the ultimate purpose of technology. Life extension is the most important thing we can invent.
 
Balaji Srinivasan
7. (Psychology) The default effect is our tendency to go with the status quo, even when a different option would be better for us

Many studies show that we tend to generally accept the default option—the one that was preselected for us—and that making an option a default increases the likelihood that such an option is chosen. One of the theories behind the default effect is that humans are hardwired to avoid loss. We feel a strong aversion to any kind of loss. This aversion is so strong that it can override our logical thinking and lead us to stick to what seems like the safest path. Another theory relates to the cognitive effort needed to consider alternative options. It’s much easier to go with what’s right in front of us, compared to researching and evaluating other potential choices.
 
Opting for the safest path may seem like a good idea but it can often lead to suboptimal decisions. For example, we might choose the default health insurance plan, even though there are better options available. Or we might stay in our current job, even though we’re unhappy, because the idea of starting over is too daunting.
 
Ness Labs

Fun things to click on:

A graveyard of apps killed by Google. Days Since Incident is a constantly updated list of earthquakes, typhoons, tsunamis, asteroid impacts, volcanic eruptions, tornadoes, etc. How hand-painted billboards are replacing digital ones.

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#49: Productivity addiction, stoicism, and hindsight bias

December 18, 2022

Hi friends,

Welcome to another edition of Seven Dawns, your weekly newsletter on marketing, productivity, psychology and more.

Note – Seven Dawns will be taking a break through Christmas and New Year as we all deserve some rest after this year. I’ll speak to you all on the other side in 2023.

Our seven ideas this week:

1. (Marketing) The average change in sales after stopping advertising for one year was a 16% drop, after two unadvertised years was 25%, and after three years a 36% drop

Advertising spend can be cut for many reasons. In a recession or other times of financial pressure — e.g., when resources are urgently required in other areas of the business — advertising may seem like a discretionary activity or a dispensable luxury. Because the advertising budget is typically non-fixed, it can be diverted quickly at short notice. In some cases, poor budget planning or extra spending due to seasonality (or certain high-reaching events) may run the budget dry for some time until the brand’s next allocation of funds.
 
Ehrenberg-Bass institute did a study to determine what happens when brands stop advertising. In the first year without advertising, the mean sales index is 84, though there is wide variation around this average. The spread widens after two years without advertising, yet there is a downward trend in sales for the majority of cases. Despite the variation, the decline becomes more common and greater in magnitude as brands go longer without advertising. After four years without advertising, there are no cases with higher-than-base level sales.
 
A small number of brands also reported higher sales in the first year or two without advertising than previously when they were advertising. Most of these growth cases were brands that were growing already and they were quick to restart advertising.
 
Ehrenberg-Bass Institute
2. (Productivity) Productivity addiction is perhaps the ultimate example of false urgency running awry. It’s being unwilling—and unable—to sit with the discomfort of the present moment in our bodies, incapable of waiting until we get our next fix

Western culture is run by a sense of false urgency. Work demands that we tend to our email, Slack, and calendars. Increasingly, our social lives are shifting from IRL hangouts to the online space, where we must battle against sophisticated algorithms designed to brainwash us into believing the urgency blasted in their notifications is real. Text messaging and WhatsApp culture convince us that if we don’t respond to our homies promptly, we are being inconsiderate, selfish friends.
 
Our bodies carry all these burdens more than we realise. The complexity of our civilization demands deadlines—especially when it comes to repairing our damaged biosphere and vitriolic political climate. Our personal lives, too, benefit from a healthy insistence on self-inquiry. At the same time, I can also admit to myself that much of my life is run by urgencies that do not exist. False urgency is stress masked under the guise of responsibility. Urgency is an invention rooted in fear.
 
Deep Fix
3. (Philosophy) Like the Stoics, we must never expect, hope, or believe that anyone is coming to save us. Because it’s the expectation, the entitlement, the naivete that crushes us

The Stockdale Paradox is the blazing determination inside Admiral James Stockdale that allowed him to believe that, despite his imprisonment and torture, he would not only survive but thrive because of his experience. There’s something similar in Meditations where Marcus Aurelius, reflecting on the plague and the wars and the troubles that beset his reign, actually says to himself, “It’s fortunate that this happened to me.”
 
When asked who fared worst in the North Vietnamese prison camp, Stockdale singled out one group: the optimists. They were convinced they’d be rescued soon. They were convinced it was going to be over any day now. Ramit’s mortgage broker guest went one step further, he was a fantasist. He dreamt of a reality that simply didn’t exist. We cannot be so naive or excessively optimistic or wishful, as to place our fate in the hands of others. Like the Stoics, we must never expect, hope, or believe that anyone is coming to save us. Because it’s the expectation, the entitlement, the naivete that crushes us.
 
Daily Stoic
 
4. (Investing) Save like a pessimist, invest like an optimist

Optimism and pessimism can coexist. If you look hard enough you’ll see them next to each other in virtually every successful company and successful career. They seem like opposites, but they work together to keep everything in balance.
 
Save like a pessimist means you acknowledge the cold statistics of how common bad news is. It’s common at the global, national, local, business, and personal levels. Save heavily, knowing with certainty that you’ll need a cushion to deal with the next banana peel. Be a little bit paranoid, knowing the assumptions you hold today could break tomorrow, and you’ll need enough room for error to make it to the next round.
 
More people and businesses try to solve problems than fudge success or get into trouble. Not by much. But the odds tilt ever so slightly toward long-term progress amid frequent setbacks. It’s been happening for thousands of years: millions of people solving one problem and moving on to the next, bit by bit, experiment by experiment.
 
Since progress is cumulative (we don’t forget past innovations) but setbacks are temporary (we rebuild), the long-term odds tilt towards growth. Same thing in the economy. As long as more people try to get better than screw up, the long-term odds are in an economy’s favour. If the odds are in your favour and you can keep them in your favour for a long time, you shouldn’t just be an optimist. You should be ridiculous, full-blown, giddy optimistic.
 
Morgan Housel
5. (Psychology) Hindsight Bias is a common tendency for you to perceive past events as being more predictable than they were

Have you ever thought: “I knew it all along”? If you have, then you’ve been influenced by Hindsight Bias. Hindsight Bias is a common tendency for you to perceive past events as being more predictable than they were. Obviously, Bitcoin was going to hit an all-time high. Obviously, Bitcoin was going to come crashing down.
 
In hindsight, both outcomes can look inevitable. The far differing opinions show just how fragile our predictions for the future are. For example, it’s easy to look back and say that it was inevitable that Amazon was going to be as big as it currently is. Today Amazon is the poster child for smart business growth. But if you were a shareholder from 1997 to 2007, you were probably considering selling off your shares in the unprofitable, cash-burning startup.
 
Hindsight Bias is a type of memory distortion: new information received after the fact influences how you remember the actual event. Researchers have found that individuals—including your buyers—selectively recall information that reinforces what they already know to be true.
 
So how can we apply this right now to sell more? Answer buyer objections upfront. Before customers click that big ol’ buy button, they must believe that success is possible. Many people try a variety of solutions to solve a problem without finding success. If they’ve tried something and failed before, their Hindsight Bias may lead them to assume failure is inevitable and they’ll be reluctant to invest again.
6. (Marketing) We live in a time where presence, salience and even the briefest burst of attention are the highest marketing priority. With so many voices shouting at once, getting anyone to hear even a sentence is a valuable achievement

A couple of weeks ago an ad from Belvedere went viral.
 
We live in a world obsessed with outcomes. At school, we’re encouraged to climb an artificial leaderboard that reflects our test scores. At work, performance is based on reaching specific targets, sometimes known as OKRs for “Objectives and Key Results.” In this goal-based society, success is defined by how our peers evaluate our track record. Kyūdō, the Japanese martial art of archery, offers an alternative philosophy where aims matter more than goals, and where success is the process itself.
 
In life like in archery, the goal is the target we want to achieve, while the aim is the course we set to reach that target. A goal fixates on the finish line, while an aim considers the trajectory. When we focus on our aims, the process becomes the goal. And we’re more likely to reach our goal when we become fully aware of our aim. This is the essence of the way of the bow. As James Clear puts it: “It is not the target that matters. It is not the finish line that matters. It is the way we approach the goal that matters. Everything is aiming.”
 
Letting go of outcomes doesn’t mean abandoning your ambitions. Instead, focusing on your aims is a mindset shift that allows you to break free of the arrival fallacy so you can zero in on your output. When we focus on our aims rather than our end goals, we learn how to design a daily life where the process itself is so fulfilling that it doesn’t matter whether we ever reach a hypothetical finish line. Success is enjoying the process.
 
Ness Labs
7. (Psychology) It is not the target that matters. It is not the finish line that matters. It is the way we approach the goal that matters. Everything is aiming

If you don’t understand how the stock market works, it’s a simple task for financial advisors to pitch you an overly complex investment fund. If you don’t know what to look for, it’s easy to assume that complexity is important to outperform. The advisor will likely trot out a bunch of statistics about how well the fund has done in the past and reassure you that they aren’t going to give you some boring old index fund. The message is clear: “if you invest with me, you’ll outperform.”

A 2017 paper titled “Use of Leverage, Short Sales, and Options by Mutual Funds” found that investment funds that use risky, complex tactics like leverage (debt) and trading options lead to bad outcomes for investors. Often, advisors will use complexity to justify their higher fees. We’ve been told, “you get what you pay for” so many times throughout our life that many of us have come to view the terms “expensive” and “quality” as interchangeable. While that might be true when you’re buying a pair of winter boots, it couldn’t be further from the truth when it comes to investment products.

Research from Morningstar has shown that investment fees are the best predictor of the performance of an investment fund. The lower the investment fees, the higher the expected returns.

Making of a Millionaire

Fun things to click on:

How to wave to other motorists on a rural road. A visual reminder of what you can and can’t control. This year the Earth will surpass the 8 billion person mark. This is a cool visualisation to see how the population is distributed by country.

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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