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SD#48: Unawareness, change and investment fees

December 11, 2022

Hi friends,

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

Our seven ideas this week:

1. (Marketing) B2B brands shouldn’t fear rejection, but being unknown

Humans are hardwired to fear rejection. Modern B2B companies struggle with something similar – fear of ‘brand rejection’. Marketers fear we might say the wrong thing to the wrong person at the wrong time and catastrophically harm the business. We often see this in advertising. Brands will pause media campaigns during turbulent times or dull down creative, trying to ensure we don’t insult any potential buyers and find ourselves starved out of a customer base.

But is the fear of brand rejection warranted? In B2C, surveys across 535 brands in 24 categories revealed only 9% of buyers actively reject any given brand, on average. Put another way, 91% of potential customers do not actively reject any brands.

So if rejection doesn’t hinder B2B growth, what does? One thing that does stand out is unawareness. Big brands like Barclays have low unawareness (16%), whereas small brands like Standard Chartered have high unawareness (62%). That’s not a coincidence.

The problem isn’t that buyers hate you – the problem is that buyers don’t even know you exist.

Marketing Week
2. (Productivity) If you try to do everything, you won’t do anything

It takes discipline not to insist on doing everything yourself. Especially when you know how to do them well. Especially when you have high standards about how they should be done. Even if you enjoy doing them—whether that’s mowing your lawn or answering your phone.

A glutton isn’t just someone who eats or drinks too much. Some of us are also gluttons for punishment. Gluttons for attention. Gluttons for control. It can come from a good place. We feel obligated. We feel bad spending money. We feel guilty asking for help. It doesn’t matter the source though, because the outcome is the same: We wear ourselves down. You have to be able to pass the ball…especially when somebody is open and has a better shot.

Some people spend hours a month opening mail, paying bills and doing administrative paperwork. Just as easily they can sign up for paperless billing, or auto-schedule payments. Almost everything we do as responsible adults in the world is set up inefficiently. By improving our systems, we buy ourselves time and energy. And then with this time and energy, we can be better at what we do, get more done, and be more present for the people who depend on us.

None of the above might come as a surprise. It’s a healthy reminder to manage our time so we can spend it the way we won’t regret it.

Ryan Holiday
3. (Psychology) Are you the same person you used to be?

John Stuart Mill once wrote that a young person is like “a tree, which requires to grow and develop itself on all sides, according to the tendency of the inward forces which make it a living thing.” The image suggests a generalized spreading out and reaching up, which is bound to be affected by soil and climate, and might be aided by a little judicious pruning here and there. The authors of “The Origins of You” offer a more chaotic metaphor. Human beings, they suggest, are like storm systems. Each storm has its own particular set of traits and dynamics; meanwhile, its future depends on numerous elements of atmosphere and landscape. The fate of any given Harvey, Allison, Ike, or Katrina might be shaped, in part, by “air pressure in another locale,” and by “the time that the hurricane spends out at sea, picking up moisture, before making landfall.”

There’s a wide range of ways in which people can relate to time in their lives. Some people live in narrative mode and others have no tendency to see their life as constituting a story or development. But it’s not just a matter of being a continuer or a divider. Some people live episodically as a form of spiritual discipline, while others are simply aimless. Presentism can be a response to economic destitution—a devastating lack of opportunities—or vast wealth.

Galen Strawson notes: “There are lotus-eaters, drifters, lilies of the field, mystics and people who work hard in the present moment. . . . Some people are creative although they lack ambition or long-term aims, and go from one small thing to the next, or produce large works without planning to, by accident or accretion. Some people are very consistent in character, whether or not they know it, a form of steadiness that may underwrite experience of the self’s continuity. Others are consistent in their inconsistency, and feel themselves to be continually puzzling and piecemeal.”

Life is full and variable, and we all go through adventures that may change who we are. But what matters most is that we lived it. The same you, however altered, absorbed it all and did it all. This outlook also involves a declaration of independence—independence not from one’s past self and circumstances but from the power of circumstances and the choices we make to give meaning to our lives. Dividers tell the story of how they’ve renovated their houses, becoming architects along the way. Continuers tell the story of an august property that will remain itself regardless of what gets built. As different as these two views sound, they have a lot in common. Among other things, they aid us in our self-development.

The New Yorker
 
4. (Productivity) It’s good to say yes when you’re starting out, wanting any opportunity, or needing variety, it’s bad to say yes when you’re overwhelmed, over-committed, or need to focus

Derek Sivers, entrepreneur and author on how to make more room for what excites us most: “Most of us have lives filled with mediocrity. We said yes to things that we felt half-hearted about. So we’re too busy to react when opportunities come our way. We miss out on the great because we’re busy with the mediocre. The solution is to say yes to less. If you’re not feeling ‘Hell yeah, that would be awesome!’ about something, say no.”

Derek Sivers
5. (Marketing) People pay attention to negativity more than positivity

There’s a reason why people can’t stop “doom scrolling.” In 1998, social psychologist Tiffany Ito found negative images spark more brain activity than positive or neutral images. Three years later, psychologists Paul Rozin and Edward Royzman coined the term Negativity Bias to explain the psychological phenomenon.

The average click-through rate of an article increases by 63% when it has negative superlatives like bad, worst, and never in its title. Negativity gets attention, clicks, and conversions. But too much negativity shifts your brand from friend to foe.

Your buyers unconsciously pay attention to negative news, trends, and stories, so they can avoid potential losses in the future. Like moths are attracted to light, they look for negativity, hoping that knowing this information will keep them safe in the future. Buyers aren’t looking for an onslaught of consistent negativity from your brand, though. A little negativity can drive action, but too much can drive buyers in the opposite direction.

Customer Camp
6. (Career) People tend to systematically overvalue near-term over long-term rewards. This effect seems to be even stronger in more ambitious people

How can smart, ambitious people stay working in an area where they have no long-term ambitions? A good analogy for the mistake they are making can be found in computer science.

A classic problem in computer science is hill climbing. Imagine you are dropped at a random spot on hilly terrain, where you can only see a few feet in each direction (assume it’s foggy or something). The goal is to get to the highest hill. At any given moment, take a step in the direction that takes you higher. The risk with this method is if you happen to start near the lower hill, you’ll end up at the top of that lower hill, not the top of the tallest hill.

A more sophisticated version of this algorithm adds some randomness to your walk. You start with lots of randomness and reduce the amount of randomness over time. This gives you a better chance of meandering near the bigger hill before you start your focused, non-random climb. Another and generally better algorithm has you repeatedly drop yourself in random parts of the terrain, do simple hill climbing, and then after many such attempts step back and decide which of the hills were highest.

People early in their career should learn from computer science: meander some in your walk (especially early on), randomly drop yourself into new parts of the terrain, and when you find the highest hill, don’t waste any more time on the current hill no matter how much better the next step up might appear.

Cdixon
7. (Investing) When it comes to investing, you get what you don’t pay for. Saving on investment fees means you get to keep more of your money

Compulsory disclaimer – none of the the below is financial or legal advice.

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:

Looria took all the most talked about brand mentions on Reddit and identified the most popular products. A list of tools for creators. One tweet biography of every English and British monarch since Alfred the Great in 886.

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#47: Advertising, compassion and goals

December 4, 2022

Hi friends,

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

Our seven ideas this week:

1. (Marketing) Advertising is like a mating ritual – impressive displays are more effective – which means consumers need to see what you’re spending on media and creative

It’s not a revolutionary idea, nature has known it since the dawn of life on the planet – if you want to attract a mate, it pays to show off. So, in birds, time-consuming twig designs signal good genes. This works effectively as a persuasive technique.
 
As biologist Amotz Zahavi concluded, anyone investing great time and effort in their message is putting their money where their mouth is – so they must really mean it. That’s why costly signalling boosts believability. As in the animal kingdom, we seem to understand instinctively that time and effort confer quality, and we apply this in our everyday lives. As Rory Sutherland has pointed out, we invite guests to weddings with a well-designed, carefully worded postal invitation. Not a group email.
 
So how can we take a leaf, so to speak, from nature’s book, and apply this idea to advertising? One approach is to employ an impressive advertising spend.
 
If you have shown visual or linguistic flair, it demonstrates the time and effort you have put into your campaign. That taps into costly signalling. In short, your task is to create through advertising the equivalent of a beautiful 6ft bower. That way you’re signalling the same: I am strong and clever. Pick me.
 
Marketing Week
2. (Psychology) Are we too sympathetic but not compassionate enough?

These days, you could argue that in some ways, we are probably too soft. And the reason I think this happens is a confusion between sympathy and compassion. People mistake sympathy for compassion.

Sympathy is feeling bad for someone and wishing they didn’t feel so bad. Sympathy is noble on the surface (“people should suffer less!”) but can often end up being subtly self-serving (“people should suffer less because I don’t want to feel bad for them anymore.”)

Compassion is similar to sympathy but different in an important way. Like sympathy, compassion begins with feeling bad for someone. But instead of simply wanting the person’s suffering to go away, compassion involves someone willing to suffer alongside that person so that they may overcome their challenges.

Sympathy is sending flowers and a card to a friend when a parent dies. Compassion is driving to their house and holding them as they cry. Sympathy is trying to remove as much strain and struggle as possible. Compassion is trying to help a person move through a manageable amount of struggle so they can grow into a better person.

As a culture, we’re over-optimized for sympathy and under-optimized for compassion. Sympathy is easy to communicate online. It’s also easy to see sympathy communicated between others. Compassion is like sarcasm, it is not communicated well online. It’s also harder to recognize between others.

Mark Manson
3. (Marketing) How Amazon uses consumer psychology to get us to buy

Rumour has it that Jeff Bezos reserves the head chair at their boardroom table for “the metaphorical customer.” The chair sits empty but whenever someone on the team suggests making a change that customers wouldn’t like, Bezos points to the chair and say, “what would they think?” Amazon is also famous for its experimentation culture. Amazon’s marketing team doesn’t guess what will work—they test, test, and test.

Amazon’s insane growth is a result of its ruthless focus on the customer, its experimentation culture, and the team’s deep understanding of buyer psychology. Here are a few Amazon-approved buyer psychology strategies:

Scarcity & Urgency
Amazon has worked hard to position itself in the buyer’s mind as the online store with the BEST prices. (They even sold diapers at a loss for years to dominate the online diaper market). But on top of everyday good prices, Amazon sellers can use various deals to attract buyers. Limited-time offers create urgency and encourage buyers to act now. And Amazon also shows buyers when stock is running low, tapping into Scarcity Bias and driving sales.

Foot-in-the-door Technique
Amazon offers 1-2 day delivery and special deals for their Prime members. Rather than forcing buyers to commit to a membership upfront, Amazon offers a free 30-day trial. A free membership gets people to make a small commitment and get their foot in the door. Then Amazon showers new Prime members with benefits like special deals and free access to video Amazon’s video and music streaming services.

Loss Aversion
It’s estimated that the average Prime member spends $1400/year on Amazon. That’s a lot more than the average Amazon user, so Amazon uses clever techniques to retain Prime members. If a member considers cancelling their Prime membership, Amazon hits them with loss aversion messaging, showing members the exact amount of money they could lose by cancelling their membership increases retention.

Social Proof
Amazon sits on the throne of social proof. If we had to choose one buyer psychology that embodies Amazon’s rise to the top — this is it. Their product pages are riddled with social proof, from star ratings, reviews, buyer questions, and user-generated content photos and videos. Amazon is less worried about doing the selling and more concerned with letting their customer’s voices be heard.
 
4. (Writing) How to get out of the creative block

American essayist Vivian Gornick described her struggles with writer’s block in several places, here’s one example, from her 1996 book Approaching Eye Level:

“I had been wandering around the apartment for hours, avoiding the desk. Couldn’t think, couldn’t write. My head filling up with fog, mist, cotton wool, dry ice; the fog rolling in through the window tops. The usual. The daily experience. The condition I struggle with from nine in the morning on, fighting to occupy a small clear space in my head until two or three in the afternoon when I desert the effort, feeling empty and defeated and as if I haven’t heard the sound of a human voice in a thousand years.”

Blocks are a kind of brain fog, powerlessness and horror, a stupefying ennui. As Normal Podhoretz says, blocks are to the professional writer what jails are to the professional burglar: a normal occupational hazard which must be taken into consideration in the choosing of the profession and discounted, as it were, in advance. Blocks don’t afflict just writers, any ambitious creative work could be affected by a block. So how do you get out of it?

(1) Try doing your very worst work. Do the worst song you can think of. At the very least you’ll get some idea of what your rules are, at the most you’re going to get something better than anything you’ve ever done because it has a lot of pure energy. (2) Do not turn one problem into another one. It’s easy to feel overwhelmed or inadequate that you stop working entirely, you have a problem and suddenly you have created another problem out of the problem. Resolving a block will not necessarily usher in a period of effortless, straightforward productivity – to the contrary, it often means going back to the most vexing, miserable stretch of work you’ve ever faced.

Subtle Maneuvers
5. (Business) Culture-market-fit model for business success

All entrepreneurs want to know how to win. Investors all want to know how to pick winners. The issue is that no one can agree on how to do it either. Depending on who you talk to, you’ll hear different gospels espoused. Some are devotees of the cult of the founder. Simultaneously, some prefer the magic of frameworks. Their divine prophets are thinkers like Clayton Christensen and Michael Porter.

What if the secret to building a successful technology company is culture-market fit? Culture-market fit (CMF) is that blissful intersection of an opportunity in the market with a culture that can execute on said opportunity. CMF occurs when an organization matches with an opportunity, and the organization’s culture allows the right strategies and processes to occur allowing them to capture said opportunity. Sometimes that will mean giving employees lots of freedom (Google), and sometimes that will mean micro-managing people (Amazon), but the important thing is that the culture cultivated correctly addresses the market opportunity. A company’s culture is a vibe, an ethos, that permeates every slide deck, every product decision, every analysis. When there is no clear right answer (which is always) the culture-market fit is what drives decisions.

Culture-market fit does not mean that the organization is hyper-aligned with customer interests, either. CMF is determined by crafting the internal culture that wins the external market. Sometimes that is aligned with customers, but sometimes it is also done through more…company-oriented decisions. Exxon and Chevron and nearly every Big Bank regularly screw over their customers but are still fiscally successful over an extended period. Some companies are motivated by ethos, some by greed, some by hubris, but all winners match their culture and incentives to the market they are serving. A market opportunity is where a business can extract the most long-term profits, not necessarily the one that gives customers the goods or services they would most prefer.

Napkin Math
6. (Society) Companies talk the talk of creating stakeholder value, but most don’t walk the talk. A truly symbiotic relationship among business, government and citizens is needed to tackle this issue

The private sector is often considered to be the heart of wealth creation and innovation — the late 1990s and early 2000s success story of Silicon Valley being a prime example. In this model, shareholder value is seen as the ultimate measure of a company’s success. Indeed, the idea that businesses are the most productive actors in the economy has served as a convenient justification for high incomes and great wealth. Today, however, many businesses also claim to be purpose-oriented; they are not just wed to shareholder value but are dedicated to creating stakeholder value.

And yet stakeholder value has largely followed the same fate as corporate social responsibility (CSR) and environmental, social, and governance (ESG) frameworks: Its transformative power has been watered down and hollowed out by overuse and underaction. It’s been value-washed. If we are to walk the talk of true stakeholder value, we must reverse two key trends: the financial sector’s propensity to invest in itself, and businesses’ prioritisation of stock buybacks. As those trends are reversed, companies and governments must embrace a new way of creating and distributing value, and that will transform society.

Harvard Business Review
7. (Productivity) An alternative to the cascade model of goals

In a cascade, the leadership team sets a small number of high-level goals (the magic number three). Department leaders then work to mimic that structure fractally. For example, the marketing team looks at the topmost goals and then comes up with three of its own goals (depending on the framework, some combination of objectives, measures, etc.).

The cascade is not chaotic. It is wonderfully symmetrical. But cascades are problematic: goal cascades combine too many ideas and attempt to do too many jobs. They have shades of driver trees, inputs/outputs, MBO, efforts at empowerment, context sharing, prioritization, tactics, strategy, and strategy deployment.

An alternative is to create a model that maps the drivers of your business. This model should be agnostic to anything you have on your roadmap. Add measurement to that model. Prioritise points of leverage. We might consider these high-level opportunities. Identify goals for those points of leverage. Map goals to the model. It is ok if you have lots of goals. You can group/summarise them later if you need that magic slide. An early version of this becomes the basis upon which teams can start figuring out where they can have an impact, where they need to collaborate, etc. Teams might, at this point, start layering more localised goals on top of more localized models.

Further explanation via The Beautiful Mess

Fun things to click on:

A map of the most notable person born in any location. A tomato variety rainbow. Take a meditation break to connect with your ancestral roots.

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#46: Brevity, optimism and attention

November 27, 2022

Hi friends,

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

Our seven ideas this week:

1. (Marketing) There’s plentiful research to show buyers don’t make purchases logically, yet B2B marketers still try to make sales largely based on product features

Back in the Dark Ages, economists believed that humans were ‘utility-maximising’ automatons that made decisions based on a series of cost/benefit calculations. But in 1956 a genius named Herbert Simon proved that most humans are satisficers, who tend to choose the first acceptable solution over the best possible solution. We satisfice to conserve mental and physical energy, and because it works. We don’t have unlimited time or perfect information, so we settle for ‘good enough’.

So what does this mean for B2B marketers? It means that your ads don’t need to convey the superiority of your product, because that’s not the key factor that drives buying behaviour. Buyers don’t want the best possible product, buyers want good-enough products that come to mind easily (mental availability) and are easy to purchase (physical availability).

When B2B buyers need a new financial service, 47% go straight to their existing bank, and 75% of those who claim to shop around also end up with their existing bank. And most buyers don’t even consider more than two brands. The truly rational B2B buyer would consider dozens of banks, compare their product specifications and prices, and choose the best possible option. The truly lazy B2B buyer would default to the brand they already know, which is what all of us do in practice.

The problem isn’t that buyers don’t know enough about your products. The problem is that buyers don’t know your brand exists. And marketing exists to solve that problem.

Marketing Week
2. (Productivity) A few gems from Churchill’s memo named Brevity

“To do our work, we all have to read a mass of papers. Nearly all of them are far too long. This wastes time while energy is spent looking for the essential parts.”

A couple of considerations from Winston that we could apply in our work:

– The aim should be reports which set out the main points in a series of short, crisp paragraphs
– If a report relies on detailed analysis of some complicated factors, or statistics, these should be set out in an Appendix
– Often the occasion best met by submitting not a full-dress report, but an aide-memoire consisting of headings only, which can be expanded orally if needed
– Let us have an end of such phrases as these: “It is also of importance to bear in mind the following considerations…”, or “Consideration should be given to the possibility of carrying into effect…”. Most of these woolly phrases are mere padding, which can be left out altogether, or replaced by a single word
 
Twitter
3. (Society) The case for optimism

Pessimism sounds smart. Optimism sounds dumb. It’s no wonder, then, that pessimistic messages hit the headlines, and optimistic ones hardly get a middle-page snippet. It’s why doomsday thinkers get respect and accolades. They’re the smart ones that can see what the rest of us can’t. They’re the ones that speak truth to power. There is an “optimism stigma” that is pervasive throughout society. But the world desperately needs more optimism to make progress, so we should stop being so shy about it.

The issue is that people mistake optimism for “blind optimism” — the blinkered faith that things will always get better. Problems will fix themselves. If we just hope things turn out well, they will. Blind optimism is dumb. And it’s not just stupid, it’s dangerous. Optimism is seeing problems as challenges that are solvable; it’s having the confidence that there are things that we can do to make a difference.

People mistakenly see optimism as an excuse for inaction. They think that it’s pessimism that drives change, and optimism that keeps us where we are. The opposite is true. Optimists are the ones that move us forward. They are the innovators, the entrepreneurs, the ones willing to put their reputation, money, and time on the line because they see an opportunity to solve a problem. 

Pessimism blocks solutions. If we always believe that the worst will happen, then what’s the point in starting? If any action will fail, we should stick with the status quo. Follow the pessimists if you want the world to stagnate or regress.

Big Think
 
4. (Marketing) Why focusing on sales only is a silly tactic

Sales are usually the ultimate corporate measure of success at most large organisations. We celebrate when a company breaks a billion dollars in revenues. And yet, once you break that focus on sales down, it becomes embarrassingly evident just how dumb an objective it usually proves to be. Sales are of course important but they are not the lifeblood of a company, profit is. Granted, to some degree operating profit is a function of sales volume. You have to sell X cars to make Y profit. But that should not justify the focus on X and the general ignorance of Y when setting objectives, shaping long-term strategy and directing marketing.

The sales signpost points towards lowering prices, targeting the bottom of the funnel, running extensive sales promotions, making more products, creating more brands, geographic expansion and the relegation of the bottom line to an ancillary role within the business. I would argue each of these precepts makes perfect sense in a sales-orientated business, and yet each is very often a stupid move.

When you look for that profit signpost, it will invariably point you in a more difficult, but more successful direction. It directs you to maintain a price premium and the branded differentiation that justifies it. It compels you to look for more profitable, protectable target segments and higher-priced, profitable products to service them with. It tells you that most sales promotions are a slow suicide and that, if you do make a sale at a special price, you should feel bad, not good, about it.

The profit signpost tells you to slow down and sometimes step back; to understand strategy as a sacrifice. It leads you to kill products and brands in massive culls that severely impact the top line of the firm while liberating the bottom. For the surviving brands, the signpost tells you to invest in big, long-term, TOFU-boosting efforts on their behalf. To follow the profit path does not mean we ignore volume, but it does mean we relegate it to page six in the marketing plan, and put gross margins and operating profit on page one. The purpose of sales is to provide profit, after all.

Mark Ritson via Marketing Week
5. (Productivity) Hard work can’t ensure your success but a lack of hard work can ensure your failure

Even many enthusiastic capitalists, these days, will concede that a lot of people are born on third base, that preexisting familial advantage can play a huge role in monetary success and success in any given field. Of course, chance influences everything we do within our various systems of achievement. People are smart and talented and work hard every day and never make it, while the idiot sons of privilege thrive and thrive and thrive. The question is, what’s the right thing to do in light of this information? Too many people seem to have concluded that the only thing to do is to devolve deeper and deeper into bitterness. That’s a great way to set yourself up for an unhappy life, and more importantly, it’s annoying for all the rest of us. We’re trapped in it too.

The simple fact of the matter is this: you are embedded in a system in which you do not control your destiny, yet you must work to achieve better outcomes rather than worse regardless. Adult life, very often, consists of recognising that you can’t control what happens next and then setting about to try and control it anyway. Because while you may never be able to exceed the potential that is forced on you by chance and parentage and timing and the system, you can certainly fail to meet that potential. If saying that means that I’m guilty of endorsing an unjust system then our standards have truly collapsed. I’m sorry to pull the wise old socialist routine, but I’ve been involved in this political culture my whole life, and being a socialist never entailed a belief that anything we do matters or that we were exempt from the need to work.

Freddie deBoer
6. (Society) How our economies have transformed around attention

Over the last decade, a great deal of attention has been paid to the problem of attention: a wide array of books, articles, essays, and documentaries have appeared to chronicle the disordered state of attention in an age of digital distraction. The curious thing about attention discourse is that it has been with us for longer than most would guess. Clearly, this most recent iteration is directly connected to the rise of digital media, but previous waves of attention discourse have preceded the advent of digital technology.

A few patterns are happening within the society: (1) We inhabit a techno-social environment manufactured to fracture our attention; (2) the interests served by this environment, in turn, pathologise the resultant inattention; (3) these same interests devise and enforce new techniques to discipline the inattentive subject.

If there is a “problem with attention,” what are its sources? Do we conceptualise the problem of attention as a failure of the individual, or as a failure of the techno-social environment? Who or what demands our attention and to what end? If we undertake a therapy of attention, in the interest of whom do we undertake it? Do our efforts to discipline our attention simply serve the interests of the system that has generated the problem in the first place or do they aim at a modest liberation from that system, reaching toward genuine human goods? Can we cultivate the skill of attending to the world for the sake of the world and those with whom we share it?

We will not by our individual actions undo a techno-social order that is inhospitable to human beings given the sorts of creatures we are (communal, embodied, mortal, etc.). But we can become more alert to how we might have internalised the demands of our milieu and judged ourselves (or others) for supposed failures — failures which are in reality the product of a social order that treats the person as a mere component in a system ordered toward economic ends. Only then might we undertake a meaningful therapy of attention whose rewards may very well be illegible to the order whose demands have structured our attention and, for that reason, be ours to enjoy in earnest.

The Convivial Society
7. (Copywriting) A few storytelling tips from the experts

(1) Cut the fluff, instead, try a “cold open” – jump straight into the action. (2) Create a hero that succeeds but success doesn’t come easy. (3) Build a world, JK Rowling said “there’s always room for a story that can transport people to another place”.
 
(4) Layer on drama, when you don’t think something can get worse, make it worse. (5) Slow down. Before your story’s climax, pause to force your audience to lean in. (6) Use data sparingly but intentionally, if you use too many numbers none of them matter. (7) Build to one moment. The entire story should be designed to amplify one moment, what is it going to be?

Twitter

Fun things to click on:

A chart for starting out new healthy relationships. Drive and Listen, lets you drive around various cities and listen to the radio stations local to those cities. A list of tools for creators.

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#45: IKEA’s tricks, cognitive scripts and discounting

November 20, 2022

Hi friends,

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

Our seven ideas this week:

1. (Marketing) 60% of IKEA purchases are impulse buys, how Ikea tricks you into buying more stuff

IKEA’s creative director has said that only 20% of the store’s purchases are based on actual logic and needs. 

How does IKEA trick you into buying more stuff? (1) Store layout. Inside, customers are led through a preordained, one-way path that winds through 50-plus room settings. The average IKEA store is 300k sq. ft.—the equivalent of about five football fields—and their typical shopper ends up walking almost a mile. This forces wider product exposure, creates a false sense of scarcity and creates mystery. (2) Low prices. IKEA often follows a “price first, design later” philosophy: It starts with a price target—say $6.99 for a new stool—then reverse-engineers the design process to meet that goal. IKEA seems to adhere to a “survival of the fittest” pricing model: If a product’s price can’t be reduced over time, it tends to get discontinued. 

(3) The IKEA Effect. We have a cognitive bias wherein we place a higher value on items we build ourselves, regardless of the quality of the end result. (4) Cafeteria. A survey of 700 shoppers found that those who ate at the food court spent an average of more than two times more on home furnishings than those who didn’t.

The Hustle
2. (Innovation) Don’t make something unless it is both necessary and useful; but if it is both necessary and useful, don’t hesitate to make it beautiful

The Shaker design philosophy is one of prioritization: their main priority is to be necessary and useful. Then, once that has been achieved, make something beautiful.

This philosophy has led to an amazing array of designs. The Shakers invented, among other things, the circular saw, the washing machine, and the flat broom. They are also well-known for their simple, durable furniture. The Shakers themselves were an interesting lot, an extremely religious group that started in Manchester, England in the 1700s. They moved (9 of them) to the Watervliet area in New York in the 1770s. The Shakers are very religious, and one of their strict beliefs hindered their growth as a community.

Bokardo
3. (Psychology) How to avoid unhelpful cognitive scripts

Although we think we are fully aware and in control of our everyday decisions, we often follow a series of cognitive scripts. These cognitive scripts often develop in childhood and are personal to you. However, as they are commonly based on a sequence of events that we expect to occur in given situations, many scripts will follow a common theme.

For example, when meeting someone new, we know we are expected to give our name, ask the individual about themselves, partake in some small talk, and then move on to deeper topics. Although cognitive scripts can save time and reduce the mental effort of deciding how to behave, they can also negatively affect our decision-making and productivity.

A few simple strategies can help you question your cognitive scripts and start overwriting the most unhelpful ones: (1) make time to journal. By journaling, you can take note of recurring scripts and the consequences they have. (2) Update scripts that fail you. Some scripts will only work at certain times in our lives before we outgrow them. If you experienced rejection as a child, and now keep others at arm’s length as an adult, this cognitive script that once protected you may no longer be needed and could be failing you. (3) Inject randomness and measured risk. If you’ve always wanted to set up your own business, learn to fly a plane or move to a new country, but have never taken action, it could be a good sign that a cognitive script is limiting your willingness to take risks. You can overwrite that script by experimenting with challenges outside of your perceived circle of competence, which will help you unlock new opportunities.

Ness Labs
 
4. (Marketing) Excessive discounting is usually a bad idea anytime, it’s a particularly bad idea at a time when prices are rising so rapidly

Price promotions on the face of it appear to be an incredibly powerful tool for stimulating sales. When you run a price promotion, you’ll see a spike in sales, and most of the extra volume appears to come from that. However, that spike is just an illusion, Les Binet has argued. Using econometrics, marketers will find the true incremental volume sales from price promotions to be considerably lower.

A big chunk of your promoted sales is just subsidising existing sales. You’re giving away discounts to people who would have bought you already, he said. Another chunk of your sales are just time-shifted. You’re bringing sales forward. You’re getting extra sales this week at the expense of next week.

Once these sales are removed, only a “tiny” proportion of promotional sales are shown to be incremental, which means most price promotions reduce profits. Indeed, data firm Nielsen estimates around 84% of price promotions are unprofitable.

Marketing Week
5. (Psychology) Nostalgia could be a powerful resource

In this YouTube video titled “Mindfulness isn’t the only powerful mental state” Dr Clay Routledge makes a case for nostalgia as a valuable psychological resource that can mobilise and motivate you to find new meaning in life. 

Nostalgia is making a comeback. Whether it’s movies, fashion, or music, people are turning the clock back a few decades. It makes sense. The world is going through a period of turmoil and uncertainty. When life feels chaotic, our minds naturally drift toward more comforting experiences from the past. Thanks to social media and streaming services, we can satisfy our nostalgic longings more easily than ever. Revisiting happy memories of the past strengthens self-continuity, connection and belongingness in the world.
6. (Society) We exaggerate the importance of breaking news but we also project illusions about the future. History really gets made in between the short and long runs

“Journalism by its very nature hides progress,” psychologist Steven Pinker argued in an interview, “because it presents sudden events rather than gradual trends … the press is an availability machine. It includes the worst things to happen on Earth at any given time.” But, he adds, “human progress is an empirical fact.” It’s certainly true that the mainstream media have a preference for bad news over good news. “If it bleeds, it leads,” is an old newsroom adage for good reasons. Pinker isn’t the only academic who has studied the cognitive biases that attract us to adverse events. Even the BBC on occasion admits that the media have a preference for negativity.

As for the newer forms of social media, it seems that our demand for “doom scrolling” is so enormous that it cannot be satisfied by the supply of real disasters. Much fake news consists of imaginary calamities. Trends are often optical illusions, born of extrapolating lines from the recent past into an uncertain future, or of imagining nonexistent cycles of history. In history, it is not so much that the trend is your friend; more that you can’t prevent the trend event.

Niall Ferguson via Bloomberg Opinion 
7. (Psychology) Embracing chaos to go from paralysing anxiety to thriving curiosity

“Better to be a dog in times of tranquillity than a human in times of chaos,” says an old Chinese proverb. We do, indeed, instinctively dread chaos as a threat to our stability; we fear the unpredictable risk and uncomfortable change it brings about, and we try hard to maintain a fragile equilibrium in our lives.

But nature shows us that life itself depends on chaos. And, because we’re human and able to override some of our instinctive behaviours, we can learn to embrace chaotic times, going from paralyzing anxiety to thriving curiosity. Norman Packard, a chaos theory physicist from the Santa Fe Institute, coined the expression “edge of chaos” to describe a transition space between order and disorder that’s fertile for adaptation and innovation.

The edge of chaos is a place for liminal creativity. It allows us to redefine the frontiers of our knowledge, to dance with disruption, and to reinvent ourselves. Instead of futilely resisting change by trying to stay stationary, this liminal space is an opportunity to respond to the threat of disequilibrium by constantly experimenting, learning, and adapting our ways of thinking.

Ness Labs

Fun things to click on:

A worksheet that helps you map the things that propel your passion. Watch the Sydney Opera House’s gorgeous lighting of the sails. The Ice-Cream Project features some bizarre ice cream flavors, like Heinz beans and Soy sauce.

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#44: Packaging, pricing and procrastination

November 13, 2022

Hi friends,

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

Our seven ideas this week:

1. (Marketing) Companies could benefit from prioritising ease over motivation

Richard Thaler, a Nobel prize winner in 2017, has a simple mantra about how to change behaviour. It can be summed up in three words: make it easy.

In 2017 psychologists from Columbia and Harvard universities did a study by launching a project to encourage parents to sign-up for a new service that would help their kids to study. They sent them the offering in three ways: a third of the group received the standard treatment by receiving a text message with the benefits; another third were told about the benefits and received a simplified sign-up process taking seconds; the final group were automatically enrolled and asked if they want to opt-out.

The sign-up rates varied radically by group: 1% for the standard set-up, 8% for the simplified, and 96% for the automatic enrolment group. 

Later on, the same psychologists asked other experts to predict the findings and, unsurprisingly, experts knew that small barriers would reduce sign-ups, but they were wildly wrong about the scale of impact. Again and again, people underestimate the impact of friction. We think behaviour is most effectively changed by motivating people to want our product but, in reality, it’s often less important than making the desired behaviour friction-free.

Richard Shotton
2. (Marketing) Packaging doesn’t just improve the product, it is the product

According to Malcolm Gladwell’s book Blink, Louis Cheskin, the man behind the decision to keep McDonald’s golden arches, believed that most of us don’t make a distinction –– at least not on a conscious level –– between the packaging of a product and the product itself.

So, in other words, the product isn’t just the product… The product is the packaging and product.

While Cheskin has long been dead, the firm he left behind has found that 7-Up can taste a hell of a lot more “citrusy” by simply increasing the yellow in the packaging by 15%, that peaches taste better in a glass jar than a can and that folks are willing to pay five to ten cents more for chocolate chip ice cream if the packaging reads, “New! Bigger Chocolate Chips!”

A lot of us assume that a product’s packaging –– logos, design, aesthetic, copy, creative and the overall experience as a whole –– is to better help market the product. But, in reality, it’s to make the product itself better.

Cole Schafer
3. (Productivity) It’s fear—not lack of motivation or willpower—that prevents us from taking action towards our goals

Procrastination is simply one of many coping strategies to avoid facing these fears. 

During high-pressure scenarios which trigger memories of negative experiences, the amygdala triggers a fight or flight response. It takes over our ability to think of the long-term consequences of our actions and leads us to avoid the important task at hand because it’s perceived as a threat to our safety.

As a reward for escaping the threat by procrastinating, we’re temporarily relieved and feel better. But this doesn’t last long. Sooner or later, the negative emotions creep back up again—boredom, self-doubt, anxiety, stress and so on—and to cope with this, we continue to procrastinate until the last-minute deadline.

This vicious cycle of avoiding negative emotions and rewarding ourselves by procrastinating is what turns procrastination from a one-off behaviour into an addiction. To us, procrastination is simply a matter of laziness. To our brains, however, it’s a matter of life and death.

Mayo Oshin
 
4. (Psychology) Could technology be stopping you from becoming the person you want to be?

Technological liturgy – the formative power of the practices, habits, and rhythms that emerge from our use of certain technologies, hour by hour, day by day, month after month, year in and year out. The underlying idea here is relatively simple but perhaps for that reason easy to forget. 

We all have certain aspirations about the kind of person we want to be, the kind of relationships we want to enjoy, how we would like our days to be ordered, and the sort of society we want to inhabit. These aspirations can be thwarted in any number of ways, of course, and often by forces outside of our control. But on occasion, our aspirations might also be thwarted by the unnoticed patterns of thought, perception, and action that arise from our technologically mediated liturgies. 

They’re not called liturgies as a gimmick, but rather to cast a different, hopefully revealing light on the mundane and commonplace. The image to bear in mind is that of the person who finds themselves handling their smartphone as others might their rosary beads.

The Convivial Society
5. (Marketing) When calculating a deal’s desirability, consumers overemphasise the sum quoted and place too little weight on the time-frame

Ever thought about why you see brands put “from £x per day” instead of month or year?

In 2016, 500 participants were shown a car financing deal. Everyone saw the same image and basic details, but how the price was displayed varied between participants. Some people saw the price conveyed as an annual amount, others as a daily, weekly or monthly figure. On each occasion, the costs were the same if annualised.

The results were clear: the longer the unit of time used, the less appealing the deal. This wasn’t a small effect. There was a five-fold variation in scores. Only 11% of people thought the car was a great deal in the annual variant. That jumped to 40% in the monthly condition, rose slightly in the weekly variant and peaked, at 51%, with the daily amount.

Wherever possible, talk about your daily rather than monthly price. Or, if you’re selling multi-packs, don’t talk about the headline price; instead, emphasise the per-unit cost.

Marketing Week
6. (Investing) Sitting still feels reckless in a fast-moving world, even in situations where it offers the best odds of long-term compounding

It’s like being told that you should play dead if a grizzly charges you – running for your life just feels more practical.
 
The bias towards action is one of the strongest forces in business investing for three reasons: It can be the only signal to yourself and others that you’re not oblivious to risks. It can be the only signal to others that you’re worth your salary. And it can provide the illusion of control in a world where so much is out of your hands.

One of Morgan Housel’s core beliefs of investing.
7. (Psychology) We can’t prevent stress from happening, but we can get better at how we interpret the stress we do experience

A team of researchers sought to determine the best way for helping teens address their stress. Because stress is often inescapable, the researchers wanted to focus on strategies that helped adolescents shift their perspective and meet stress head-on. They examined two key methods: the growth mindset and the stress-can-be-enhancing mindset.

Growth mindset is the idea that our ability is not permanent, and that we can develop our skills and intelligence. In the context of stress, this “…casts normal but challenging stressors as both helpful (because they provide opportunities for valuable learning and skill development) and controllable (because the abilities needed to overcome them can be developed).”

Stress-can-be-enhancing mindset is the perspective that experiencing difficulties and stress has benefits. Specifically, that stress stimulates physiological responses that help us optimise performance. In the context of stress, we “…can choose to take advantage of the enhanced capacity for performance it (stress) fuels rather than being worried and distracted by it.” 

Now combine the two into a synergistic mindset and instead of looking at stress as an entirely negative experience you can see it as a way to develop your skills and resiliency, as well as an asset that can help you achieve your goals.

Psychology Today

Fun things to click on:

A gallery of physical visualisations and related artifacts. Use Harvest’s timesheet template to track your day and understand where your time is going. How animals perceive the world and what can that teach us.

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#43: Pricing, systems, and friendships

November 6, 2022

Hi friends,

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

Our seven ideas this week:

1. (Marketing) People tend to evaluate prices in a relative, rather than an absolute, manner

A product isn’t judged solely on its own merits but in contrast with a mental competitive set. If you can change that comparison set, then you can boost willingness to pay. One technique for doing that is to harness an idea called ‘extremeness aversion’.

Say you’re selling two variants of your brand – a basic one and a higher-margin premium one. You can encourage sales of the premium line by introducing a super-premium version.

One example comes from the now-defunct JJB Sports, which widely stocked Nike’s most expensive, super high-end football boots, despite rarely selling any. The store’s justification was that when they delisted these high-end boots it had a detrimental effect on its next most expensive pair. Shoppers felt uncomfortable buying the most expensive boots, as it felt wasteful. But they would happily buy the second most expensive pair as they could justify it as a relatively restrained purchase.

Marketing Week
2. (Productivity) An important function of almost every system is to ensure its own perpetuation

Systems are the foundation of long-term results. You become efficient when you design a system for what you do. It saves you time and energy. A system for any area of your life will give you the freedom to do your best every day. Systems make life easier. When you commit to a system, you make real progress daily. Joe Frazier once said, “Champions aren’t made in the ring, they are merely recognised there.”

In almost all areas of life, the temptation to jump to tactics, hacks and shortcuts is very high. Many people fall for it.

“If you’re a writer, your goal is to write a book. Your system is the writing schedule that you follow each week,” says James Clear. What you do daily is how you are leading your life. If your present habits are not delivering the results you want, design a better system. Medium

For an alternative point of view –  How to live a chaotically organised life
3. (Psychology) Friendships have a bigger impact on our health than diet

Longevity expert Dan Buettner found that friends can exert a measurable and ongoing influence on your health behaviours in a way that a diet never can. 

“The most powerful thing you can do to add healthy years is to curate your immediate social network. In general, you want friends with whom you can have a meaningful conversation. You can call them on a bad day and they will care. Your group of friends are better than any drug or anti-ageing supplement, and will do more for you than just about anything.”

The New York Times
 
4. (Marketing) Brands which have a higher share of advertising versus their market share and competitors achieve higher growth

Brands which secure a high level of consumer or customer mental availability are more likely to achieve stronger business metrics, including sales, customer acquisition and profit growth, according to a report by the Advertising Council. 

Mental availability, according to the report, has a direct impact on another surging marketing theme of global interest and its direct impact on business results: ESOV, or extra share of advertising voice. Essentially, it means those brands which have a higher share of advertising versus their market share and competitors achieve higher growth.

Mental availability, ESOV and advertising attention metrics are combined into a new marketing science pot, still underpinned by the work first published in 2004 by Professor Byron Sharp and Jenni Romaniuk from the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute for Marketing Science on mental availability. The report focused on showing ESOV’s relationship with mental availability, which the study defines as “a measure of the breadth and depth of perceptions of a brand”. It’s not the same as top-of-mind brand awareness. With brands competing for memory, advertising plays a critical role in growing mental availability. 

Mi-3
5. (Productivity) Working with your doors open exposes you to what matters

In the mid-1980s, Richard Hamming, a retired Bells Lab scientist, delivered his famous “You and Your Research” lecture, which summarized his 40-year-long career and attempted to answer the question “why do so few scientists make significant contributions and so many are forgotten in the long run?”

“I notice that if you have the door to your office closed, you get more work done today and tomorrow, and you are more productive than most. But 10 years later somehow you don’t know quite know what problems are worth working on; all the hard work you do is sort of tangential in importance. He who works with the door open gets all kinds of interruptions, but he also occasionally gets clues as to what the world is and what might be important.

Now I cannot prove the cause and effect sequence because you might say, “The closed door is symbolic of a closed mind.” I don’t know. But I can say there is a pretty good correlation between those who work with the doors open and those who ultimately do important things, although people who work with doors closed often work harder.

Somehow they seem to work on slightly the wrong thing – not much, but enough that they miss fame.”

You and Your Research
6. (Society) Pursuing economic growth the green way

Is it possible to pursue economic growth in a way that doesn’t make things worse for the planet and its inhabitants? Can we decouple growth from greenhouse gas emissions, the decline in biodiversity and the destruction of habitats? The prophets of decoupling belong to a motley but expanding crew of green-growthers.
 
The green-growthers’ pitch is an appeal to the magic of innovation and technology. Self-described “techno-optimists” are vocal proponents of market-based climate policy (like carbon taxes and tradable permit schemes), “innovation economies” and “net-zero” pledges: corporate and government commitments to large-scale projects that would supposedly allow us to continue business basically as usual while offsetting emissions with carbon capture and storage, tree-planting, and other carbon-sequestration programs.
 
Until the green-growthers can point to something, anything, that demonstrates their faith has helped realize a meaningful structural shift—not just toward compostable take-out packaging or shopping malls with charging stations in the car park but in the global economy as a whole—it is up to them to make the case, not their critics. 
 
London Review of Books
7. (Psychology) Using expressive writing to heal trauma

Expressive writing comes from our core. It is personal and emotional writing without regard to form or other writing conventions, like spelling, punctuation, and verb agreement. Expressive writing pays no attention to propriety: it simply expresses what is on your mind and in your heart. It pays more attention to feelings than the events, memories, objects, or people in the contents of a narrative. 

The connection between expressive writing and wellness has been explored by Dr James Pennebaker at the University of Texas at Austin. In his landmark research project, Pennebaker developed an expressive writing prompt to uncover the potential health benefits of writing about emotional upheaval. Pennebaker’s research project has been replicated many times with positive outcomes. The prompt and subsequent studies are often referred to as the Pennebaker Paradigm.

To get started dedicate four days to writing a minimum of 20 minutes per day. What you choose to write about should be extremely personal and important to you. Write continuously: do not worry about punctuation, spelling, and grammar. If you run out of things to say, draw a line or repeat what you have already written. Keep pen on paper. Write only for yourself: you may plan to destroy or hide what you are writing. Do not turn this exercise into a letter. This exercise is for your eyes only. Many people briefly feel a bit saddened or down after expressive writing, especially on the first day or so. Usually, this feeling goes away completely in an hour or two.

Psychology Today

Fun things to click on:

Map showing the spread of dumplings. Top 50 productivity hacks chosen by the internet and you. Splasho’s Up-Goer text editor challenges you to explain an idea using only the dictionary’s 1,000 most-used English words.

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#42: Forecasts, menu pricing and ideas

October 30, 2022

Hi friends,

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

Our seven ideas this week:

1. (Marketing) The opposite of a good idea can also be a good idea

In his book, Alchemy, Rory Sutherland talks about seemingly non-sensical ideas. They’re the type of ideas that don’t make sense but for some reason, they just work.
 
Some of these brands have embraced a “chink”. They’re the features that would be listed as a weakness on the S.W.O.T analysis and would rarely feature as the single-minded proposition on a creative brief. They’re honest, confident and unashamedly proud of their flaws.
 
When we share a weakness with the world, we’re signalling that we can be trusted, we’ve got nothing to hide and at the same time, we are managing people’s expectations.
 
In fact, you’re more than likely to forgive us for small inconveniences because we’ve earned your trust, and thus we become more likeable.
 
This phenomenon is called “the beautiful mess effect.” A study conducted by behavioural psychologists found that “self-disclosure can build trust, seeking help can boost learning, admitting mistakes can foster forgiveness, and confessing one’s romantic feelings can lead to new relationships.” In essence, it creates feelings of human connection between people and brands.
 
Invent Better
2. (Investing) Nobody can predict the future

“There are two kinds of forecasters: those who don’t know, and those who don’t know they don’t know” – John Kenneth Galbraith.

To produce something useful, you must have a reliable process capable of converting the required inputs into the desired output. The problem is that I don’t think there can be a process capable of consistently turning the large number of variables associated with economies and financial markets (the inputs) into a useful macro forecast (the outputs).

Take the relationship between unemployment and inflation. For roughly the last 60 years, economists relied on the Phillips curve, which holds that wage inflation will rise as the unemployment rate declines because when there are fewer idle workers on the sidelines, employees gain bargaining power and can successfully negotiate for higher wages. It was also believed for decades that an unemployment rate of around 5.5% indicated “full employment.” But unemployment fell below 5.5% in March 2015 (and reached a 50-year low of 3.5% in September 2019), yet there was no significant increase in inflation (in wages or otherwise) until 2021. So the Phillips curve described an important relationship that was built into economic models for decades but, seemingly, didn’t apply over much of the last decade.

Noted physicist Richard Feynman once said, “Imagine how much harder physics would be if electrons had feelings.” The rules of physics are reliable precisely because electrons always do what they’re supposed to do. They never forget to perform. They never rebel. They never go on strike. They never innovate. They never behave in a contrary manner. But none of these things is true of the participants in an economy, and for that reason their behaviour is unpredictable. And if the participants’ behaviour is unpredictable, how can the workings of an economy be modelled?

Howard Marks
3. (Marketing) The order prices are written on menus influences how much you’ll spend

The insight around the order effect comes from Donald Lichtenstein at Colorado University. In 2012, his team ran an eight-week experiment in a craft beer bar in the US.

When drinkers arrived at the bar, they were given a menu of 13 beers. Sometimes the researchers handed out a menu with a $4 beer at the top and progressively more expensive beers below. On other occasions, the drinks were listed in descending price order.

The psychologists found that, when the menu had a low-priced item at the top, the average price paid was $5.78. But, when the menu order was flipped, the average price rose by 24c to $6.02 – a statistically significant increase.

But why? Well, the authors argued that the first beer you spot has disproportionate importance in determining what’s a reasonable amount to pay. If you spy an expensive $10 drink first, it reframes a $6 beer as a $4 saving on that reference point. Whereas, if the first beer you spotted was a $5 beer – well, then, the $6 beer feels like an extravagance.

Marketing Week
 
4. (Psychology) Use idea sex to programme your creativity

Blank page syndrome, writer’s block—call it whatever you want, most creators have once faced this overwhelming lack of inspiration. If you do experience writer’s block from time to time, the best reaction is to go do something else: going for a walk, journaling, talking it out with a friend. Better yet, though, is to avoid writer’s block together by not relying on flimsy, unpredictable inspiration. Instead, use idea sex to programme your creativity.

Idea sex is different from waiting for inspiration as it is something active, you combine ideas and see what interesting things may come out of the experiment. It’s also programmable, if you create a system, you will be able to create ideas on demand. How do you do that? (1) Take smart notes and be selective when saving ideas, ask yourself if the idea connects to any other that’s already in the system. (2) Proactively connect ideas by blocking time for mind gardening. (3) Let your ideas evolve.

Ness Labs
5. (Productivity) Be hard on yourself

In one of his letters, Seneca describes himself as a “cold-water enthusiast.” He would celebrate the new year by taking a plunge into the canal, who used to inaugurate the first of the year with a plunge into the Virgo aqueduct. His reason: “The body should be treated more rigorously that it may not be disobedient to the mind.”

Think about that every morning just before you crank the knob for a cold shower. Who is in charge? The courageous side of you or the cowardly side? The side that doesn’t flinch at discomfort or the side that desires to always be comfortable? The side that does the hard thing or the side that takes the easy way?

There’s that cliché: do one thing each day that scares you. We treat the body rigorously to remind it who is in charge. We push ourselves in little ways so the big ways stop seeming quite so big, quite so out of character. We minimize fear by making the act of overcoming it routine. We test ourselves to prepare for the tests of life.

Ryan Holiday
6. (Psychology) The paradox of politeness

We often equate goodness with altruism—giving and expecting nothing in return. We think that being a good host means doing everything ourselves and refusing any help from the guests.

This is where generosity and courtesy take on a self-centred edge, or at least self-concerned. It wouldn’t be wrong for people to help us wash the dishes. We’re just afraid of what it might say about us if we accept more help than the rules of engagement dictate we ought to. A polite society often functions along these lines. Saying we’re good when we’re not, saying something is “perfect” when it’s regular, insisting no one else lifts a finger. This version of civility, obligatory and rehearsed, includes a lot of bullshitting. It’s the gravity on the left side of the nice/kind and sorry/thank you spectrums.  

In the western world, we’re focused on self-care, self-actualization, personal life coaching, personal tips and tricks for feeling better. We may be learning to ask for help, but we’re learning how to say no when others ask us for it even more. Rarely in the dialogue around “learning to ask for help” do you hear talk about the other side of that equation. Obviously, those tools can be useful in isolation but taken together as an approach to communal wellness, they feel pretty hollow.

Haley Nahman
7. (Cryptocurrencies) Crypto bubbles, saturation, and micro-communities

A few excerpts from Noah Smith’s interview with Vitalik Buterin (co-founder of Ethereum):

On recent crypto crash:
When the prices are rising, lots of people say that it’s the new paradigm and the future, and when prices are falling people say that it’s doomed and fundamentally flawed.

Could cryptos reach gold-level saturation:
The math nerd way of putting it would be: the price of crypto is stuck in a bounded range (between zero and all the world’s wealth), and crypto can only stay highly volatile within that range for so long until repeatedly buying high and selling low becomes a mathematically almost-surely-guaranteed winning arbitrage strategy.

On crypto start-up community:
I do think that there is room for some kind of startup society right now; there’s a lot of demand for a physical community oriented around particular values, providing an outlet to express those values constructively and not just through zero-sum twitter warfare, and that combines with a pragmatic need to escape the high living costs of the US and the increasingly in-your-face and not just theoretical authoritarianism of many other large countries. But the projects I have seen so far are not doing this well.

Noah Opinion

Fun things to click on:

Splasho’s Up-Goer text editor challenges you to explain an idea using only the dictionary’s 1,000 most-used English words. What happens when it rains after a drought? Who can and should be telling visual stories of working-class communities?

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#41: Special edition on CRYPTO

October 23, 2022

Hi friends,

Today’s newsletter is different.

I’ve spoken to many of you that all say they want to get into crypto but don’t know where to start. There are loads of resources and beginner guides online and with this newsletter, I am also attempting to shed a little bit of light into the world of crypto and perhaps spark some curiosity to explore further.

After doing some initial reading, it’s becoming clear to me how this could be much bigger than a simple investment opportunity or a way to store value. There’s a reason why people in this space are talking about the end of traditional finance.

Let me know your thoughts on this single-topic newsletter version, if people like it I will do more of these.

Let’s dive into it:

1. Understanding blockchain

Before we dive into cryptocurrencies, their applications and all that jazz, we need to have a quick intro to blockchains.

A blockchain is a type of distributed ledger technology (DLT) that consists of growing list of records, called blocks, that are securely linked together using cryptography (from Wikipedia). For bitcoin a blockchain was created by a person (or group of people) using the name Satoshi Nakamoto in 2008 to serve as the public distributed ledger for bitcoin cryptocurrency transactions. But it also opened up a whole new way to think about the internet and what we can do with it.
 
How does the blockchain technology affect the internet? Here’s one way to think about the differences between them: the previous generation of shared protocols (TCP/IP, HTTP, SMTP, etc.) produced immeasurable amounts of value, but most of it got captured and re-aggregated on top at the applications layer, largely in the form of data (think Google, Facebook and so on). The Internet stack, in terms of how value is distributed, is composed of “thin” protocols and “fat” applications. As the market developed, we learned that investing in applications produced high returns whereas investing directly in protocol technologies generally produced low returns.

This relationship between protocols and applications is reversed in the blockchain application stack. Value concentrates at the shared protocol layer and only a fraction of that value is distributed along the applications layer. It’s a stack with “fat” protocols and “thin” applications.

We see this very clearly in the two dominant blockchain networks, Bitcoin and Ethereum. The Bitcoin network has a $360B market cap yet the largest companies built on top are worth a few billion at best, and most are probably overvalued by “business fundamentals” standards. 

Fat protocols
2. Bitcoin vs Ethereum

Simply put, Bitcoin can be described as digital money. Bitcoin has been around for thirteen years now and is used to transfer money from one person to another. It is commonly used as a store of value and has been a critical way for the public to understand the concept of a decentralized digital currency.

Ethereum is different from Bitcoin in that it allows for smart contracts which can be described as highly programmable digital money. Imagine automatically sending money from one person to another but only when a certain set of conditions are met. For example, an individual wants to purchase a home from another person. Traditionally there are multiple third parties involved in the exchange including lawyers and escrow agents which makes the process unnecessarily slow and expensive. With Ethereum, a piece of code could automatically transfer the home ownership to the buyer and the funds to the seller after a deal is agreed upon without needing a third party to execute on their behalf.

The two also use different ways to keep their infrastructure secure and legitimate. Decentralized cryptocurrency networks need to make sure that nobody spends the same money twice without a central authority like Visa or PayPal in the middle. To accomplish this, networks use something called a “consensus mechanism,” which is a system that allows all the computers in a crypto network to agree on which transactions are legitimate. There are two major consensus mechanisms used by most cryptocurrencies today. Proof of work is the older of the two and is used by Bitcoin and many others. The newer consensus mechanism is called proof of stake, and it powers Ethereum 2.0, Cardano, Tezos and other (generally newer) cryptocurrencies.

In simple terms, proof-of-work blockchains are secured and verified by virtual miners around the world racing to be the first to solve a math puzzle. The winner gets to update the blockchain with the latest verified transactions and is rewarded by the network with a predetermined amount of crypto.

In a proof of stake system, staking serves a similar function to proof of work’s mining, in that it’s the process by which a network participant gets selected to add the latest batch of transactions to the blockchain and earn some crypto in exchange.
 
These blockchains employ a network of “validators” who contribute — or “stake” — their own crypto in exchange for a chance of getting to validate new transactions, update the blockchain, and earn a reward.
3. Finding your faction

The world of crypto began as a small island of misfits, but in the past 13 years, it has evolved into an enormous ecosystem of different subcultures and (sometimes warring) factions.

You have the Bitcoiners, Ethereans, the Solana crowd, the small coiners, and the Suits. Different cryptos seem to attract different kinds of people, almost like a Harry Potter or Game of Thrones house, which one will you plead allegiance to?

The earliest bitcoiners, often regarded as the boomers of Crypto Land, weren’t in it for the money — instead, they were drawn to the cypherpunk vision of a currency free from government oversight. Unlike the bitcoin network (which can be pictured as a database of wallets), ethereum was conceived as a World Computer. It allowed users to do more than just transfer money; it was also a platform on which people could create new apps and currencies. Many of the first people to arrive were technical developers.
 
If you’re struggling to understand what crowd likes which cryptocurrency, this normie’s guide to becoming a crypto person can give you a few pointers.
 
4. Play around but do your research

At this point you should have a rough understanding of how things work and what your main options are, to understand them a little further you could get a small amount and start using it. 

Buy a small amount of bitcoin or ether to play around with in one of the popular exchanges and try using it in a few different ways:
Make a donation: Many organizations accept bitcoin donations. For example, you can follow Wikimedia’s online instructions to send bitcoin to their donation address
Buy a digital collectable: CryptoKitties, where people can collect unique digital cats, is a fun way to play around with Ethereum
Pay in person: Yelp has a feature where you can filter for places that accept bitcoin payments
 
But be mindful, if others are telling you to buy or sell a coin they might have a vested interest so it’s important to always do your research. There are many scams, projects without a working product, and projects that are marketing-heavy rather than focused on building the technology. Make sure to review how the technology works by reading through the white paper, blog posts, and forums.

Here’s a few more beginner tips by Linda Xie
5.1 Theory behind cryptoasset valuations

How do you actually understand the value of a cryptocurrency?
 
The first thing to note with crypto valuations is these aren’t companies; they don’t have cash flows. Hence, using a discounted cash flow (DCF) analysis is not suitable. Instead, valuing cryptoassets requires setting up models structurally similar to what a DCF would look like, with a projection for each year, but instead of revenues, margins and profits, the equation of exchange is used to derive each year’s current utility value (CUV). Then, since markets price assets based on future expectations, one must discount a future utility value back to the present to derive a rational market price for any given year.

The taxonomy of cryptoassets goes far beyond currencies. That said, within its native protocol a cryptoasset serves as a means of exchange, store of value, and unit of account. By definition, then, each cryptoasset serves as a currency in the protocol economy it supports. Since the equation of exchange is used to understand the flow of money needed to support an economy, it becomes a cornerstone to cryptoasset valuations.

If we want to get technical, some bloggers tried to figure out ways to calculate a cryptoasset valuation. I couldn’t possibly cover it all here so read Chris Burineske‘s blog to dig into his way.
5.2 Understanding cryptoeconomics

Separate from the world of cryptocurrencies valuations and speculation is the world of cryptoeconomics.
 
The term “cryptoeconomics” causes a lot of confusion. People are often unclear on what it is supposed to mean. The word itself can be misleading, as it suggests that there is a parallel “crypto” version of the whole of economics.

In simple terms, cryptoeconomics is the use of incentives and cryptography to design new kinds of systems, applications, and networks. Cryptoeconomics is specifically about building things and has most in common with mechanism design — an area of mathematics and economic theory.

Cryptoeconomics is not a subfield of economics, but rather an area of applied cryptography that takes economic incentives and economic theory into account. Bitcoin, ethereum, zcash and all other public blockchains are products of cryptoeconomics. Cryptoeconomics is what makes blockchains interesting, what makes them different from other technologies.

Bitcoin is a product of cryptoeconomics. Bitcoin’s innovation is that it allows many entities who do not know one another to reliably reach consensus about the state of the bitcoin blockchain. This is achieved using a combination of economic incentives and basic cryptographic tools. Bitcoin’s design relies on economic incentives and penalties. Economic rewards are used to enlist miners to support the network. Miners contribute their hardware and electricity because if they produce new blocks, they are rewarded with amounts of bitcoin.

In the past years, we’ve moved from thinking about this new field solely through the lens of one application (bitcoin) to thinking about it in terms of one underlying technology (blockchains). What needs to happen now is to step back once again and view this industry in terms of a unifying approach to solving problems: cryptoeconomics.

Hackernoon
6. Crypto startups and architecture

Big tech companies of today (Facebook, Google) tend to expand their platforms and monopolize information by locking users into proprietary interfaces. Cryptonetworks, on the other hand, tend to provide single services, and can’t “own” the interface because they don’t control the data. 

Specialization helps because the more decentralized a network, the harder it is to coordinate a complete suite of services under a single interface like Google, Facebook, or Amazon do. So instead, consumer applications in crypto/Web3 are independently built on top of multiple “composable” protocols using what we could call a cryptoservices architecture (like microservices, but with sovereign components).

In Decentralized Finance (DeFi) people call this “money legos”. Consider Zerion (a Placeholder investment), Instadapp and Multis. They are building similar crypto-finance apps using many of the same protocols, like Ethereum, Compound, Maker, and Uniswap. This allows them to deliver a complete suite of financial services (transactions, borrowing, lending, trading, investing, etc.) without building all that functionality, infrastructure and liquidity in-house. The protocols provide specific services across many interfaces and the apps on top share resources and data with no centralized platform risk. Sharing the infrastructure lowers the costs across the board. These same dynamics are showing up in corners of crypto like DAOs and games.

A cryptoservices architecture is great for startups. Entrepreneurs can launch new applications quickly and cheaply by outsourcing a lot of the functionality to various networks. And every app is on equal footing when it comes to protocol costs and resources (unlike web infrastructure like AWS where the smaller you are, the more expensive it is).

Thin applications
7. Beyond crypto – how we are transitioning from an age of geopolitics to one of techno-politics

The 21st century belongs not to China or the United States—nor to tech companies as traditionally understood. It belongs to the internet.

Traditional geopolitics concerns itself with the eternal location of territorial powers. Russia and Japan might have different ideologies over time, but their geography remains constant. The internet is adding a new dimension to this. It is not merely a passive data layer that states enable and contest but a new kind of geography comparable in scope to the physical world. Basic geopolitical assumptions about citizenship, migration, power projection and the use of force need to be rethought for the digital world.

Currencies will change too, we are about to enter an age of global monetary competition, where national currencies are competing against cryptocurrencies to earn their place in someone’s wallet portfolio every hour of every day, even among citizens of their own countries.

Next will come online marketplaces and sharing economy services. The Federal Aviation Administration was built for Boeing and Airbus, not 1 million drone hobbyists; and the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission was created to go after Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley, not 1 million Web3 developers. The people running these institutions typically have career tenure; they were not democratically elected and are not easily fired. They are thus not accountable to the public they claim to serve.

Add changes in property rights, how web3 is addressing global inequality, companies, cities, communities, and countries becoming networks, and you have a movement.

Great Protocol Politics

Further resources:

Thanks for reading! This edition is only a minor attempt at sparking your curiosity into the world of crypto. It does not attempt to cover the topic in full nor it is possible to do so within such a small space. But I hope it clears some initial confusions and fears that this world is out of your reach. Let me know if you liked this edition and I will try to create more (either on crypto or completely other subjects).

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

Speak soon,

Tom

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SD#40: Fake content, shorter work week and brands

October 16, 2022

Hi friends,

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

Our seven ideas this week:

1. (Marketing) The important things in life are nothing at all, ever, to do with retailers and brands

Most of the people who inhabit our world cannot see the existential trees for the branding forest. Too many marketers are so addled about the importance of their brands that they actually thought a statement or a gesture in light of the passing of Elizabeth II was essential activity.

Marketers lost touch long ago with the world of the customer they are meant to understand.

Brands are little things. Enormously central to the marketers in charge of them. Tiny and inconsequential to the customers that pay for everything. Understand that contrast and make it a mantra for better marketing. Escape the befuddled, indoctrinated world of dumb marketers who think the market thinks like them. Think instead like a customer.

Mark Ritson via Marketing Week
2. (Society) Fake content is becoming the new norm of today that has no solutions

A theory — The Dead Internet Theory — that went viral some years back, posited that the internet is a no man’s land of bots and fakery. It was, of course, a ridiculous overstatement. But then again, maybe not that ridiculous? Maybe it was actually correct, just too early on the scene.

The authors of this paper suggest that 14% of Twitter users are bots as an upper bound. Supposedly 10% — or around 95m — of accounts on Instagram are bot/spam accounts. Some 42% of Amazon reviews are fake. According to this article, “over 80% of NFTs minted for free on OpenSea are fake, plagiarised or spam”.

What will this technology look like two papers down the line? Given just how far generative text, audio, and image models have advanced in just two years, this proposition should be alarming. If convincing enough, then content manufacturing is an unsolvable problem. People believe fake news and discard truisms, even when the evidence is right there in front of their faces. If people don’t spend the time to critique the source, they will blindly embrace the message. Because of fake news, there’s a much higher signal-to-noise ratio than what we’re used to. We’re on the cusp of breakneck velocity content generation that promises unclear but undoubtedly pernicious consequences.

Curiosities Miscellanea
3. (Psychology) The Zeigarnik effect and the Onvsiankina effect of unfinished tasks

Unfinished tasks can feel overwhelming, leading to procrastination and slowing your progress. On the other hand, the annoyance of having all of these unfinished tasks on your to-do list may motivate you to tackle them at the next opportunity. These contradictory experiences are due to two effects: the Zeigarnik effect and the Ovsiankina effect.

By supporting our short-term memory and encouraging the completion of an activity, unfinished tasks can be useful as a productivity tool. However, it only works if you don’t leave tasks hanging over you for too long.

How can you take advantage of unfinished tasks? (1) Start even if you can’t finish, as you’ll feel more inclined to finish at the earliest opportunity; (2) follow the ten-minute rule, fight procrastination by starting a task for ten minutes; (3) take breaks, it helps to restore motivation and increase creativity; (4) critically appraise your tasks; (5) practise self-compassion, unfinished tasks can cause stress and anxiety, be kind to yourself and practice mindfulness.

Ness Labs
 
4. (Productivity) 88% of companies say that four-day working weeks are working well

A recent survey from the nonprofit 4 Day Week Global found that 78% of leaders at the more than 70 UK companies that shifted to four-day schedules say their transition was good or “seamless.” Only 2% found it challenging. Most (88%) say that four-day schedules are working well.

Nearly all of the participating UK organizations (86%) said they’ll likely keep four-day schedules after the pilots finish in November. Almost half, 49%, said that productivity had improved, while 46% said it has remained stable.

This is amazing news for all of us looking to waste less time on the computer screen and enjoy it somewhere else. 

Fortune
5. (Marketing) Digital marketing should be a way of exploration not efficiency

Marketers often look towards digital marketing and transformation as a tool for efficiency and cost-savings, allowing a brand to trawl for mass data, finely target consumers online, automate the customer experience and drive customer acquisition and sales with minimal waste.

However, Ogilvy UK vice-chairman Rory Sutherland believes this is an oversight. Digital should be viewed as an opportunity to explore, experiment, test and learn.

The danger of digitalisation is it gets hijacked by the efficiency freaks. It’s all about time-saving and not about customer experience. This obsession leads businesses to try and solve a customer’s need with a single correct answer, which sits as an average in the middle of two extremes.

In any organisation, there should be a mixture of automation streamlining where consumers want it, and the complete opposite, which is high touch attention, where nothing else will do.

Meanwhile, another “danger” area for brands is marketers’ obsession with the metrics digital marketing and digital transformation can provide. The very fact that it’s measurable has made people obsess about what you can measure, on the assumption that what you can measure must be important.

Marketing Week 
6. (Psychology) Becoming powerful makes you less empathetic

Research shows that personal power interferes with our ability to empathise. Dacher Keltner, an author and social psychologist at the University of California, Berkeley, has conducted empirical studies showing that people who have power suffer deficits in empathy, the ability to read emotions, and the ability to adapt behaviours to other people. In fact, power can change how the brain functions, according to research from Sukhvinder Obhi, a neuroscientist at Wilfrid Laurier University in Ontario, Canada.

How does it happen? Slowly, and then suddenly. It happens with bad mini-choices, made perhaps on an unconscious level.  It might show up as the subtle act of throwing one’s weight around. Demands for special treatment; isolated decision-making; and getting one’s way. Leaders who are pulled over by the police for speeding or driving drunk become indignant and rail, “Do you know who I am?!” Suddenly the story hits social media and we change our minds about the once-revered personality.

Harvard Business Review
7. (Society) Workers in the UK have seen their real wage fall by roughly 8% year-on-year

Real wages had flatlined for many years in the biggest OECD economies. Just before the pandemic, real wages moved powerfully higher; tightening labour markets gave workers the upper hand in negotiations. The pandemic radically altered the equation, of course.

As economies stabilized and reflated, real wages began to creep higher again. But rampant inflation checked that growth, rising so fast that it has diminished the purchasing power of people’s take-home pay. Workers in the United Kingdom today have seen their real compensation fall by roughly 8% year-on-year.

McKinsey & Company

Fun things to click on:

A list of videos of relaxing music to help you fall asleep. Sometimes it helps to adopt a new perspective, look out a random person’s window through WindowSwap. Dru Riley has put together a list of 100 useful rules for making life more rewarding.

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#39: Purpose, sleep, and liminal creativity

October 9, 2022

Hi friends,

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

Our seven ideas this week:

1. (Marketing) The industry has gone too far into ‘purpose’ and forgot to pay attention to growth

A couple of weeks ago, the news of Yvon Chouinard, the 83-year-old founder of Patagonia, broke our news feeds as he announced he will relinquish the ownership of the company to trust. Patagonia’s profits will no longer go to him but to the fight against climate change. “Instead of going public” Chouinard explained, “you could say we’re ‘going purpose’.”
 
The move will cost him dear. Aside from giving up an asset worth around £2.6bn, along with all the associated future profits, Chouinard will also have to pay tax as a result of his generous donation. None of this is likely to come as any surprise to the great man. He surely understands one of the central precepts of purpose; that it must cost you something to deliver it.
 
It’s a point that largely escapes the army of marketers who applauded Chouinard’s move with supportive posts that included their personal take on brand purpose. Marketers have developed their own very special strain of brand purpose in recent years, one that does not require purpose to cost them anything at all.
 
Mark Ritson via Marketing Week
2. (Productivity) Sleep is more important than you think

People say ‘I do perfectly fine on four or five hours of sleep’. No, you don’t. ‘I’m an exception.’ No, you’re not. 
 
In a study by a team of scientists at the Division of Sleep and Chronobiology in the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Pennsylvania, participants were divided into four groups: one was sleep deprived for up to 88 hours, one group slept for 4 hours a night, one group slept for 6 hours a night, and one group slept for 8 hours a night. There were two important findings. First, the performance of the groups who slept 4 and 6 hours was as impaired as the sleep-deprived group. Second, when asked, all participants grossly miscalculated how impaired they were.

As Dr Thomas Roth, the Director of the Sleep Disorders and Research Center at Henry Ford Hospital in Detroit, put it, “The number of people who can survive on 5 hours of sleep or less without any impairment, expressed as a percent of the population, and rounded to a whole number, is zero.” Or if not zero, close enough to zero that we can assume it doesn’t include you. 
3. (Culture) Old music is killing new music

Old songs now represent 70% of the U.S. music market, according to the latest numbers from MRC Data, a music-analytics firm. Those who make a living from new music—especially that endangered species known as the working musician—should look at these figures, trembling with fear. But the news gets worse: The new-music market is actually shrinking. All the growth in the market is coming from old songs. 
 
Investment firms are getting into bidding wars to buy publishing catalogues from ageing rock and pop stars. The song catalogues in most demand are by musicians who are in their 70s or 80s (Bob Dylan, Paul Simon, Bruce Springsteen) or already dead (David Bowie, James Brown). Even major record labels are participating in the rush to old music: Universal Music, Sony Music, Warner Music, and others are buying up publishing catalogues and investing huge sums in old tunes. In a previous time, that money would have been used to launch new artists.
 
The Atlantic
 
4. (Marketing) The case against personalisation

The era of personalisation will never arrive. Gartner predicts that 80% of marketers will abandon personalisation by 2025. 
 
It doesn’t work because:

– You can’t personalise, because third-party data is extremely unreliable.
– And you shouldn’t personalise, even if you could, because marketing works by reaching everybody with the same message to create shared associations.
 
Instead, let’s embrace impersonalisation – the path to simplicity, scale and success.
 
Marketing Week 
5. (Investing) Few investment lessons from Game of Thrones

Here are a few investment lessons from Game of Thrones according to Beachman: (1) everyone has an agenda and speaks their book. Every move the Lannisters, the Boltons, the Tyrells and the Greyjoys made, every alliance they struck, was in pursuit of a singular goal… to rule. 
 
(2) Traders will trade in almost any market condition. Littlefinger (Petyr Baelish) was the quintessential “trader” in the show. The man was so agile, you just never knew which side he stood on and what his true motives were.
 
(3) Meme trading is here to stay – wild and unpredictable. (4) Have a plan and stick to it. Success comes in all shapes and sizes and no one embodies this better than Arya Stark. That little peanut of a girl persevered through the entire tale to become one of the deadliest assassins. Successful investors find a formula that works for them and they stick to this playbook, including a set of rules within. 
 
(5) Never fall in love with a stock and refuse to give it up. Robb Stark was racking up victory after victory until he was taken down at the Red Wedding by the wily Freys. As investors, it is sometimes hard for us to give up on our favourite stocks, even in the face of overwhelming evidence that the business is faltering and the share price is not going to recover any time soon. (6) Do your own due diligence. Jon Snow, captured by the Wildlings, is surprised to find that they are just regular folks trying to survive and feed their families. He uses this knowledge to form new alliances. (7) History repeats itself.
 
Beachman’s newsletter
6. (Psychology) Liminal creativity, how to find growth during the in-between phases of our life

Liminality is the ambiguity that emerges in the middle of a fundamental transition. Liminality is the “in-between”, where the space and the participants no longer hold their past status, but have not yet fully transformed to their post-transition self. Losing a job, taking on a new challenge, preparing to launch a project, deciding to raise a family, moving to a new country, living through a societal revolution: the world’s chaotic flows force us all to walk through liminal spaces at one point or another during our lives.
 
What happens in liminal spaces? Doubt, discomfort, unfamiliarity, anxiety. But also growth, change, and discovery. Liminal spaces offer all of the ingredients for creativity. Our brain is uncomfortable in liminal spaces. Fear of uncertainty is an evolutionary mechanism designed to protect us from unknown risks. Our brain resists change and seeks predictable patterns.
 
Life is a creative adventure that requires becoming comfortable with discomfort, a journey where we continually experiment, make mistakes, learn, and grow. And some of the biggest turning points in our story happen in the uncomfortable yet liberating liminal spaces where we are free to express our creativity.
 
Ness labs
7. (Psychology) Ignore feedback from losers

Theodore Roosevelt said “It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows, in the end, the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.”
 
Researcher Brene Brown on why your critics aren’t the ones who count. If you’re not in the arena also getting your ass kicked, I’m not interested in your feedback. If you have constructive feedback you want to give me, I want it… But if you’re in the cheap seats, not putting yourself on the line, and just talking about how I can do it better, I’m in no way interested in your feedback.

Fun things to click on:

Need ideas for how to use your time for creative content? The Remote Experience Generator gives you just that. How rest and relaxation became an art. 20 actually helpful ways to stop wallowing in self-pity.

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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