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SD#38: B2B, stoics, and idea generation

October 2, 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) B2C is our past, B2B is our future

The fastest-growing companies in the world don’t sell fizzy drinks and designer shoes anymore. These days, the fastest-growing companies sell workflow management solutions and cyber-security software. Dishwasher detergent is a great business, but it’s not a growth business.
 
We understand why the marketing industry focuses on B2C: it’s our legacy. The marketing industry is built on the modern consumer economy. Washing machines and refrigerators, soap and cereal, mobile phones and video games; we brought all those products to market.
 
You could think of the past 100 years as the B2C century when the marketing industry freed us from the drudgery of our homes by bringing innovative consumer products to market. The next 100 years will be the B2B century when the marketing industry frees us from the drudgery of work by bringing innovative business products to market.
 
The B2B century will create massive economic opportunities for everyone in the marketing industry. The engineers needed us to make vacuum cleaners popular, and they’ll need us again to make robotic process automation popular. They’ll need us even more because it’s a hundred times more difficult to convey the value of robotic process automation.
 
Yes, the marketing industry will need to adapt and retool itself for the B2B century. But at its core, the B2B century will require the same skills as the B2C century: the ability to understand the customer’s needs, ensure the product is easy to mind and easy to find, and build distinctive brands that can charge higher prices. If we can make car insurance funny, then we can make commercial insurance funny too. We just have to recognise the opportunity.
 
Marketing Week
2. (Creativity) What if creativity was embedded into our lives, instead of taking time away from other activities?

Work, social events, spending time with their loved ones… These activities, while fulfiling in their ways, meant life was too busy to develop a creative practice.
 
Unfortunately, we’ve come to see creativity as an activity, something we do instead of something we embody. We take painting classes, we organise brainstorming sessions, and we go to writing retreats. But what if creativity was embedded into our daily lives, instead of taking time away from other activities?
 
In those well-defined spaces, creativity is decoupled from failure and stripped from its messier components. At work, we participate in a brainstorming session following predefined steps with our coworkers. Then, we join a “paint and sip” class in the evening with a friend. In both cases, we are guaranteed some form of creative output, and the boundaries between creativity and productivity are slowly dissolving.
 
Creative aliveness consists in reclaiming a larger creative canvas woven into the fabric of our lives. It starts by asking yourself: what makes you come alive creatively? And how can you inject more creativity into your daily life?
 
Ness Labs
3. (Productivity) Ringfence three or four hours of undisturbed focus and stop assuming that the way to make progress on your most important projects is to work for longer (plus give yourself some slack)

Charles Darwin, at work on the theory of evolution in his study at Down House, toiled for two 90-minute periods and one one-hour period per day; the mathematical genius Henri Poincaré worked for two hours in the morning and two in the afternoon. Thomas Jefferson, Charles Dickens, Virginia Woolf, Ingmar Bergman and many more all followed suit, as Alex Pang explains in his book Rest (where he also discusses research supporting the idea: this isn’t just a matter of cherry-picking examples to prove a point).
 
The moral here isn’t that you ought to be in a position to rise from your desk, once your four hours are up, then spend the rest of the day playing tennis and drinking cocktails.

The real lesson – or one of them – is that it pays to use whatever freedom you do have over your schedule not to “maximise your time” or “optimise your day”, in some vague way, but specifically to ringfence three or four hours of undisturbed focus.
 
The other, arguably more important lesson isn’t so much a time management tactic as an internal psychological move: to give up demanding more of yourself than three or four hours of daily high-quality mental work. That’s an emphasis that gets missed, I think, in the current conversation about overwork and post-pandemic burnout. Yes, it’s true we live in a system that demands too much of us, leaves no time for rest, and makes many feel as though their survival depends on working impossible hours. But it’s also true that we’re increasingly the kind of people who don’t want to rest – who get antsy and anxious if we don’t feel we’re being productive. The usual result is that we push ourselves beyond the sane limits of daily activity when doing less would have been more productive in the long run. 
 
Oliver Burkeman
 
4. (Philosophy) Marcus Aurelius was right when he said that you can also commit injustice by doing nothing

The Stoics would agree that the world can be ugly and awful and disappointing. They would just remind us that what we control is what we do about this. We control what difference we try to make. We control whether it makes us bitter or makes us better—whether we complain or just get to work.

They spoke of our “circles of concern.” Our first concern, they said, is our mind. But beyond this is our concern for our bodies then for our immediate family then our extended family. Like concentric rings, these circles were followed by our concern for our community, our city, our country, our empire, our world. The work of philosophy, the Stoics said, was to draw this outer concern inward, to learn how to care as much as possible for as many people as possible, to do as much good for them as possible.
 
As Zeno said, “well-being is realized by small steps, but is truly no small thing.” You don’t have to save the planet. You don’t have to save someone’s life. Can you just make things a little bit better?
 
Ryan Holiday on why he picks up trash at the beach
5. (Productivity) In-person teams generated 15-20% more ideas than their virtual counterparts

While the ease of gathering virtually has made the shift to widespread remote work possible, a new study finds that on-screen meetings have a significant drawback: They hinder creative collaboration. 
 
New research shows that in-person teams generated 15% to 20% more ideas than their virtual counterparts. The researchers say they’ve identified a reason online meetings generated fewer good ideas: When people focus on the narrow field of vision of a screen, their thinking becomes narrower as well. If your visual field is narrow, then your cognition is likely to be as well. 
 
For creative idea generation, the narrowed focus is a problem. In contrast, people who meet in person get creative stimulation by visually wandering around the space they’re in, which makes them more likely to cognitively wander as well.
 
Levav, a professor of marketing who has studied how environmental cues affect people’s choices, cautions that these findings don’t mean that virtual meetings have no value. His study also found that teams meeting online did as well and possibly better than in-person teams when it came to selecting the best ideas.
 
Stanford Business
6. (Psychology) Quick and easy journaling prompts to start your day

One of my goals for this year has been to journal every day. There is plenty of research on how this helps us when we are stressed, confused, anxious, depressed, overly excited etc. My relationship with journaling hasn’t been easy and I’ll admit I’ve missed many days when I didn’t do it. What I found useful is having a few easy prompts to use every day. Here are a couple that Nicolas Cole, a top writer for Quora, suggested on his LinkedIn:
 
– What did I do yesterday?
– What am I working on?
– What’s coming up?
– What am I grateful for?
7. (Society) If you want to understand contemporary politics, you need to get into professional wrestling

There are two camps of wrestlers in lucha libre: the técnicos, or experts who abide by the rules, and the rudos, or rough ones who break them.
 
From a book by Superbarrio Gomez: 
 
In the real world, you have the referee and the state, the rage you feel before underhanded politics and the demagogy that thrives without censure or scorn on television and in the press. In the lucha, the rudos do what they want. They don’t hide their behaviour. A dirty wrestler isn’t sneaky about his wrongdoings. It’s all there for the public to see. He goes out of his way to offend the public, to give the finger to anyone who calls into question his corrupt ways. A rudo with a referee in his pocket is capable of anything, of using any available ruse to take down the scientifico, the clean fighter. This is how it is in the real world too.
 
Meanwhile, the good guys, the técnicos, can be a bit wide-eyed. They’ll extend their hand to their crooked opponent only to have the gesture of good faith paid back with some treacherous blow. The rudo will hold out his hand and, despite the crowd yelling “No! No!” the técnicos will accept it and get whacked. How many times have the people told their leaders “No!” only to be ignored and then suffer the consequences. Wrestling fans know perfectly well who the rudos are. When they’re spotted on the streets, they’ll yell out, “Enough! We’re sick of all your screwing around!
 
Austin Kleon

Fun things to click on:

Feeling stressed? The flow of a good poem can synchronize your heart and breath. A collection of writing advice that has helped people most. Turn your paint brush into musical instruments and compose on sensorial canvases with Paint With Music.

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#37: Jargons, data and mimetics

September 25, 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) Based on the premise that “memories generate sales”, research from Ehrenberg-Bass urges B2B marketers to build “wider, fresher networks” by tapping into the power of category entry point

Linking brand messages to key buying situations can increase customer acquisition and retention, proving the “accountability” of B2B brand marketing, according to new research from the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute

Collaborating with LinkedIn’s B2B Institute, the research suggests brand messaging can become fully customer-centric by focusing on category entry points, the cues customers use to access memories when faced with a buying situation. These cues are both internal, such as motives and emotions, and external, including location and time of day.

“Category entry points are not about the brand, they’re about the buyer,” the report’s author Professor Jenni Romaniuk, associate director (international) at the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute, tells Marketing Week.

To identify the category entry points, Romaniuk suggests considering the different motivators customers consider, from the emotions attached to a purchase and who else is involved in the decision-making process, to timing issues.

Marketing Week
2. (Philosophy) The inability to cope is not always a political problem

We have generational trauma. We are living through a global pandemic. We are literally neurodivergent and a minor. We are riddled with climate grief. We are, for one reason or another, unable to cope.

There is a strain of discourse that insists an inability to cope in one’s day-to-day life is in almost all cases a political problem or even the primary political problem. By volume, the most examples are on social media. Sometimes it’s an elaborate hypothetical in which asking a disabled person to make alternate arrangements and forgo ordering Instacart groceries for one day of a strike is tantamount to a genocidal program.

Capitalism is the reason we sometimes tie our identities to material status objects. Capitalism is the reason we want to be paid for writing. It is capitalism that makes you feel bad that you didn’t learn to bake sourdough during quarantine.

When living “under capitalism” becomes a catch-all explanation for what you can’t manage — whether that’s getting on the metaphorical treadmill or stepping off it — it assumes the nature of a complaint to an adjudicating authority. Since capitalism has impressed such impossible conditions on us, we can’t reasonably be expected to deal with it until they improve. But in fact, there is no one to adjudicate between you and capital, no one to say yes, that is too much, let’s reassign this project. There is no political program that will release you from the necessity of doing more than you should have to or feel capable of doing, in politics as in every other part of life.

Clare Coffey via Gawker
3. (Writing) Jargon is like cholesterol – there’s a good kind and a bad kind

The fabulous Ann Handley on using jargon:

Jargon is like cholesterol—there’s a good kind and a bad kind.

Good kind:
– When jargon and buzzwords signal belonging to an audience. You understand your audience. You are using insider terms familiar to them.
– When jargon is shorthand for a shared mindset.

Bad kind:
– Jargon that masks incompetence, insecurity.
– Jargon that’s “the language of business.” 
– Time to shouty-cap the same point in a new bullet: THERE IS NO LANGUAGE OF BUSINESS. There is only language people use with other people.
– Jargon and buzzwords are the chemical additives of content: You can use them from time to time. One or two used sparingly might help. But add too many of them and the whole thing becomes toxic.

Ann Handley
 
4. (Data) Data fails more often than you think

Consider the case of the infamous Reinhart-Rogoff paper “Growth in a Time of Debt” which contained a major Excel error. Reinhart and Rogoff’s work showed average real economic growth slows (a 0.1% decline) when a country’s debt rises to more than 90% of gross domestic product (GDP) – and this 90% figure was employed repeatedly in political arguments over high-profile austerity measures.

However, this 0.1% decline was inaccurate because an Excel formula hadn’t been dragged down properly. After fixing the formula, the 0.1% decrease became a 2.2% increase, completely changing the paper’s conclusion.

This error made headlines because of how influential the paper was. According to Google Scholar, it had been cited by more than 4,500 other academic papers. And many of those academic papers were cited by thousands of other academic papers, and so forth. A long chain of ignorance from a single Excel error.

Data can also mislead when it describes a subset of what you are actually trying to analyse. Or when that data is derived from a process that changed over time. Or when it’s collected through dubious ways.

Of Dollars and Data
5. (Marketing) Make your messaging appeal to customers by being different and distinctive

How do we make our message more attractive and appealing to the end user? This can apply to both visual elements and the messaging itself.

We know it’s hard to capture attention in a wildly cluttered environment.

The oldest study addressing this was coined the Von Restorff effect. Lists of three-digit letters or numbers were given to the participants, as found here: VEM, AKE, 164, MNH, KLI, PLO.

People were asked to recall as much as they could.

It was overwhelmingly clear that when provided with lists of letters, it’s the short series of numbers they remember, and vice versa if the three letters were put amidst a series of numbers. Humans notice what is distinctive. Being different and distinctive pays off.

Marisa Crimlis-Brown
6. (Psychology) Mimetic learning is a type of social learning in which we observe the actions of others, and then develop similar behaviours ourselves

We all know that children learn through imitation. They observe and then mimic their parents when learning how to speak, perform new motor skills, and interact with others. What you may not know is that mimetic learning is a lifelong process. In adulthood as well, the way we behave is heavily influenced by how others conduct themselves.

It continues to happen in our workplace too. The first type of mimetic learning is through learning from a live model. For instance, if you notice a colleague completing a project in a succinct, organised manner, then you may mimic their actions to complete your tasks similarly. Another way that mimetic learning occurs is by observing a verbal instruction model. Rather than directly witnessing the behaviour, your colleague might describe the behaviour so that you can emulate it. With verbal instruction, the framework is provided, but you must learn to adapt your behaviour accordingly.

Ness labs
7. (Career) But mimetic traps can force us to continue on a path that brings us no happiness

Brian Timar wrote of his experience of falling into a mimetic trap: “I’ve been a graduate student in physics for almost three years, but I only recently figured out why. I had to tackle a simple question do so ‘Why does this matter?’  I realized that I’d never forced myself to answer this honestly. As Paul Graham has pointed out, these systematic gaps in conversation should raise suspicion — they often indicate when you’re wrong about something important. I was wrong in thinking that my work mattered to me, and I avoided asking myself this question because I knew the answer would be painful.

I ended up in physics through stubbornness, and an unusual willingness to suffer for the sake of grades. When multiple people are striving towards a shared goal, they often rank themselves by progress within their peer group. This was my mistake — I swapped an absolute goal (figuring out how bits of nature work) with a relative one (scoring higher on tests than my classmates). Later, when I found myself unhappy, I couldn’t leave without feeling like I’d lost something. That social capital sunk cost was the first part of the trap I found myself in.

The second was a positive feedback loop that encouraged me to spend ever-increasing amounts of time on my work. Humans inherit convictions mimetically from each other — we learn what to value by imitating our peers. As my desire to excel academically grew, I spent greater amounts of time in and around the physics department… Although quitting would have made me happier, I felt like I had nowhere to quit to. My tunnel vision left me with few concrete notions of alternative pursuits, and without a destination, I could not seriously contemplate leaving.

That’s the mimetic trap in a nutshell: it hurts to leave, and there’s nowhere to go.

Brian Timar

Fun things to click on:

25 and a half ways to get things done by KesselsKramer. Luminous images of space nominated for Astronomy Photographer of the Year. 15 images every investor needs to memorise.

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#36: Inspiring emotion, failure and savings

September 18, 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 best ideas don’t start with a grand theory, they start with a little tinker

In 1971 Carolyn Davidson was a young graphic design student at Portland State University. She was happy enough to earn some extra money when a member of faculty asked her to do some design work for his company, Blue Ribbon Sports, and agreed on a fee of $2 an hour. He wanted a stripe for a new running shoe, asking for ‘something that suggests speed’. When, after many hours of work, she presented him and his colleagues with a logo, they were unimpressed and asked ‘What else you got?’ But after a few minutes her client, realising he needed something urgently for a presentation to the Japanese, grudgingly accepted it. ‘I don’t love it’, he said, ‘but maybe it will grow on me.’ He paid Carolyn’s bill of $35.

In case you haven’t twigged yet, the client was Phil Knight, the product he needed a logo for was a new model of sports shoe which he called the ‘Nike’ after the Greek goddess of victory, and the logo was the original but already a very recognisable version of what we now know as the Swoosh.

Most theory about brand building assumes that the correct procedure is to start with a definition of the ‘brand essence’ – maybe at the heart of a ‘brand key’ or ‘brand onion’ – and that the creative task is then to communicate this through images or behaviour. But history shows us that the actual sequence of events is often the other way round – many brands start with a visual image, and the meaning – or meanings – of the image are created by the brand’s various stakeholders. I want to suggest that this sequence is probably much more common, and maybe a more helpful one for us to have in mind, than the received wisdom about brand essence coming first.

Paul Feldwick
2. (Psychology) Teaching someone might not be enough, you need to inspire emotion

Kobe Bryant once said you can’t improve a player by just giving them feedback on their free throw technique. Instead, you have to start somewhere else.

“What you have to do is you have to get them emotionally to want to be better. You have to get them to an emotional space where they wake up every morning driven to be the best version of themselves.”

He’d figure out which emotional buttons to press with his teammates at practice. Some players were hyper-competitive, so he’d insult them to piss them off. Others just loved the craft; for them, he’d use encouraging words.

Learning starts with desire
3. (Marketing) Does attention to ads matter?

Ehrenberg-Bass has much to say about advertising media. During an event in Sydney, professor Byron Sharp was quick to remind his audience of the two “golden rules” that the Institute advises clients to follow. “First, you have to reach everyone in the category… and spread your budget across timeslots, across locations.”

Mass reach and always on. Clear. But when questioned about attention, things got more interesting and animated. “Our job is to get some attention,” Sharp agreed. “I don’t want to do advertising and not be seen. But after that, paying for a lot more? No.”

Except Sharp is wrong. About the value of attention in general. And about the specific need to engage with audiences more to ensure longer periods of attention. There is a growing accumulation of evidence from the likes of Lumen, Dentsu and the inestimable Professor Karen Nelson-Field to demonstrate the point. And marketers must be following the debate because it has major implications for what they do.

Attention is not a binary variable, irrespective of what Ehrenberg-Bass might try to tell us. Simply reaching or not reaching a target customer is not the end of it. More attention in the form of extended dwell time is not a sucker’s objective, quite the reverse. It can have a significant impact on whether your brand achieves salience and whether preference eventuates.

Mark Ritson via Marketing Week
 
4. (Society) The faster the start-up grows, the faster it can be destroyed

What do goldfish and tech companies have in common? If you take two groups of identical baby fish and put one in abnormally cold water; the other in abnormally warm water, The fish living in cold water will grow slower than normal, while those in warm water will grow faster than normal. Put both groups back in regular temperature water and they’ll eventually converge to become normal, full-sized adults.

Then the magic happens. Fish with slowed-down growth in their early days go on to live 30% longer than average. Those with artificial supercharged growth early on die 15% earlier than average.

The cause isn’t complicated. Super-charged growth can cause permanent tissue damage and may only be achieved by the diversion of resources away from the maintenance and repair of damaged biomolecules. Slowed-down growth does the opposite—allowing an increased allocation to maintenance and repair. In the startup world, a focus on topline growth often leads to underinvestment in other areas, which makes the company less resilient, more fragile and more prone to implosions. For all the hype about hyper-growth startups, we need to acknowledge that fast growth comes with risk.

Collaborative fund
 
5. (Psychology) Why you should practice failure

We learn valuable lessons when we experience failure and setbacks. Most of us wait for those failures to happen to us, however, instead of seeking them out. But deliberately making mistakes can give us the knowledge we need to more easily overcome obstacles in the future.

We learn from our mistakes. When we screw up and fail, we learn how not to handle things. We learn what not to do. Failing is a by-product of trying to succeed. If we want to avoid costly mistakes in the future when the stakes are high, then making some now might be excellent preparation.

In 1932, at the dawn of the aviation age, Amelia Earhart described the value for all pilots of learning through deliberate mistakes. “The fundamental stunts taught to students are slips, stalls, and spins,” she says in her autobiography The Fun of It. “A knowledge of some stunts is judged necessary to good flying. Unless a pilot has actually recovered from a stall, has put his plane into a spin and brought it out, he cannot know accurately what those acts entail. He should be familiar enough with abnormal positions of his craft to recover without having to think how.”

fs
6. (Career) Do things, tell people

These are the only things you need to do to be successful. You can get away with just doing one of the two, but that’s rare, and usually, someone else is doing the other part for you. If you don’t have any marketable skills, learn some. Then make something that you can talk about. Make something cool. Something interesting. Spend time on it. Go crazy. Even if it’s the least useful thing you’ve ever made if you can talk about it, make it.

Next, find events where the people you want to work with are. Then get a drink into you (or don’t) and talk to them about it. Relax. It’s probably interesting to them too… Then you get contacts, business cards, and email addresses. Then you get contracts, job offers, investors, whatever. You make friends who think what you do is cool. You make a name for yourself as “the person who did that cool thing.” Then, the next time someone wants to do something in any way related to that cool thing, they come to you first.

Carl Lange
7. (Finance) Saving more or spending more

48% of U.S. adults experienced “high” or “moderate” levels of anxiety around their level of savings according to Northwestern Mutual’s 2018 Planning & Progress Study.

Despite this anxiety, the evidence suggests that the opposite seems to be true—many individuals seem to be saving too much. The Investments & Wealth Institute reported, ‘Across all wealth levels, 58% of retirees withdraw less than their investments earn, 26% withdraw up to the amount the portfolio earns, and 14% are drawing down principal.’

Surprisingly, retiree wealth tends to go up, not down, with age. This suggests that more people should be asking the question, “Am I saving too much?” rather than “Am I saving enough?”

Of Dollars And Data

Fun things to click on:

103 bits of advice I wish I had known. How does healthcare spending correlate with life expectancy? Artwork within an artwork within an artwork within an artwork.

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#35: Systems vs goals, happiness and sharing meals

September 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) The dirty tricks of social media

One of the ongoing patterns in cyberland is the lag time between the point at which a platform achieves great success and the point at which the public learns what creepy shit they’re up to. Such is the case with Chinese-owned social media sensation TikTok.
 
In recent weeks, for national security reasons, the FCC asked both Apple and Google to remove the TikTok app from their app stores as well as Forbes claimed that several hundred TikTok employees had connections to Chinese state media. The New York Times reported about how election misinformation was thriving on TikTok.
 
But the cherry on the top has been researchers finding that under certain circumstances TikTok can collect keystroke information. In other words, they can collect anything you type on your phone’s keypad, including passwords and credit card numbers, without you knowing it. According to The Times this “is often a feature of malware and other hacking tools.”
 
The Ad Contrarian
2. (Psychology) It’s time we let mental health stats sink in

According to a study from Amplify, (1) 81% of young men struggled with mental health in the last year; (2) 86% consistently face body shaming; (3) 1/3 of men reported anxiety and depression in the past year.

Mental health is a dear topic to me and such statistics shed light on how bad the situation might be. I won’t try delving into why the situation is so dire, for now, I’d just like us to absorb the magnitude of these statistics, and sit with them for a moment…
3. (Marketing) Social proof as a marketing technique

From the outset, Apple has been unrivalled at tapping into behavioural science techniques. Apple launched iPod in 2001. They couldn’t yet claim market leadership and popularity. However, other market leaders at the time grew complacent, allowing their position to become invisible. MP3 hardware was in consumer pockets as they listened. Indistinguishable black headphones were all you could see.

Apple set itself apart with distinctive white earbuds. They immediately stood out in the market, making them look like market leaders. People with white headphones were wearing them proudly like a status symbol – a simple and creative stroke of genius from Apple.

The most powerful tool in the behavioural science toolbox appears to be social proof. We are hugely influenced by others around us, especially when making complex decisions.

Now, this is true of people we know, as well as strangers in a crowd. However, the closer in proximity to your life, the more it resonates.

Marisa Crimlis-Brown
 
4. (Psychology) Nobody optimises happiness

Everyone is scheming for the future. They’ve got big goals and get up every day and work like mad to try to achieve them. There’s something odd about that: despite all this effort, people don’t seem to think too much about the specifics of what would happen after their goal is achieved. Like—say your startup goes public and you become a billionaire. What now? What will you buy, where will you live, what will you eat for lunch?

If you achieved your goals, you’d need to make a huge number of decisions to convert them into a “life” and then (hopefully) happiness. And people don’t seem to think much about those decisions. So if we aren’t optimizing happiness, why not?

Well there are several possibilities: (1) increasing happiness is impossible, maybe changes in our lives only have a fleeting effect on happiness, after which hedonic adaptation returns us to our fixed baseline. (2) Maybe small life changes get eaten away by hedonic adaptation, but it’s only grand achievements that provide lasting satisfaction, things like publishing a novel or starting a company or inventing a new medical treatment or raising some new amazing humans. (3) Perhaps it is hard to climb out of local optima, maybe happiness improvement is possible, but we don’t have the willpower to leave our leaving local optima. (4) Increasing happiness is easy, maybe it’s totally feasible to increase happiness—there are lots of ways most of us could move the needle, and it would be pretty easy to do them, but we just don’t. (5) It’s the hunt, maybe it’s not the achieving stuff that makes us happy, but rather the act of chasing after achievements.

Dynomight
 
5. (Psychology) The power of being you

At birth, each of us is original. Our DNA has never existed before on this planet. No one will ever have our unique set of experiences. No one will ever have our totally unique point of view.

There has never been anyone like us…and there never will be again. We have been given a complete and total monopoly over the business of being us. Yet what do we do with this rarest of rarities? We give it up! We choose not to be ourselves. We become our trustbuster.

Peter Thiel has said before that the only kind of business worth making is one where you can have a monopoly. The profits, he said, are in owning an entire market. So it goes with ourselves as individuals.

Too many people pointlessly enter contests where the outcome is dependent on forces outside their control. They think it’s safer to be like everyone else…when in fact, what they’re doing is hiding in the chorus, protecting themselves from judgment. They’re less likely to be singled out and laughed at, sure, but they’re guaranteeing that they’ll never really be noticed or appreciated. Theirs becomes the Indian restaurant that will never be great, but it will never be closed. That is the best you can expect when you’re not playing to win…you’re playing not to lose.

Ryan Holiday
6. (Productivity) Systems trump goals

If you do something every day, it’s a system. If you’re waiting to achieve it someday in the future, it’s a goal.

One should have a system instead of a goal. The system-versus-goals model can be applied to most human endeavours. In the world of dieting, losing twenty pounds is a goal, but eating right is a system. In the exercise realm, running a marathon in under four hours is a goal, but exercising daily is a system. In business, making a million dollars is a goal, but being a serial entrepreneur is a system.

Goal-oriented people exist in a state of continuous pre-success failure at best, and permanent failure at worst if things never work out. Systems people succeed every time they apply their systems, in the sense that they did what they intended to do. The goals people are fighting the feeling of discouragement at each turn. The systems people are feeling good every time they apply their system. That’s a big difference in terms of maintaining your energy in the right direction.

Scott Adams
7. (Culture) Would you offer a meal to a visiting friend?

If a friend was visiting your home and it was dinnertime, would you invite them to the table? Or would you … chow down without sharing a bite?

These questions are the crux of a Twitter thread that went viral in May. It all began when a user on Reddit told how they once went to a Swedish friend’s house “and while we were playing in his room, his mom yelled that dinner was ready. And check this. He told me to WAIT in his room while they ate.”

Some Twitter users shared that this kind of non-hospitality was common in Sweden and other parts of Northern Europe.

That’s because some Swedes think feeding a guest creates a sense of obligation. And in a society that values equality and independence, people don’t want to put a burden on someone or feel like they owe someone something. Still, the online debate does raise the question: If folks in certain countries are more willing to share meals, what’s the reason for this generosity?

NPR

Fun things to click on:

An interactive tool compares the new Webb telescope images to Hubble’s. In 1983, Quentin Tarantino and Roger Avery worked at the Video Archives movie rental store in Manhattan Beach, California. Nearly 40 years later, Tarantino and Avery have teamed up to host The Video Archives Podcast, where they talk about their favorite cult movies of the era.

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#34: TEA, eSports, persuasive dissent and shamelessness

September 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) Making behavioural change easy
When marketing goods or services, it’s critical to take any impediments out of the process. We know this of website use – the fewer clicks to purchase, the better – but it’s true of so much more. 
 
Psychologist Daniel Kahneman uses a driving analogy to describe behaviour change. He argues that there are two ways to influence behaviour: you can push on the accelerator (boost motivation) or remove the handbrake (remove small barriers). Kahneman argues the most effective way of changing behaviour is often removing the handbrake.
 
So, when looking at your marketing or sales process, what can be changed to make the process simpler for your audience?
 
We see great examples of this with streaming services like Netflix applying the ‘ease principle’ with their ‘autoplay’ function. By automatically playing the next episode, it removes barriers to watching and encourages viewers to continue on their binge spree.
 
Marisa Crimlis-Brown in Sookio
2. (Productivity) The TEA productivity framework

The TEA acronym was coined by entrepreneur Thanh Pham, host of The Productivity Show podcast. 
 
After studying many productivity systems, he saw the need for a simpler, more holistic framework, comprised of three key pillars: (1) time, it all starts with the way you manage your schedule, your priorities, and how you invest your time — not only the quantity of time you devote to certain tasks but the quality of this time. For instance, some time investment today may save you lots of time tomorrow. (2) energy, your mind and your body are tools that need fuel. Deep work requires mental and physical energy. No mental and physical fuel, no meaningful productivity. (3) attention, to direct your attention, you need to know what your goals are. Then, you have to sustain your attention by staying focused on the goal and by avoiding distractions.
 
These principles may sound obvious, but it’s easy to get lost in the weeds. Before you start studying complex productivity systems, consider improving the way you manage your time, your energy, and your attention by applying the TEA framework of productivity.
 
Ness Labs
3. (Marketing) Gaming industry continues to be underutilised by marketers

Marco Carreon, VP of brand solutions at Burson Cohn & Wolfe, recently told ClickZ that “Gaming will be central moving into 2023”. The Smartbrief article in which the quote appeared suggests how brands are continuing to enter the gaming space as the sector has grown increasingly through COVID.

Back in 2019, I wrote an article about how marketers are incredibly slow to embrace the eSports industry. Only some brands were experimenting within the industry and the examples were few and far between. Lack of knowledge, old stereotypes and internal buy-in have been major challenges to getting marketers to buy into this channel more.

One of the ways to achieve that buy-in is to showcase the opportunities that are non-existent elsewhere. If you take Twitch as an example, the platform gives you a chance to see live reactions to the advertisements being played or communicated via influencers. It is a source of organic feedback at a time when other data sources are under increased scrutiny for their validity. Combine that data with analytical tools and you will have a unique source of feedback from the community that will save you thousands of pounds in market research. The highly segmented audience of different games also allows reaching a targeted audience without micro-profiling people through Facebook or Google which gets such a bad reputation for advertisers these days.
 
4. (Psychology) Writing as a therapeutic process

The research linking writing and health has gained quite a lot of coverage over the last few decades. It’s now a known fact that writing can help us in many ways but it’s always nice to have a reminder. 
 
Dr Pennebaker recently reviewed his study from twenty years ago and when looking at early-life trauma, studies revealed that the main issue wasn’t that people experienced the trauma itself, but rather that people who had had any kind of trauma but who kept it secret were those most likely to have a variety of health problems.
 
What was it about secrets that were so toxic?
 
Concealing or holding back powerful emotions, thoughts, and behaviours, was itself stressful. Further, long-term, low-level stress could influence immune function and physical health. If keeping a secret about trauma was unhealthy, it made sense that having people reveal the secret should improve health. In one of the studies students randomly assigned to write about traumas for 4 days, 15 minutes a day, ended up going to the student health centre over the next 6 months at about half the rate of students in the control condition
 
Expressive Writing in Psychological Science
5. (Marketing) When it comes to marketing return, words can matter just as much as numbers

Advertising ROI gets a lot of stick. Professor Tim Ambler from London Business School wants to bury it. Les Binet says using it unwisely will destroy your brand. And even Andrew Willshire, one of the very few outspoken econometricians, says it stinks.
 
But love it or hate it, we can’t live without it. Anyone that regularly talks to CMOs and CFOs knows it. What you get back from what you spend on advertising is something businesses need to know.
 
Or let’s take another measure – cost per acquisition/CPA. When marketers see ‘cost per acquisition’ in Google Analytics or other platforms, many believe it is what it says it is: the cost of acquiring a new customer by spending advertising money on the platform.
 
It is, in fact, nothing of the sort. The dashboards present everyone who clicked on an ad and then went on to buy something as if the sale was caused by that ad. But a large proportion of people who click on online ads were already on their way to buy. Their choice was prompted by an offline ad, a deal, the weather or the economy. This means that ‘cost per acquisition’ is not just a bad label. At best it’s a grave misunderstanding. More likely it’s a flat-out lie.
 
Many marketing metrics need a rework in how we label them. Relabelling isn’t something we should do just for the sake of it, it takes time and commitment, and many of the concepts we use are fine.
 
But for the sake of all the newcomers to come, on something as fundamental as “does it work then?” we really can’t afford to have the labels as problematic as they currently are.
 
Marketing Week
6. (Psychology) Rules for persuasive dissent

It’s hard to be a dissenter. When you question widely accepted beliefs, you tend to experience far more pain than pleasure. People are likely to dismiss your opinions and reject you from future interactions. That’s because groups prefer consensus. They want to have their existing views validated, maintain a predictable environment, and work quickly toward goals.
 
And yet, when you believe that your team or organization is missing something important, moving in the wrong direction, or taking too much risk, you need to speak up. Even if your message isn’t received well in the short term, decisions formed from a diversity of opinions usually lead to better long-term outcomes.
 
Consider Martin Luther King Jr.’s 1963 “I Have a Dream” speech. In the three years following it, a mere 33% of Americans approved of the content. But, over time, his public dissent on prevailing views about civil rights for Black Americans, led to big changes in laws and attitudes. By 2011, public approval for the speech jumped to 94%.
 
Harvard Business Review
7. (Culture) Shamelessness as a strategy

The “Shameless” approach is becoming a dominant strategy today. It was first popularized in modern canon by Paris Hilton, who played the “dumb blonde heiress” stereotype so smoothly that everyone assumed she was as stupid as she seemed.
 
Paris didn’t play by the “obvious” rules for famous people. She was widely derided by both media and her peers as at best, a train wreck, and at worst, a self-serving aggrandizer. And yet, people couldn’t stop talking about her. A decade later, Paris is now remembered as the mastermind behind the playbook that’s made the Kardashians, Jenners, and other celebrity socialites so successful. We could see parallels in politics too.
 
People were dismissive of Paris because validating her playbook would mean admitting that they were playing an inferior game. 
 
A common critique of shameless people is questioning their intelligence. But one of the most bizarre aspects here is it doesn’t matter how aware that person is of what they’re doing. The concept of a “genius mastermind” is itself outdated, because it assumes that someone needs to be in control. The shameless person is simply a host for a set of ideas, which, like any virus, will continue to propagate as long as there are willing hosts to receive it.
 
Nadia Asparouhova

Fun things to click on:

100 tips for a better life. A “zero-star hotel” in Switzerland offers sleepless nights to ponder the world’s crises. Mario games teach us that even if something is essentially the same, psychologically it can be completely different.

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#33: Market orientation, sacred beliefs and doing less

August 28, 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 more a company copies a competitor’s strategy, the more it loses the ability to create its own
There is a long and rewarding literature on the power of market orientation and keeping the customer in your crosshairs at all times. And there is equally persuasive literature on the perils of competitor orientation – of switching our gaze from our customers to our competitors and how they do things. And that danger multiplies significantly if these insights turn to action and we start to replicate our competitors’ moves in our approach.
 
There is the inherent double danger of doing something that suits your competitor and not you. Externally, the position, attraction and image of your brand are bound to certain things. And your rival, in this case TikTok, is bound to others. A focus on doing what it does leaves you vulnerable to attempting to offer things that aren’t your core and aren’t what customers want from you, and which are already being offered – in a superior way – by a competitor.
 
When Facebook internally announced its new TikTok-like features, one bemused employee voiced the fears that there was “a real risk in this approach that we lose focus on our core differentiation (the social graph and human choice) in favour of chasing short-term interests and trends”.
 
Of all the many disadvantages of competitor orientation, the biggest one is that it inhibits and ultimately destroys a company’s strategic capability. When you look at your rival and adopt its approach, you look less and less at your situation, advantages and options. The more a company copies a competitor’s strategy, the more it loses the ability to create its own.
 
Mark Ritson via Marketing Week
2. (Philosophy) The more we observe the world around us, the less we know. Therefore none of our beliefs should be held as sacred

I was reading a  piece about humility from Alex Olshonsky and his excerpt about epistemic humility is what made me smile and think at the same time.
 
Humans are evolutionarily adapted and socially conditioned creatures who are incapable of interpreting Reality. A human-made model—whether it be philosophy, science, religion, woke, or anti-woke—is only a partial representation of Reality. A micro-slice of the great pie.
 
Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle states that we cannot simultaneously know the position and the momentum of a subatomic particle. The more we know about the position, the less we know about the momentum and vice versa. On the deepest, smallest level, we do not know what the hell is going on.
 
The same proof of our ignorance is found in mathematics. Gödel’s incompleteness theorem demonstrates that mathematics contains true statements that cannot ever be proven (that’s an oversimplification of his theorem).
 
Polish-American logician Alfred Tarski expanded upon Gödel’s work by proving that arithmetic truth cannot be defined in arithmetic, essentially restating the brain teaser we first heard in the opening lines of the Tao Te Ching 3,000 years ago: “the Tao that can be named is not the eternal Tao.”
 
In other words—all around and everywhere we look—the more we observe, the less we know. The key takeaway here is that none of our beliefs should be held as sacred. We simply do not know enough to hold strong opinions.
 
Deep Fix
3. (Psychology) Arrival fallacy – why do we not feel satisfied after reaching a long-term goal?

“When I achieve this goal, then I will be happy.” If you’ve ever experienced such a when/then thought pattern, you’re not alone. Whether you’re aiming to run a marathon, get a promotion at work or buy your first house, having a goal in mind can increase your motivation. However, we often mistakenly believe that achieving our goals will make us happy. That tendency is called the arrival fallacy.
 
So why are we so bad at predicting our happiness levels? Psychologists found that predictions about how a future event might make us feel are often flawed because of the impact bias. The impact bias leads to an overestimation of the duration and intensity of the positive emotions you may feel as a result of an event. We overestimate the positive impact the accomplishment of a goal will have, and we underestimate how other events or feelings may influence the way we feel.
 
How do we avoid it? The trick is to repackage your motivation to change your perspective, making the process of achieving your goals as important as the result.
 
Ness Labs
 
4. (Productivity) Doing more by doing less

Have you ever noticed how “busy” has become the new “fine”? As in, when you used to ask somebody how they were doing, they would answer, “Fine.” But nowadays, everybody answers, “Busy.” Busy has become the default state for many of us. But is the state improving our lives? Certainly not.
 
How do we unbusy our lives but continue to pursue a significant and productive life?
 
Unbusy people know their purpose and use it to guide decisions. Unbusy people are adamant about saying no to things that do not align with their mission. Unbusy people know they have a choice in life. Unbusy people say no to almost everything. Unbusy people don’t get distracted by unfulfilling pursuits. Unbusy people value the significance of rest.
 
Warren Buffett is credited as saying it this way: “The difference between successful people and very successful people is that very successful people say ‘no’ to almost everything.”
 
Recognize the inherent value in the word no. Learning to say no to less important commitments opens your life to pursue the most important.

Becoming Minimalist
5. (Marketing) Distribution and line length (assortment) matter most in economic expansions and contractions

A group of marketing professors recently looked at why some brands can ride the wave of macroeconomic expansions while other brands are better able to successfully weather contractions. They looked at six strategic brand factors: price positioning (value vs. premium), advertising spending (low vs. high), line length (short vs. long), distribution breadth (selective vs. extensive), brand architecture (single-category vs. umbrella-category branding strategy), and market position (follower vs. leader).
 
They found that all six factors matter in either expansion and/or contractions but that two factors stand out above the rest: distribution and line length (assortment). In good times and bad times, extensively distributed brands win.
 
Jan-Benedict Steenkamp via LinkedIn
6. (Writing) Write one sentence per line

Derek Siver’s advice to anyone who writes: try writing one sentence per line. New sentence? Hit [Enter]. New line. Not publishing one sentence per line, no (we all hate that when people do it on LinkedIn). Write like this for your eyes only. HTML or markdown combine separate lines into one paragraph.
 
Why is it so useful?
 
It helps you judge each sentence on its own. It helps you vary sentence length – sometimes short, sometimes long. It helps you move sentences. It helps you see first and last words.

Derek Sivers
7. (Psychology) Mindfulness might not be the answer to young people’s mental health

I read a lot about the benefits of mindfulness and meditation but this study was interesting as it showed it isn’t always useful.
 
There is a crisis in teen mental health, and schools in many countries are exploring different ways to make young people more resilient.
 
A UK-based research project, the largest of its kind on the subject, has suggested mindfulness training in schools might be a dead end — at least as a universal, one-size-fits-all approach.
 
The study, which involved 28,000 children, 650 teachers and 100 schools, looked at the impact of mindfulness training over eight years and found that the technique didn’t help the mental health and well-being of adolescents ages 11 to 14. The authors suggested investigating other options to improve adolescent mental health.
 
CNN Health

Fun things to click on:

A visualisation of inflation and the cost of everyday items. 100 tips for a better life. For the most complex female characters in animation, look to Japan.

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#32: Availability bias, financial sorcerers and climate action

August 21, 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) Creating assets specifically for each channel is more effective than repurposing them
Most marketers know the potency of spreading their media dollars across multiple channels. But the temptation to save time, money and effort by reusing the same video execution that was built for TV on YouTube, or reusing print ads for digital ends, is all too often the most common approach.
 
However, data from Analytic Partners suggests that when you create your own dedicated, native content for digital video, it’s likely to be three times more effective than TV creative that’s been repurposed for digital channels.
 
While marketers should aim for cross-channel campaign synergy, they should do so with distinctly created assets that are natively designed for each specific medium.
 
Marketing Week
2. (Psychology) Availability bias – our tendency to make judgements based on previous experiences that are easily recalled

As humans, our ability to make the right decisions is limited by the many constraints of our minds. One such constraint is the availability bias — our tendency to make judgments based on previous experiences that are easily recalled. When some piece of information is easily brought to mind, we incorrectly assume that it’s an accurate reflection of reality. This cognitive bias often leads to the illusion of rational thinking and, ultimately, to bad decisions.
 
For example, if you’re looking for a new note-taking app, you might go for a particular tool because you recall that a friend recently raved about it. Or, if you read about a plane crash in the news a week before you are due to fly for work, you may overestimate the likelihood of your plane crashing.
 
How can you avoid it?
 
(1) Practice deliberate brainstorming. Instead of going for the most obvious choice, generate as many potential solutions as possible. (2) Try “red teaming” ideas. It involves rigorously challenging ideas and assessing them from an opposing point of view to discover flaws. (3) Use self-reflection methods. It can take the form of journaling, talking out loud. Taking time to reflect will reduce the power of availability bias.
 
Ness Labs
3. (Marketing) Linking Category Entry Points (CEPs) to buying situations is key in building mental availability

“The most important search engine is still the one in your mind.” 
 
This statement makes a profound point all marketers should internalize about buyer behaviour: most purchases start not by searching Google, but by searching our memory. If you believe most buyer behaviour starts with a memory, it then follows that the primary job of marketing is not to generate clicks, but instead to generate memories.
 
In B2B, as B2C, the evidence suggests the path to company growth requires building mental and physical availability. Mental availability is about being easily thought of in buying situations, while physical availability is about being easy to buy. Category Entry Points are the cues that category buyers use to access their memories when faced with a buying situation and can include any internal cues (e.g., motives, emotions) and external cues (e.g., location, time of day) that affect any buying situation.
 
Understanding CEPs helps you build useful associations between your brand and the category’s core buying situations. Therefore when a buyer enters the category, your brand has a greater chance of being mentally available, which is the first step to being bought.
 
LinkedIn B2B Institute
 
4. (Society) What Pre A Manger sales tell us about hybrid work

In May 2021, as Covid-19 cases in Europe and the US receded and citizens began emerging from pandemic-induced lockdowns, Bloomberg set out to track the economy’s return to normality using transactions at Pret A Manger Ltd.
 
Because the coffee and sandwich chain is closely associated with the lunch hour in the financial districts of London and New York, Bloomberg’s Pret Index – which benchmarked weekly transactions against what they were before the outbreak of Covid-19 – showed whether hundreds of thousands of bankers, asset managers and corporate lawyers were repopulating those areas as firms recalled workers to the office.
 
In London City, Pret’s transactions have recovered to 83% of pre-pandemic levels, while in suburbs it is 118% of pre-pandemic levels. An indication of remote work having a marked impact.
 
Bloomberg
5. (Investing) Take note of financial analysts / macroeconomic forecasters with extreme scepticism

“The Commanding General is well aware that the forecasts are no good. However, he needs them for planning purposes.”
 
A report from CXO Advisory Group analyzed 6,582 public market calls made by 68 pundits from 2005-2012 and found that their average accuracy was 47%, slightly worse than chance. Despite this, there is still a high demand for pundits and their predictions.
 
For all of the recorded history of humans, we’ve had a deep desire to know the future. Ancient tribes used sorcerers and priests to forecast it, we use financial pundits.
 
So what’s an investor to do in a world filled with sorcerers? Ignore them. Ignore them as much as possible. Because if you don’t, you may be persuaded to do something harmful to your finances.
 
Of Dollars and Data
6. (Productivity) Creative problem solving for when you’re stuck and out of ideas

Even if you usually excel at finding solutions, there will be times when it seems that there’s no obvious answer to a problem. It could be that you’re facing a unique challenge that you’ve never needed to overcome before. You could feel overwhelmed because of a new context in which everything seems to be foreign, or you may feel like you’re lacking the skills or tools to navigate the situation. When facing a dilemma, creative problem solving offers a structured method to help you find an innovative and effective solution.
 
There are four guiding principles to creative problem-solving. (1) Look at problems and reframe them into questions. While problem statements tend to not generate many responses, open questions can lead to a wealth of insights, perspectives, and helpful information (2) Balance divergent and convergent thinking. During divergent thinking, all options are entertained. Throw all ideas into the ring, regardless of how far-fetched they might be. Convergent thinking, in contrast, is the thinking mode used to narrow down all of the possible ideas into a sensible shortlist. (3) Defer judgement. By judging solutions too early, you will risk shutting down idea generation. Take your time during the divergent thinking phase to give your mind the freedom to dream ambitious ideas. (4) Say “yes and” rather than “no, but”. You will only stifle your creativity by automatically saying no to ideas that seem illogical or unfeasible.

Ness Lab
7. (Environment) Why has climate action failed in the US so far (and elsewhere)

Why have climate activists and leftists failed to generate a sufficient sense of urgency in the American public? One reason is that many have embraced the idea of degrowth. This is the idea that economic growth is environmentally unsustainable and should be halted (at least in rich countries).
 
Slowing growth or abolishing capitalism would be very bad for the climate for two reasons: it’s too big of an ask for developed countries to give up their middle-class lifestyle and you need a robust economy to fund investment in new green technology. 
 
Degrowth, anticapitalism, and doomerism are not a single unified package — many climate activists subscribe to only one or two of the trio of bad ideas. And some climate activists don’t subscribe to any of the three. But enough subscribe to at least one of the three that together, this trio of ideas has heavily compromised the effectiveness of activism in generating the degree of popular urgency required for bold policy change.
 
All of this gets in the way of the positive, can-do rhetoric that will help us actually make progress. The strategy that will work is a technology-focused, bottom-up, whole-of-society effort. In other words, everyone pushes wherever they can push. We campaign for climate-aware state leaders. We build technologies that make decarbonization easier if that’s what we’re good at doing. We persuade our bosses and the companies we own to adopt renewable technologies. We use our investment choices to direct capital toward companies that produce or use renewables. If we work for the civil service, we try to design and implement regulations in ways that favour renewables. That’s how we fight climate change.
 
Noahpinion

Fun things to click on:

What came first? This Google quiz asks questions like these (and shows relevant images) and challenges you to click what came first. Bad job search advice you should ignore. A window into a dimension where time does not exist.

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:

Marketing

SD#31: Digital delusion, Brahman and Einstein’s focus

August 14, 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 digital delusion of the marketing industry

Digital media have been the primary cause and the primary beneficiary of delusional thinking in marketing. The fascinating thing is that the cycle of delusion has been going on for well over 10 years and we still don’t recognize it.
 
Here are the 6 stages of digital delusion: (1) The miracle is acknowledged: it may be blockchain or VR, 3D printing or Pokemon Go. Whatever it is, it is going to “change everything.” (2) The big success: a company somewhere reports a success. It is “proof” that the miracle is real. (3) Experts are hatched: clever snake-oil salesmen gather up a Powerpointful of cliches and bullshit, march it around from conference to conference. They write articles, and even books, on how not to be “left behind.” (4) The bndwagon rolls: everyone who knows nothing is suddenly asking the marketing department, “what is our (millennial, content, metaverse) strategy?” (5) Reality rears its ugly head: the numbers dribble in. Shit…people are ignoring our miracle by the billions. Proxy metrics are invented to hide the fact that the miracle is mostly worthless chitchat. (6) The back-pedaling begins: “well, it’s just part of an integrated program…” say the former zealots. The experts start blaming the victims, “hey, we never promised…We told you you had to…”
 
This cycle has repeated itself so many times that it’s comical.
 
Bob Hoffman
2. (Psychology) How to dissolve your ego and why you should

Even for those who aren’t self-absorbed, egos can get in the way more often than we’d like. Having a sense of self isn’t bad, but we can become so invested in the idea of who we are that we refuse to take necessary steps forward that would challenge that idea.

Oftentimes this manifests as a fear of failure, an inability to start on new projects, or the evasion of responsibility.

Here’s a system to change it: a person should have a friend who is their equal, better, and lessor in their field. When you’re working on starting a project, turn to your equals to stay motivated and to remind you that you’re all in the same boat. When coming off a success, turn to your better, who could be an accomplished mentor, to keep your ego from growing too much. Lastly, when you’ve failed, have somebody who you’re a mentor to around to explain the failing; that’ll help you realize that failure is just part of the process.

Big Think
3. (Productivity) Accomplishing more by doing less

Last week we discussed how you’re doing something important when you aren’t doing anything. This week we’re turning to Einstein to accomplish more by doing less.

Between 1912 to 1915, Einstein became increasingly obsessed with his push to formalize general relativity. As revealed by several sources, including his recently released letters, he worked so hard that his marriage became strained and his hair turned white from the stress

But he got it done. In 1915 he published his full theory. It stands as one of the greatest scientific accomplishments — if not the single greatest — of the 20th century.

Einstein’s push for general relativity highlights an important reality about accomplishment. We are most productive when we focus on a very small number of projects to which we can devote a large amount of attention. Achievements worth achieving require hard work. There is no shortcut here. Be it starting up a new college club or starting a new business, eventually, effort, sustained over a long amount of time, is required.

But in reality, that’s difficult.

Most of us will never fully satisfy the Einstein Principle. It’s too risky. If you invest fully in one thing, and then it fails, you’re left empty. More importantly, it can be boring. Life requires zigs and zags. That is why you need to undertake a purge of your activities and focus just on those most likely to yield results.

Cal Newport
 
4. (Marketing) Lack of communication between TV sets and streaming devices causes estimated waste of over $1 billion in ad dollars every year

The Wall Street Journal recently reported that many streaming services can’t detect whether a TV is on or off. Consequently, advertisers paid over a billion dollars last year for ads on streaming channels that ran when TVs were off. Can’t make this shit up.

According to the Journal, “17% of ads shown on televisions connected through a streaming device—including streaming boxes, dongles, sticks and gaming consoles—are playing while the TV is off, according to a study by…GroupM and ad-measurement firm iSpot.tv Inc.”

You can add that billion to the 20% of ad fraud that has been reported in the connected TV (CTV) industry.

We are so used to criminality, corruption, and incompetence in the online advertising business that this billion-dollar scandal hardly even made a ripple in adland.

Bob Hoffman
5. (Society) The shrinking of the middle-class neighbourhoods

Nationally, only half of the American families living in metropolitan areas can say that their neighbourhood income level is within 25% of the regional median. A generation ago, 62% of families lived in these middle-income neighbourhoods.

In one area, the share of families living in middle-class neighbourhoods dropped by 15 percentage points between 1990 and 2020. But the portion of families in wealthy ones jumped by 11 points, and the segment living in poor neighbourhoods grew by four points.

In some ways, the pattern reflects how wealthy Americans are choosing to live near other wealthy people, and how poorer Americans are struggling to get by. But the pattern also indicates a broader trend of income inequality in the economy, as the population of families making more than $100K has grown much faster than other groups, even after adjusting for inflation, and the number of families earning less than $40K has increased at twice the rate of families in the middle.

New York Times
6. (Culture) The changing diversity of entrepreneurs

Is entrepreneurship becoming more diverse?

Kauffman Foundation details trends in the share of new entrepreneurs by sex, race and ethnicity, age, and nativity in the U.S. between 1996 and 2020. (1) In 2020, about 4 in 10 new entrepreneurs were women, consistent with recent years. (2) In 2020, more than half of new entrepreneurs were white and about 1 in 5 were Latino. The overall trend since 1996 has been a decline in the share of new entrepreneurs who are white, and an increase in the share who are Asian, Black, and Latino. (3) New entrepreneurs were largely under 44 years old in 1996 and were more likely to represent all ages by 2020. (4) More than 1 in 4 new entrepreneurs in 2020 were foreign-born, more than double the share in 1996.

Kauffman Foundation
7. (Philosophy) Chasing Maya, avoiding Brahman

To steal a term from Hinduism, we spend most of our days in Maya: “that which is not.” The illusion. Maya is your job and the email you don’t want to answer and your worry about politics and the thing you’re mad about on Twitter.

The opposite of Maya is Brahman, or absolute reality. It’s not on any map, but, as Melville said, “true places never are.” For you can indeed find Brahman, or, far more likely, it finds you. Some sterile space with fluorescent lighting and coffee in little cardboard cups from a break room with vending machines. That’s where Life really happens, because that’s where Death really happens.

According to the Advaita philosophy, there is only one thing real in the universe, which it calls Brahman; everything else is unreal, manifested and manufactured out of Brahman by the power of Mâyâ. To reach back to that Brahman is our goal. We are, each one of us, that Brahman, that Reality, plus this Maya. If we can get rid of this Maya or ignorance, then we become what we really are.

These Hindu terms (used in this admittedly idiosyncratic and secular way) help formalize the ontological hierarchy of problems. Hospitals, medical and psychiatric problems, personal rifts and damaging decisions, and so on, are all really real, that is, Brahman, whereas at least most of the time political and cultural issues are just kind of real, or Maya. When people say things “just got real” they are speaking, I think, quite literally. They have entered Brahman. One of the biggest fallacies in modernity is the flipping of the ontological pyramid, wherein one thinks that senate bills, cultural debates, a wayward opinion you don’t like, etc, are the foundation of personal reality when really they are its ghostly superstructure.

Erik Hoel’s beautiful piece

Fun things to click on:

Ever searched for a word in your mind but just couldn’t succeed? Tip of my tongue helps you track down the word you’re thinking of. The most watched Netflix films. Would you try ketchup popsicles?

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#30: Branding, sleep deprivation and doing nothing

August 7, 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) How brands work

The reason brands exist, at the bottom line, is to make the bottom line work harder.

They do that by making it more likely that customers choose one brand over another in a way which delivers a positive commercial benefit for the business.

Simple enough. But because brands are about the choices people make they are also about the way the brain works.

We’re trying to create new memories and associations in the minds of many people, who don’t care much about what we’re trying to do, don’t notice what we put in front of them, and everything we do put in front of them exists alongside a lot of other people trying to do the same thing.

For the simplest description of how brands work, check out Johnny Corbett’s article on Marketing Week
2. (Leadership) Moral courage could be the single most important attribute that social change leaders can possess

Moral courage is the commitment to act upon one’s values regardless of the difficulty or personal cost. It inspires the conviction to take action with the clarity to remain constant in goals but flexible in the method. Moral courage is a mindset that centres on the internal conditions needed to make the courageous choice visible and to instil the confidence that it’s possible.

Equally, moral courage is the determination and resilience required to try and fail as you attempt to address some of society’s biggest inequities—to stumble and get back up again. It is to persist when everything is falling apart around you, to endure the trials of the arena not just for months or years but, often, for a lifetime.

How do we cultivate moral courage? Practice self-awareness; examine, sharpen and clarify core values in dialogue with others; and create systems of trust and nourishment.

Stanford Social Innovation Review
3. (Psychology) Sleep deprivation can actually cause long-term damage

The sleep debt collectors are coming. They want you to know that there is no such thing as forgiveness, only a shifting expectation of how and when you’re going to pay them back.

As every human has discovered, a couple of nights of bad sleep is often followed by grogginess, difficulty concentrating, irritability, mood swings and sleepiness. For years, it was thought that these effects, accompanied by cognitive impairments like lousy performances on short-term memory tests, could be primarily attributed to a chemical called adenosine. Spikes of adenosine had been consistently observed in sleep-deprived rats and humans. Adenosine levels can be quickly righted after a few nights of good sleep. This gave rise to a scientific consensus that sleep debt could be forgiven with a couple of quality snoozes—as reflected in casual statements like “I’ll catch up on sleep”.

But a recent study contends that the concept of sleep as something that can be saved up and paid off could be false. The review, which canvassed the last couple of decades of research on long-term neural effects of sleep deprivation in both animals and humans, points to mounting evidence that getting too little sleep most likely leads to long-lasting brain damage and increased risk of neurodegenerative disorders like Alzheimer’s disease.

New York Times
 
4. (Marketing) In any given category there are more buyers ‘out-of-market’ than ‘in-market’

It might surprise you to learn that up to 95% of business clients are not in the market for many goods and services at any one time. This is a deceptively simple fact, but it has a profound implication for advertising.

It means that advertising mostly hits buyers who aren’t going to buy anytime soon. And in turn, that tells us about how advertising works: it mainly works by building and refreshing memory links to the brand. These memory links activate when buyers do come into the market (as mentioned in our first learning this week). So, if your advertising is better at building brand-relevant memories, your brand becomes more competitive. The question to ask is – does our advertising do that?

John Dawes and the B2B Institute
5. (Productivity) You are doing something important when you aren’t doing anything

Reading a book, visiting a museum, wandering out to people-watch at the park. Though we purport to value artists and romanticize their muses, the aforementioned activities aren’t often recognized as work.

And I’m not talking about vacation or weekends. I’m talking about a more regular practice, built into our understanding of what work is. Fallow time is part of the work cycle, not outside of it. In periodic intervals around the completion of a project.

Fallow time is necessary to grow everything from actual crops to figurative ones, like books and children. To do the work, we need to rest, to read, to reconnect. It is the invisible labour that makes creative life possible.

New York Times
6. (Psychology) We can reframe boring (but useful) tasks into… well not boring

We go to incredible lengths to avoid actions that we know are good for us. For any endeavour, there are a set of basic skills needed to build a strong foundation. Exercising consistently, eating your vegetables, meditating, reading books, and writing for yourself and your peers.

Even when we know they are good for us, even when we know they will advance our goals, we avoid taking the steps needed.

We don’t do the boring fundamentals because, well, they’re boring. Repetitive actions done day after day are not a recipe for excitement. There’s a disconnect between the future positive result and the present slog. Progress often plateaus, and only arrives in unpredictable bursts.

We too can reframe what we imagine as not fun into fun that we appreciate later on. We can train ourselves to love the pain in the process. By attaching a boring action with the anticipation of positive feelings, we can turn the uncomfortable grind into fun.

James Stuber
7. (Investing) Investing consistently over time will yield better results most of the time

It’s easy to say just keep buying when stocks are going up. But what about when they are going down? What about when consumer prices are going through the roof? What about when there is increased economic and geopolitical uncertainty? Say at times like now.

Mid-1960s to the early 1980s were one of the toughest times for US stock investors. It is the longest inflation-adjusted loss on record. $1 invested in the S&P 500 in February 1966 would be only $0.95 in October 1982 after adjusting for inflation.

However, an investor investing $100 every month during this period would have turned their $20100 investment into $20931 after adjusting for inflation.

Even through the worst period of history in US stocks, an investor who bought every single month at least preserved their value.

Even throughout the most difficult periods in market history, investing money over time as soon as you have it into U.S. stocks has preserved purchasing power over time. Though this point might seem trivial to some, it is anything but. Because the record of history is one of the most powerful tools we have to combat our emotions when markets are in free fall. What other choice do you have?

When there is blood in the streets, how do you keep yourself calm? When you see your portfolio decline by 20, 30, 40% and beyond, where do you run to?

Let’s rely on historical evidence. Let’s rely on history.

Nick Maggiulli, Of dollars and data

Fun things to click on:

Akiflow lets you consolidate all the tools you use, so you can block time for your tasks and see everything you need to get done in your calendar. A scientific analysis into Tom Cruise’s running. What happens after 14 days of cold showers?

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#29: Subscription models, journaling and crypto

July 31, 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) Subscription models should take into consideration the perceived utility others derive relative to ours
Our perception of value is not simply a case of “utility minus price”, there is also a sense of fairness relative to others. In other words, we don’t only perceive value based on the utility we might derive for ourselves, but also the perceived utility others derive relative to ours.
 
Let’s say Jane is paying £3,000 per year for an annual season travel ticket in London, and she travels 5 days a week. Rachel is also paying £3,000 per year, but only travelling 3 days a week. Rachel would begrudge paying the same rate as Jane because she is extracting less utility for the same price.
 
The New York Times understands this. They make the subscription much cheaper to a Brit than it is to an American. They understand that a large amount of their content is irrelevant to a Brit – for example, New York restaurant reviews are of little interest to a subscriber who lives in Newcastle.
 
For these reasons, the crude subscription model will always struggle to achieve mass adoption, because there will be relatively few people who are confident that they are getting optimal value from the arrangement. I would argue that there isn’t a single example of a news outlet achieving mass reach with this model.
 
Per Rory Sutherland
2. (Psychology) Strength-based journaling can help us improve our self-esteem and resilience

Have you ever noticed that it is far easier to dwell on mistakes than it is to focus on the things that went well? For instance, you might become fixated on the three seconds in which you tripped over your words during a presentation, rather than acknowledging the remaining twenty minutes in which your performance was flawless.
 
This tendency to dwell on our shortcomings can negatively impact our mental health, leading to low self-esteem, and even anxiety and depression. However, simple, accessible tools such as strength-based journaling are available to help us build resilience.
 
Strength-based journaling is a free, convenient, and accessible positive psychology tool. This mindfulness method helps us to shift from dwelling on negative thoughts and beliefs to focusing on our strengths and capabilities.
 
Start by crafting a list of curated strength-based journaling prompts. Find recurring time in your diary for journaling and other self-reflection exercises. Write down your answers consistently to reap the rewards.
 
Ness Labs
3. (Productivity) Be intentional at the start of every day

With a fresh 24 hours before us, it’s easy to just get started in our usual way. But to make the most of this new batch of hours, it is important to take a few moments at the start of the day to reflect on what we want to do with them. We might not end up doing things exactly as we plan, but we’re much more likely to spend the hours wisely if we set intentions at the start. Make a list of what you would like for the day.

Zen Habits
 
4. (Marketing) True personalisation is unachievable and ineffective due to poor data quality and should be replaced with creative that resonates with everyone

The biggest problem with personalisation is that it’s impossible. Personalisation assumes that marketers have perfect data on every individual customer.
 
Most personalisation efforts are powered by third-party data. Marketers infer who customers are based on their browsing behaviour. So how good is that third-party data? It must be extremely good if you’re claiming to understand buyers on a personal level. It’s really not. Most third-party data is garbage.
 
I’ve written a whole rant about it last year, the long story short is that data is unreliable and so personalisation is unachievable. Marketing Week explains further.
5. (Investing) Crypto world is slowly turning into the system it was initially created against

The crypto ecosystem has been a fascinating world to observe over these years as it recreated financial rules and made (or broke) people. Katelyn Donnelly summarises this piece from Sarah Resnick:
 
There was the promise of crypto for many: Many were here, trying to make money in crypto because they felt they had no other choice. People struggling financially; who despise their jobs; who feel the system is rigged and there is no way out. People whose country has been at war for years and want to leave, or who have left and want to help family members who stayed behind. From crypto they draw optimism for the future, the possibility that their lives could change or that they could change the lives of others.
 
But now the economic reality is setting in: These are signs that the economy has muscle but its vigour is being overshadowed by the spectre of inflation. All the news of rising wages notwithstanding, the average earner is worse off than they were a year ago.
 
And so is the practical reality: There is a contradiction that those who truly believe that crypto exists outside our financial system will have to contend with: (1) this latest bull run appears to have been fueled by government stimulus and easy monetary policy; and (2) banking giants BNY Mellon, Goldman Sachs, and JPMorgan Chase have all begun offering clients access to crypto products.
6. (Psychology) Our fights with our partners might be because we’re hangry

In 2014, Researchers from Ohio State University found that most fights between couples are because someone is hungry.
 
People are often the most aggressive against the people to whom they are closest—intimate partners. Intimate partner violence might be partly a result of poor self-control. Self-control of aggressive impulses requires energy, and much of this energy is provided by glucose derived from the food we eat.
 
So the next time you feel angry against your partner or your partner is angry at you, think if all you need is a meal.
 
PNAS
7. (Environment) Cement ranks third among the top 10 biggest sources of industrial pollution, biologically grown limestone could change that overnight

Every year about two gigatons of CO2 is released into our environment due to the production and usage of cement. According to a report from the United States Environment Protection Agency (EPA), cement ranks third among the top ten biggest sources of industrial pollution. Surprisingly, a team of researchers claims that we can put a full stop to this cement-driven carbon emission overnight by replacing traditional cement with their new microalgae-based biogenic (a substance made using living organisms) cement.
 
A team of researchers have developed a unique carbon-neutral method using which portland cement can be produced from biologically grown limestone. This new material can drastically reduce the environmental pollution caused due to construction activities around the globe.
 
Interesting Engineering

Fun things to click on:

A list of the 50 funniest books of all time. An ancient living forest was discovered in a 200 meter sinkhole in Guangxi. ‘How to say no’ is a collection of email templates that you can use to decline social events, meetings, dates, phone chats and other work-related requests you might get.

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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