Skip to content

SD#28: Double-jeopardy, cognitive bottlenecks and green spaces

Written by

Tomas Ausra

July 24, 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) Double-jeopardy law is further amplified by today’s digital algorithms
Double jeopardy is an empirical law in marketing where the lower-market-share brands in a market have far fewer buyers in a time period and also lower brand loyalty. Big brands have an easier time acquiring and keeping customers, their advertising budgets go further. And… digital world has only amplified the effects.

The pendulum has had two swings. Starting in the 1990s, the internet made it easier for startup businesses to make their products available, market them and grow. But since then, the direction of travel is increasingly in the opposite direction, with an ever-growing advantage for the big players.

The reason is that algorithms are mediating ever more purchases and they prioritise things that are already popular. That means businesses that are already big. Smaller businesses are served up less often, pay more for their digital ads and have to devote more cash to defending their existing sales.

The two swings net out at a situation where it’s easier for small businesses to launch than ever before, but also where there’s a limit to how far their growth can go. Where challengers can only challenge so much, and big business remains at least partly insulated from competition.

Marketing Week
2. (Psychology) We have two cognitive bottlenecks impacting our perception and action – our attention and our working memory

The human mind has many limitations. For instance, our limited sensory capabilities mean that there are many sources of information we cannot perceive at all. Dogs can smell emotions such as fear and ​​can tell the difference between two people based on their scent alone. Bees can see infrared, which is invisible to the human eye.

For the most part, we are naturally aware of these sensory limitations. We know we are not able to perform echolocation or see in the dark. But, somehow, we tend to overestimate our cognitive capacities — our ability to concurrently process multiple streams of information or to work on several tasks at the same time.

We believe that by combining two tasks, we will complete them sooner than if we worked on them separately. We also trust that we can consider many different facts when making complex decisions. But our thinking mind is limited by two big bad bottlenecks: our attention and our working memory.

Everyone will have different profiles for levels of attention and working memory, and your cognitive capacities also vary throughout the day and years. Being aware of the existence of these cognitive bottlenecks can help you avoid being overconfident in your cognitive capacities, and to make more sound decisions at work and in your daily life.

Ness Labs
3. (Meditation) If you struggle during regular meditation, consider an active one

Musician Regina Spektor was recently interviewed by The Creative Independent. It’s a brilliant piece full of creative thought, but the gem I found in it came in the afterthoughts section. Regina shared how she struggles with regular meditation, sitting down and focusing her thoughts. So instead, she does cooking meditation.

You decide something you dedicate the meal to. It can be peace in the world, or someone’s health, or anything that is stirring you at the time. Then as you cook, every little action of the cooking—washing, cutting, mixing—can be imbued with that dedication. You concentrate on that intention from start to finish and keep repeating the thought in your mind as you cook. In the end, every bite is filled with that wish. A meditation for the over-thinker…
 
4. (Investing) The most important investing question is not “what are the highest returns I can earn?” It’s “what are the best returns I can sustain for the longest period?”

Some of the best athletes in the world spend almost all their time working way below potential, purposefully not pushing themselves to the limits.

They don’t race at that leisurely pace, of course – they might be at the highest levels of intensity for an hour or more during a competition.

But in training, you tend to build the best athletic machine when longevity is favoured over intensity, when your body gets a signal to adapt vs. thinking it’s been temporarily tortured, and when you’re less subject to injury and mental burnout.

For the highest levels to be attainable over time, the process has to be sustainable.

Which is exactly how good investing works too.

Compounding is just returns to the power of time. Time is the exponent that does the heavy lifting, and the common denominator of almost all big fortunes isn’t returns; it’s endurance and longevity. “Excellent returns for a few years” is not nearly as powerful as “pretty good returns for a long time.” And few things can beat, “average returns sustained for a very long time.”

Collaborative fund
5. (Marketing) The value of brand love as a metric might be overstated but still valuable

Cast your mind back to the crazy days of the late 20th century when brand love was everywhere. Academics talked about brand relationships in a manner akin to marriage. Every third case study of branding success ended with consumers getting a tattoo of the company’s logo on their upper shoulder. And best-selling authors climbed over each other to come up with ever more ejaculatory metaphors for brand loyalty, obsession, love, passion, delight or intimacy.

And then things changed. The fire went out. The leopard skin rug was pulled from under the intertwined bodies of the brand and consumer. And the lights came on. All passion halted.

In 2007, Havas published the results of global research indicating most people would not care if 74% of brands disappeared. Linked to the Havas factoid was the emergence of the Ehrenberg Bass Institute and a new school of brand thinking. Brands grew through mental and physical availability, not love. Salience was the new engine for success.

But… there has to be room in any theory of brand management for affection, love and even loyalty. All three were certainly overplayed and overstated in decades past. But committing the equivalent sin of underestimation today does not absolve the exaggerations of the past.

Mark Ritson via Marketing Week
6. (Productivity) There will always be too much to do – and this realisation is liberating

Oliver Burkeman has been writing for The Guardian for over a decade. In his last column, he tried to sum up all he has learned in one piece, which ranges from the superpower of tolerating minor discomfort to how to deal with imposter syndrome. 

One that I need to remind myself the most – there will always be too much to do.

Today more than ever, there’s just no reason to assume any fit between the demands on our time – all the things we would like to do, or feel we should do – and the amount of time available. Thanks to capitalism, technology and human ambition, these demands keep increasing, while our capacities remain largely fixed. It follows that the attempt to “get on top of everything” is doomed. (Indeed, it’s worse than that – the more tasks you get done, the more you’ll generate.)

The upside is that you needn’t berate yourself for failing to do it all, since doing it all is structurally impossible. The only viable solution is to make a shift: from a life spent trying not to neglect anything, to one spent proactively and consciously choosing what to neglect, in favour of what matters most.

The Guardian
7. (Psychology) Prescribing time in parks and green spaces is now used as a way of treating a range of conditions including high blood pressure, anxiety and depression

Our species has spent the majority of our time evolving in close concert with nature over hundreds of thousands of years. So let’s compare that to the time after the advent of agriculture just 10,000 years ago. Farming transformed our way of life and essentially brought us more indoors by encouraging more permanent living structures. 

And even more recently in our evolution: The internet. Screen technology is becoming increasingly sophisticated at grabbing and holding our attention and keeping us sedentary, indoors with our eyes fixed on screens- especially our children’s. Are we becoming an indoor species so rapidly that our health cannot keep up with the change? Are there simply fewer opportunities to be active outside of how our modern lives have been structured?

Researchers studied how technology and urban environments deprive us of development in our attention system, which is designed for interactions with nature. They found that by redirecting our attention to nature and interacting with natural environments (Attention Restoration Theory), there is less of a demand for controlled attention compared to attention in urban environments, and is, therefore, restorative.

Duncan Murdoch is a certified Nature and Forest Therapy Guide, and his site has a lot of great information about improving your mental health by getting out into nature, and specifically about forest therapy, or as the Japanese call it, “Shinrin-Yoku,” which means forest bathing.

Fun things to click on:


An illustrated book full of things to look forward to. Find a local time that is convenient for everyone in your next virtual meeting. Guided monthly reviews help bring perspective and closure to the past month before you dive into the month ahead.


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

Previous article

SD#27: Choice, financial freedom and compound returns

Next article

SD#29: Subscription models, journaling and crypto