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SD#30: Branding, sleep deprivation and doing nothing

Written by

Tomas Ausra

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#31: Digital delusion, Brahman and Einstein's focus