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.
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Speak soon,
Tom