SD#39: Purpose, sleep, and liminal creativity
October 9, 2022
Hi friends,
Welcome to another edition of Seven Dawns, your weekly newsletter on marketing, productivity, psychology and more.
Our seven ideas this week:
1. (Marketing) The industry has gone too far into ‘purpose’ and forgot to pay attention to growth A couple of weeks ago, the news of Yvon Chouinard, the 83-year-old founder of Patagonia, broke our news feeds as he announced he will relinquish the ownership of the company to trust. Patagonia’s profits will no longer go to him but to the fight against climate change. “Instead of going public” Chouinard explained, “you could say we’re ‘going purpose’.” The move will cost him dear. Aside from giving up an asset worth around £2.6bn, along with all the associated future profits, Chouinard will also have to pay tax as a result of his generous donation. None of this is likely to come as any surprise to the great man. He surely understands one of the central precepts of purpose; that it must cost you something to deliver it. It’s a point that largely escapes the army of marketers who applauded Chouinard’s move with supportive posts that included their personal take on brand purpose. Marketers have developed their own very special strain of brand purpose in recent years, one that does not require purpose to cost them anything at all. Mark Ritson via Marketing Week |
2. (Productivity) Sleep is more important than you think People say ‘I do perfectly fine on four or five hours of sleep’. No, you don’t. ‘I’m an exception.’ No, you’re not. In a study by a team of scientists at the Division of Sleep and Chronobiology in the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Pennsylvania, participants were divided into four groups: one was sleep deprived for up to 88 hours, one group slept for 4 hours a night, one group slept for 6 hours a night, and one group slept for 8 hours a night. There were two important findings. First, the performance of the groups who slept 4 and 6 hours was as impaired as the sleep-deprived group. Second, when asked, all participants grossly miscalculated how impaired they were. As Dr Thomas Roth, the Director of the Sleep Disorders and Research Center at Henry Ford Hospital in Detroit, put it, “The number of people who can survive on 5 hours of sleep or less without any impairment, expressed as a percent of the population, and rounded to a whole number, is zero.” Or if not zero, close enough to zero that we can assume it doesn’t include you. |
3. (Culture) Old music is killing new music Old songs now represent 70% of the U.S. music market, according to the latest numbers from MRC Data, a music-analytics firm. Those who make a living from new music—especially that endangered species known as the working musician—should look at these figures, trembling with fear. But the news gets worse: The new-music market is actually shrinking. All the growth in the market is coming from old songs. Investment firms are getting into bidding wars to buy publishing catalogues from ageing rock and pop stars. The song catalogues in most demand are by musicians who are in their 70s or 80s (Bob Dylan, Paul Simon, Bruce Springsteen) or already dead (David Bowie, James Brown). Even major record labels are participating in the rush to old music: Universal Music, Sony Music, Warner Music, and others are buying up publishing catalogues and investing huge sums in old tunes. In a previous time, that money would have been used to launch new artists. The Atlantic |
4. (Marketing) The case against personalisation The era of personalisation will never arrive. Gartner predicts that 80% of marketers will abandon personalisation by 2025. It doesn’t work because: – You can’t personalise, because third-party data is extremely unreliable. – And you shouldn’t personalise, even if you could, because marketing works by reaching everybody with the same message to create shared associations. Instead, let’s embrace impersonalisation – the path to simplicity, scale and success. Marketing Week |
5. (Investing) Few investment lessons from Game of Thrones Here are a few investment lessons from Game of Thrones according to Beachman: (1) everyone has an agenda and speaks their book. Every move the Lannisters, the Boltons, the Tyrells and the Greyjoys made, every alliance they struck, was in pursuit of a singular goal… to rule. (2) Traders will trade in almost any market condition. Littlefinger (Petyr Baelish) was the quintessential “trader” in the show. The man was so agile, you just never knew which side he stood on and what his true motives were. (3) Meme trading is here to stay – wild and unpredictable. (4) Have a plan and stick to it. Success comes in all shapes and sizes and no one embodies this better than Arya Stark. That little peanut of a girl persevered through the entire tale to become one of the deadliest assassins. Successful investors find a formula that works for them and they stick to this playbook, including a set of rules within. (5) Never fall in love with a stock and refuse to give it up. Robb Stark was racking up victory after victory until he was taken down at the Red Wedding by the wily Freys. As investors, it is sometimes hard for us to give up on our favourite stocks, even in the face of overwhelming evidence that the business is faltering and the share price is not going to recover any time soon. (6) Do your own due diligence. Jon Snow, captured by the Wildlings, is surprised to find that they are just regular folks trying to survive and feed their families. He uses this knowledge to form new alliances. (7) History repeats itself. Beachman’s newsletter |
6. (Psychology) Liminal creativity, how to find growth during the in-between phases of our life Liminality is the ambiguity that emerges in the middle of a fundamental transition. Liminality is the “in-between”, where the space and the participants no longer hold their past status, but have not yet fully transformed to their post-transition self. Losing a job, taking on a new challenge, preparing to launch a project, deciding to raise a family, moving to a new country, living through a societal revolution: the world’s chaotic flows force us all to walk through liminal spaces at one point or another during our lives. What happens in liminal spaces? Doubt, discomfort, unfamiliarity, anxiety. But also growth, change, and discovery. Liminal spaces offer all of the ingredients for creativity. Our brain is uncomfortable in liminal spaces. Fear of uncertainty is an evolutionary mechanism designed to protect us from unknown risks. Our brain resists change and seeks predictable patterns. Life is a creative adventure that requires becoming comfortable with discomfort, a journey where we continually experiment, make mistakes, learn, and grow. And some of the biggest turning points in our story happen in the uncomfortable yet liberating liminal spaces where we are free to express our creativity. Ness labs |
7. (Psychology) Ignore feedback from losers Theodore Roosevelt said “It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows, in the end, the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.” Researcher Brene Brown on why your critics aren’t the ones who count. If you’re not in the arena also getting your ass kicked, I’m not interested in your feedback. If you have constructive feedback you want to give me, I want it… But if you’re in the cheap seats, not putting yourself on the line, and just talking about how I can do it better, I’m in no way interested in your feedback. |
Fun things to click on:
Need ideas for how to use your time for creative content? The Remote Experience Generator gives you just that. How rest and relaxation became an art. 20 actually helpful ways to stop wallowing in self-pity.
Thanks for reading! If you have any learnings you’d like to share with me, or disagree with any of the ones above then do drop me a message.
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Speak soon,
Tom