SD#52: The flow, harmful reactions and marketing budgets
January 22, 2023
Hi friends,
Today’s newsletter has a few learnings on productivity. Starting from understanding the flow state, how can we trigger it and maximise it. And then we discuss actions that have the most long-term benefits for us. Finishing off with a few interesting facts about the world population, as we’ve recently hit 8 billion people in the world. Isn’t it crazy how many of us there are now?
Our seven ideas this week:
1. (Productivity) Motivation is what gets us into the game. Learning allows us to continue to play. Creativity is how we steer. And flow, which is optimal performance, is how we amplify all the results beyond all reasonable expectation Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi is often referred to as the Godfather of Flow Psychology. He was very interested in the sort of well-being and meaning of life, and he went around the world talking to people about the times in their lives when they felt their best, and they performed their best. Everywhere he went, people said the same thing. “I’m in this altered state of consciousness where every action, every decision I make, seems to flow effortlessly, perfectly, seamlessly from the last.” Flow actually feels ‘flowy.’ More specifically, it refers to any of those moments of rapt attention and total absorption. You’re so focused on the task at hand, so focused on what you’re doing, everything else just seems to disappear. One way to explore flow triggers, there’s a cluster of them, is through dopamine triggers. They drive focus, they drive attention, they drive alertness and excitement, and there are a lot of different ways to get dopamine. Novelty produces dopamine. We see the same thing with unpredictability, complexity, and the experience of awe. You look up at the night sky and you see stars everywhere and you know those stars are actually universes, and you get sorta perceptual vastness. We get dopamine, not as a reward for taking a risk, which is what some people used to believe, but now we know it’s to drive motivation. Now, there are lots of different intrinsic motivators, but from a motivation standpoint, there are five and they’re all designed to be built into one another and work in a specific order, in a specific sequence. The most basic human motivator is curiosity. One of the things we get from curiosity is focus. When we’re curious about something, we don’t have to struggle. We don’t have to burn a lot of calories trying to pay attention to it. Curiosity is designed, biologically again, to be built into passion. Now, passion is incredibly useful, but as a motivator, you can go one better, which is purpose. Everyone’s talking about, “Oh, I have a purpose,” and it’s this big altruistic thing and it’s good for the world, and all those things may be true, but from a peak performance perspective, it’s very, very selfish. Once you have a purpose, the system demands autonomy. I want the freedom to pursue my purpose. And once you have that freedom, the system wants the last of the big motivators, mastery. Mastery is the skill to pursue that purpose well. Big Think |
2. (Marketing) If you can meet your customer’s expectations, they’re likely to spend 140% more after a positive experience Psychologically speaking, our brains are pattern-seeking machines. We develop expectations to help us make sense of and evaluate the world around us. Expectations are based on our past experiences. But our expectations can change depending on the environment, our mood, or our perception of a product or situation. The problem with expectations is that when they don’t match up with reality, we’re disappointed. Everything about the product, from the packaging to the website copy, will set the expectations in the mind of your buyer. If you can meet your customer’s expectations, they’re likely to spend 140% more after a positive experience. So how can we manage buyers’ expectations? Setting expectations early and often will help you manage the relationship with your customer. Packaging and presentation are key to setting expectations through non-verbal communication. Be sure your product’s ability exceeds the buyer’s expectations for your specific industry. And lastly, use unhappy customers as a research opportunity. Why we buy |
3. (Psychology) It’s not what happens to us that bothers us – it’s the reaction we have to what happens that bothers us. Letting go of our harmful reactions is important if we want to live a joyful life Long before Freud and other psychologists posited that implicit orientations and patterns subconsciously guide behaviour, the yogic concept of samskara provided a sophisticated explanation for the causal forces that shape our unwitting actions and future responses. While we cannot escape the creation of these unconscious imprints, we can work to overcome them through conscious awareness and self-reflection. In this way, we can transform our lives from being driven by unconscious habits and tendencies toward more fulfilling ones. The path of yoga offers a systematic method to foster self-awareness and to replace maladaptive samskaras with healthier patterns of orienting. Healthier samskara can be formed by actively replacing maladaptive patterns with more wholesome responses (for example, when experiencing feelings of not being good enough, sending oneself thoughts of loving-kindness and perhaps stating an affirmation such as, “may I know that I am enough”). Although samskara continue to exist in the self-realised practitioner, they no longer hold the power to bind or influence action or behaviour, having been brought into the light of awareness. Such is the experience of liberation. Yoga Basics |
4. (Productivity) Short-term easy is long-term hard. Short-term hard is long-term easy We’d rather do the easy thing than the hard thing. That’s natural and normal. We can call this the mountain. You can climb it, or you can avoid it, but it’s not going away. There is always a mountain. There is always something in front of us that we know we should do, but it just seems so … hard. On any given day, we can avoid the climb. We can stand at the bottom, look up, and say, “I’ll wait. Hopefully, the mountain isn’t here tomorrow.” But we all know the mountain is still there tomorrow. And instead of looking smaller, it’s even larger. Jerzy Gregorek said about the mountain “Easy decisions, hard life. Hard decisions, easy life.” The easy path today makes a hard path tomorrow. The hard path today makes an easier path tomorrow. The choice is yours, but the mountain isn’t going away. The longer you put off the hard thing you know you need to do, the harder it becomes to get started. The climb is the fun part. Brain Food |
5. (Marketing) Most budgets are set too low, most marketing departments aren’t confident enough in their plans, and profitable opportunities are being misseds Most businesses don’t spend 5-10% of revenue on advertising. In other words, most budgets are set too low, most marketing departments aren’t confident enough in their plans, and profitable opportunities are being missed. Part of the reason for this seemingly chronic underinvestment in advertising is, no doubt, the risk involved where something hard to control – creativity – has a big impact on returns. Big advertising budgets are not an easy sell when the CFO has much more certain ways to spend the same money. But a difficult selling task shouldn’t be a barrier to senior marketers. After all, most CMOs and marketing directors got there because they had at least a bit of a knack for convincing people to buy stuff. When the sell is internal and to the CFO, having evidence and numbers on expected returns is an important step. Magic Numbers |
6. (Learning) Some of the most important topics are the hardest to teach, and real-world experience is the only school The most important decisions in your life may be whether to marry, who to marry, and whether to have kids. But none of those topics are taught in school. They’re hardly even discussed. How could they be? They aren’t problems you can distil down to an equation, or even a broad principle. People have different personalities, goals, experiences, levels of chance and serendipity, all of which make universal truths hard to find and difficult to teach. No matter how smart the world becomes, the best answer will always be, “You’ve got to figure it out for yourself.” A lot of things work like that. A few others: how to get along with people you disagree with; how to respect the views of people who’ve had different life experiences than you; how to recognize that your views would be different if you were born in a different country or era; how to recognise and appreciate luck; how to deal with regret; where to live; how to advertise your skills and accomplishments without being insufferable. Morgan Housel |
7. (Society) We’ve hit peak child – there will never again be more children alive than there are today, with fertility rates plummeting across the globe Homo sapiens have roamed the Earth for roughly 300,000 years, give or take (no one left a diary back then). We evolved to have big brains and long legs, but our population grew relatively slowly at first. There were perhaps 230 million of us on Earth at around the time of Cleopatra’s death, as the ancient Egyptian civilisation came to an end. The population had more than doubled by the Renaissance in 1500 and doubled again by 1805 when the ancient Egyptian civilisation was rediscovered with the help of the Rosetta Stone. The 2 billion mark was reached just before the Great Depression in 1925, and it took just 35 years from there to get to the third billion. Since then, the population has been rising by another billion every 10 to 15 years. Under its most likely scenario, the UN projects the world population will reach about 10.4 billion in the 2080s. We’re getting older and older, which means there are fewer people able to work to support more people who can’t. We’re seeing a major shake-up of the huge population centres of the world. ABC |
Fun things to click on:
Visualising Berkshire Hathaway’s holdings over the years. Tree.fm plays the sounds of forests, recorded by people who’ve visited them. Observe the growth of Singapore 2012-2020.
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