SD#53: How to be successful, memorisation, and faces
January 29, 2023
Hi friends,
The year is in full swing now and we can finally settle down and focus on things that matter. Today’s newsletter focuses on a few fundamentals including how to be successful (one of my favourite articles of all time), how to improve our thinking processes, and love. Who doesn’t like a bit of romance in the end?
Our seven ideas this week:
1. (Career) How to be successful Every year I try to reread this brilliant piece from Sam Altman on how to be successful. Here are a few excerpts: 1) Compounding is magic. Look for it everywhere. Exponential curves are the key to wealth generation. You don’t want to be in a career where people who have been doing it for two years can be as effective as people who have been doing it for twenty — your rate of learning should always be high. As your career progresses, each unit of work you do should generate more and more results. There are many ways to get this leverage, such as capital, technology, brand, network effects, and managing people. 2) Have almost too much self-belief. Self-belief is immensely powerful. The most successful people believe in themselves almost to the point of delusion. Cultivate this early. As you get more data points that your judgment is good and you can consistently deliver results, trust yourself more. If you don’t believe in yourself, it’s hard to let yourself have contrarian ideas about the future. But this is where most value gets created. 3) Make it easy to take risks. Most people overestimate risk and underestimate reward. Taking risks is important because it’s impossible to be right all the time — you have to try many things and adapt quickly as you learn more. It’s often easier to take risks early in your career; you don’t have much to lose, and you potentially have a lot to gain. Once you’ve gotten yourself to a point where you have your basic obligations covered you should try to make it easy to take risks. I strongly encourage you to read the rest here. |
2. (Productivity) Memorisation isn’t antithetical to critical and analytical thinking, it’s what lays the foundation for it Memorising facts is generally seen as less important than developing skills like critical thinking. In fact, having information stored in your memory is what enables you to think critically. Many teachers don’t even try to get students to remember information they can Google. They’ve been trained to believe it’s best to go straight for “higher-order skills” like analysing and synthesising — rather than wasting time on supposedly “lower-order” ones like knowing and understanding information. But scientists who study the process of learning have found something quite different: the more factual knowledge people have about a topic, the better they can think about it critically and analytically. This has to do with “working memory,” which is somewhat like short-term memory. The important point about working memory is that it can only hold a limited number of items for a limited period of time. Long-term memory, on the other hand, is virtually unlimited. The more items you can simply withdraw from long-term memory — because you’ve memorised them — the fewer items take up precious space in working memory, leaving more space there for absorbing and analysing new information. Minding the Gap |
3. (Marketing) Twitter spies on us all the time It was reported late last year that Twitter has spyware (known in the dark art of adtech as “ad tracking pixels”) embedded in over 70,000 websites. This means that every time you go to one of these websites, they report your activities back to the great and powerful Musk. Do you need to have a Twitter account to be in Musk’s files? No. Do you need to have ever had a Twitter account to be spied on by Twitter? No. Are you aware that information about you is being reported to Twitter by tens of thousands of companies? No. Have you ever given Twitter informed consent to collect this information about you from tens of thousands of websites? No. According to The Register…”In addition to sharing info on their visitors including cookie IDs, IP addresses, and browsing data with Twitter, Adalytics … also observed some websites sharing hashed emails and phone numbers with the platform.” What does Twitter do with all this data about you after they get it? Who the hell knows. But if you want to get paranoid…remember that Musk’s partners in Twitter include the sovereign fund of Saudi Arabia and some other lovely people who were promised special access to Twitter data in return for their investments. The Ad Contrarian |
4. (Productivity) Writing can be used as a thinking tool. Not only for personal management, but for ideation as well. From consuming information to creating your own content, writing can be used every step of the way “What is clearly thought out is clearly expressed” once said Boileau (1636-1711), a French writer. Anytime you struggle to write about something you just read, watched, or listened to, make sure to take the time to understand it properly. The fact that you’re struggling to express it in your own words often means you haven’t completely grasped the new idea. Writing is being kind to your future self. The generation effect, which was described in a research paper published in 1978 in the Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior, is the phenomenon where information is better remembered if it is actively created from one’s mind rather than simply read in a passive way. Instead of passively taking notes, writing what you want to learn in your own words ensures you are in active learning mode and form connections between new and pre-existing knowledge, which will make it easier to retrieve information later on. Ness Labs |
5. (Marketing) Buyers are instinctively drawn toward faces, which is what makes them such a magnetising part of advertising Ads and content featuring faces are 11x more likely to get noticed. By running thousands of experiments, Netflix figured out that faces showing an emotion aligned with the genre of the movie or show performed best, showing the villain over the hero performed better, and people react differently to faces around the world. Your buyers will notice faces in your content. But, it only takes them 40 milliseconds to come to a conclusion after looking at a face in a photo. You can use faces in your content to grab attention by strategically having them look at the buyer, gaze at a value proposition, call-to-action, or product, or depict a specific emotion. People will naturally follow the eye gaze and are more likely to read the copy or notice the product. Why we buy |
6. (Marketing) Businesses must invest in their brands to drive sustainable growth in the long term, and resist falling into the vicious cycle of chasing short-term sales boosts with excessive performance marketing and promotions Last year, online fashion giant Asos confessed to getting the balance wrong. In October, the retailer reported a loss before tax of £31.9m for 2022 – down 118% versus 2021. For new CEO José Antonio Ramos Calamonte, Asos’s problem can be nailed down to “insufficient” brand investment over recent years, resulting in a customer acquisition slowdown. More than 80% of its marketing investment had been spent on performance, he revealed. But Asos wasn’t the only business to re-evaluate its spending in 2022. In August, travel firm Expedia announced plans to no longer spend the majority of its marketing budget on performance, switching its attention towards brand-building creative, loyalty and CRM to trade “modest short-term disruption” for “significant long-term growth”. Following its split from efficiency-focused pharmaceuticals company GSK earlier this year, consumer healthcare giant Haleon is also planning to “reinvest” in brand building, having previously sacrificed quality of reach in pursuit of lower cost. Marketing Week |
7. (Relationships) We can fall into an error of seeing love as a passive mysterious gift that we are in no position to generate, direct or guarantee, rather than conceiving of it as an emotion that for the most part flows fairly logically, steadily and naturally on from things we are in a position either to do or not do We can spend a lot of time in relationships to which we are ostensibly committed wondering, maybe with a fair amount of anxiety: do they love me? Is this solid? Might it all suddenly end? But perhaps less time asking the more salient question: what can I do to help this valued relationship endure? We can fall into the error of seeing love as a passive mysterious gift that we are in no position to generate, direct or guarantee, rather than conceiving of it as an emotion that for the most part flows fairly logically, steadily and naturally on from things we are in a position either to do or not do. And, to come to the central thesis, love tends to be a consequence of a partner feeling cared for and heard — in the way they have almost certainly frequently signalled to us that they need to feel, to be inwardly assured that they are in safe and tender hands. To maintain love, we need more than anything to follow a few simple-sounding rules: 1) the partner must feel heard. 2) They must feel we are on their side. 3) They must feel appreciated according to their distinctive love language. 4) The partner must know we are making an effort in their name. 5) They must feel wanted, emotionally and physically. 6) In so far as we are difficult to be around (and we all are) we must explain why; we need to give our partner an accurate map to our areas of immaturity. 7) We must strive to remain calm around their most trying sides. The School of Life |
Fun things to click on:
Greg Isenberg asked 1 billionaire, 1 PhD math professor and 1 99-year-old man what self-reflection questions they asked themselves. Their list of questions to make you feel more fulfilled in life, love & career. The growth of Singapore 2012-2020. Bakers create a life-sized Han Solo out of bread.
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