SD#54: Negative capability, desire, and time poverty
February 5, 2023
Hi friends,
Today we delve into some of the fundamentals of our lives, starting from the capacity to hold conflicting ideas in our heads and what that brings to inner desires and what drives them. We don’t venture far from our bodies as we look at time management, commitments and the importance of friendships. Hope you enjoy it.
Our seven ideas this week:
1. (Philosophy) The world is complicated, ambiguous, paradoxical, and contradictory. To make sense of it, to survive it, one must be able to balance conflicting ideas The poet John Keats called it “negative capability”—the mental fortitude to be able to entertain multiple contradictory ideas in your head at the same time. Or as F. Scott Fitzgerald famously wrote, “The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposing ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function. One should, for example, be able to see that things are hopeless, yet be determined to make them otherwise.” How do you cultivate the kind of negative capability Keats was talking about? 1) Read widely and from people you disagree with. 2) Study deeply. Marcus Aurelius chided himself “not to be satisfied with just getting the gist of it.” 3) Put yourself in rooms where you’re the least knowledgeable person. Observe and learn. Ask questions. 4) Understand that timing and context are everything. 5) Embrace epistemic humility. Epictetus reminds us that “it’s impossible to learn that which you think you already know.” To the Stoics, particularly Zeno, conceitedness was the primary impediment to wisdom. 6) Keep your identity small. the more you identify with things—being a member of a certain political party, being seen as smart, being seen as someone who drives a fancy car or someone who belongs to this club or that ideology—the harder it is for you to change your mind or entertain new points of view. 7) Don’t always have an opinion. It’s possible, to not have one. 8) Flexibility is key. Ryan Holiday |
2. (Psychology) The four desires driving all human behaviour: acquisitiveness, rivalry, vanity, and love of power Bertrand Russell endures as one of humanity’s most lucid and luminous minds — an oracle of timeless wisdom on everything from what “the good life” really means to why “fruitful monotony” is essential for happiness to love, sex, and our moral superstitions. Man differs from other animals in one very important respect, and that is that he has some desires which are, so to speak, infinite, which can never be fully gratified, and which would keep him restless even in Paradise. Russell points to four such infinite desires — acquisitiveness, rivalry, vanity, and love of power. Acquisitiveness — the wish to possess as much as possible of goods, or the title to goods — is a motive which has its origin in a combination of fear with the desire for necessaries. However much you may acquire, you will always wish to acquire more; satiety is a dream which will always elude you. The world would be a happier place than it is if acquisitiveness were always stronger than rivalry. But in fact, a great many men will cheerfully face impoverishment if they can thereby secure complete ruin for their rivals. Hence the present level of taxation. Vanity is a motive of immense potency. Anyone who has much to do with children knows how they are constantly performing some antic, and saying “Look at me.” It is scarcely possible to exaggerate the influence of vanity throughout the range of human life, from the child of three to the potentate at whose frown the world trembles. But the most potent of the four impulses, Russell argues, is the love of power: Love of power is closely akin to vanity, but it is not by any means the same thing. What vanity needs for its satisfaction is glory, and it is easy to have glory without power… Many people prefer glory to power, but on the whole, these people have less effect upon the course of events than those who prefer power to glory… Power, like vanity, is insatiable. The marginalian |
3. (Productivity) Time poverty doesn’t arise from a mismatch between the hours we have and the hours we need; it results from how we think about and value those hours Time poverty affects all cultures and crosses all economic strata. Time-poor people are less happy, less productive and more stressed out. They exercise less, eat fattier food and have a higher incidence of cardiovascular disease. The most obvious explanation is that we simply spend more time working than previous generations but the evidence doesn’t support this theory. Time diaries show that men’s leisure time in the US, for instance, has increased by six to nine hours a week in the past 50 years, while women’s has increased by four to eight hours a week. Why, then, do we feel more time-poor than ever? Time poverty doesn’t arise from a mismatch between the hours we have and the hours we need; it results from how we think about and value those hours. It’s as much psychological as it is structural. We are ceaselessly connected. When the free time arrives, we are unprepared to use it so we waste it. Or, we tell ourselves we shouldn’t take a break so we work right through it. The first step to becoming time smart is to identify the time traps in your life. TED |
4. (Marketing) Humans’ desire to stay consistent with our commitments is a mega-driver for buying decisions Your buyers have an identity aligned with how they perceive themselves currently and who they want to grow into in the future. Buyers are committed to their current identity and take actions that are consistent with maintaining it. If buyers are committed to their health, they’ll consistently take supplements that align with acting as the healthiest version of themselves. Buyers also want to make commitments that align with their future desired identity and want to make consistent habits that bring it to fruition. Creating consistency behind these commitments tells their mind they’re likely to reach that identity, despite distractions along the way. Aligning the messaging for your products with buyers’ current identity and desired future identity activates commitment and consistency in their minds. Do your clients resonate with being the hacker-style entrepreneur that wears sweatpants and flip-flops to VC meetings? Or do they relate to the go-getters running at 5 am before their all-hands meeting? Get to know your customers through research and then tie your products or services to their identity. You can speak to who they are today and illustrate how you can help them to remain consistent with their commitments or highlight your product as a stepping stone to the kind of person they wish to become. Why we buy |
5. (Investing) Bullshit in investing, be it wild over-optimism, deception or fraud, is as old as time, precisely because it is hard to resist the promise of easy returns and to tell the difference between innovation and make-believe “What bothers me isn’t that fraud is not nice. Or that fraud is mean. For fifteen thousand years, fraud and short-sighted thinking have never, ever worked. Not once. Eventually, you get caught, things go south. When the hell did we forget all that?” — Mark Baum, The Big Short. The investing industry is ridden with bullshit. The most common and insidious form is over-optimism: offers of tantalizing risk/reward that defy any notion of reality, often based on misinformation or deception. Less common but even more dangerous are outright frauds. The problem is inherent to the product. Most consumer goods – apples, hotel rooms, laptop computers – are tangible objects or services that you can see, taste, feel, or experience, so you can judge how much they are worth to you. Investments represent claims about some future probability distribution of monetary outcomes which are not verifiable. The best an investor can do is form a reasonable judgment about the uncertainty around those claims, based on historical evidence and details about the mechanics of how those claimed outcomes are generated. The first step in avoiding being taken for a ride is to recognise that you are a mark for people trying to get rich off your money. Burn the principle into your brain that financial markets are large and competitive and have a lot of smart people in them. Easy money-making opportunities are seldom real; professional mercenaries would have found and exploited them first. High returns with low risk explained away by complicated and non-transparent strategies deserve great scrutiny. Benn Eifert |
6. (Psychology) The importance of friendships Loneliness registers an impact on your well-being similar to that of smoking 15 cigarettes a day and rivals alcohol and smoking as a cause of early death. Since 1990, the percentage of Americans who report having less than three close friends has doubled, from 16% to 32%. The share who report having no close friends at all has gone from 3% to 12%. Put another way, 20 million Americans have begun smoking a pack a day. Several factors inspired this perfect storm of loneliness: Covid; political polarisation; fewer random encounters, as we no longer go to the mall/theatre/office; social media raising a generation of disconnected people who feel worse about themselves; and a lack of Third Spaces. Men and women approach friendship differently. Men have it drilled into us from an early age that vulnerability and emotional connections are signs of weakness. They aren’t, and men with influence should cleanse this bullshit version of masculinity from the zeitgeist. But to be clear: Declining friendships is an everyone problem. The decline in friendship is insidious, as it feeds on itself. Friendship is a muscle that strengthens with use but atrophies with age. We have so many more opportunities and so much more fuel for our friendships when we are children and even as young adults. Scott Galloway |
7. (Marketing) During periods of inflation brands work to prove their worth to consumers by showcasing their premium offer, despite it seeming counterintuitive for business Diageo – owner of alcohol brands such as Guinness and Baileys – has reported the staggering success of its choice to focus on its most premium brands to drive growth last year. In its financial year ending 30 June, the company’s ‘premium plus’ brands like Johnnie Walker, Don Julio and Tanqueray contributed 57% of reported net sales and drove 71% of organic net sales growth. In March last year, Diageo CMO Cristina Diezhandino told Marketing Week’s Festival of Marketing that rising costs in the year ahead meant price rises were inevitable. However, she argued that consumers are more likely to accept these price increases from premium brands because these are viewed as “special” or “treats” already. Outside of the FMCG sector, travel company On the Beach increased its booking value by 31% compared to pre-pandemic levels as it focuses on capturing a greater share of the premium market. The Bank of England doesn’t expect inflation to fall until the middle of 2023, so prices aren’t likely to come down soon. And with a recession taking hold, brands will have to stand out in other ways to win consumer spending next year. As such, premiumisation is likely to continue. Marketing Week |
Fun things to click on:
“20 simple things I wish I could tell my 20-year-old self”. Visualise location of emotions in the body. What if everything you shared on social media, for one month, was about something other than yourself?
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