SD#55: Mimicry, childhood, and creativity
February 19, 2023
Hi friends,
We’re halfway into February and am I the only one who can’t get used to writing 2023 yet? Today’s newsletter has a slight undertone of change. How can we change the way we think about creativity? How can we stop focusing on things we can’t change? The timeless and timed change between childhood and adulthood.
Our seven ideas this week:
1. (Creativity) We can improve our creative thinking by understanding the processes behind it and influencing them Researchers generally believe that creativity is a two-part process. The first is to generate candidate ideas and make novel connections between them, and the second is to narrow down to the most useful one. The generative step in this process is divergent thinking. It’s the ability to recall, associate, and combine a diverse set of information in novel ways to generate creative ideas. Convergent thinking takes into account goals and constraints to ensure that a given idea is useful. This part of the process typically follows divergent thinking and acts as a way to narrow in on a specific idea. So how can you influence your creative system for the better? Build a good “memory bank” full of materials for creation. Read voraciously and engage deeply with a wide variety of content to build a richer memory bank for you to tap. Then interact with your materials. If you read a lot but never revisit or use that information later, some of it may get into your memory, but the connections between the ideas in what you’ve just read and your existing knowledge will likely be weak and fade over time. Taking notes, making highlights, and revisiting that material when it’s related to what you’re currently thinking about is a good way to maintain and strengthen connections. Our mental state also has a large influence on our creativity. The complete picture is nuanced, but the best state for doing creative thought work depends on the type of work, your attentional state, your mood, and how engaged you can be. Lastly, pay attention to attention. In a productivity-obsessed culture, it’s easy to think that if we just buckle down and focus, we can churn out more creative thought work. Counterintuitively, the more we try and force ourselves to focus, the narrower our thinking may become. Mind wandering is what allows us to explore, retrieve, and experiment with connecting our memories in different ways. So give yourself a break the next time you feel like you’re “spacing out.” Every |
2. (Productivity) No matter what hustle culture says, you don’t need to milk productivity out of every moment As a productivity nerd, I’ve been guilty of trying to optimise every moment for usefulness. Jumping from one activity to another just to optimise my time and do what feels more productive. But lately, I’ve been trying to induce a healthy level of slowing down because ultimately it helps us be productive when we need it. Because we’re humans, not machines. We need time to catch a breath, relax our minds, and feed our brains some fun candy. It’s okay not to work all the time. If you’re struggling to wind down and allow yourself to not work, try to schedule and enjoy downtime rather than optimise it. How? By not trying to squeeze productivity out of every waking minute. When you’re in the mood for some good music, try to immerse yourself in the listening experience. During bedtime, swap reading articles and self-improvement books with biographies or fiction books that don’t demand too much brain power and are a soothing experience. Be okay with slowing down and not doing anything productive during your downtime. Enjoy a warm bath, a cup of tea, moments of solitude or an engaging conversation with your loved one. There’s more to life than just work. Cherish your downtime. Hulry |
3. (Marketing) When you match your tone and style to mimic prospective buyers, they’re more likely to be open to your message Social scientists have long been intrigued by the human tendency to mimic the behaviour of others. But new studies show that mimicry isn’t just a subconscious reflex — it’s a sales technique. In one study, researchers observed that simply watching someone else eat a certain snack food caused the viewer to choose the same snack themselves 71% of the time. Humans are hardwired to gravitate towards people who are more like us. Subconsciously we seek to “belong” to a social group, which is why we can quickly adapt to new social environments — like inadvertently mimicking someone’s accent. Being the social creatures that we are, we’re more likely to respond to a suggestive message positively when it comes from someone who looks like us. Humans instinctively like people who are more like them. When you match your tone and style to mimic prospective buyers, they’re more likely to be open to your message. Mimicry is a persuasive sales technique. It can be highly effective when used honourably. That said, you also want to be on the lookout for people who may use it against you. Customer Camp |
4. (Career) The three-step framework to introduce yourself Many of us dread self-introduction, be it in an online meeting or at the boardroom table. Here is a practical framework you can leverage to introduce yourself with confidence in any context, online or in person: present, past, and future. You can customise this framework both for yourself as an individual and for the specific context. Perhaps most importantly, when you use this framework, you will be able to focus on others’ introductions, instead of stewing about what you should say about yourself. Start with a present-tense statement to introduce yourself: Hi, I’m Ashley and I’m a software engineer. My current focus is optimising customer experience. The second part of your introduction is past tense. This is where you can add two or three points that will provide people with relevant details about your background. It is also your opportunity to establish credibility. Consider your education and other credentials, past projects, employers, and accomplishments. My background is in computer science. Before joining this team, I worked with big data to identify insights for our clients in the healthcare industry. The third and last part of this framework is future-oriented. This is your opportunity to demonstrate enthusiasm for what’s ahead. If you’re in a job interview, you could share your eagerness about opportunities at the firm. If you’re in a meeting, you could express interest in the meeting topic. If you’re kicking off a project with a new team, you could talk about how excited you are, or share your goals for the project. I’m honoured to be here. This project is a significant opportunity for all of us. Harvard Business Review |
5. (Productivity) Focus on what you can change In his very first season as the New York Giants coach, Bill Parcell was hit with a rash of injuries. He worried incessantly about the impact of the injuries on the team’s fortunes, as it is difficult enough to win with your best players let alone a bunch of substitutes. When his friend and mentor Raiders owner Al Davis called Parcells to check in, Parcells relayed his injury issues. Parcell’s: “Al, I am just not sure how we can win without so many of our best players. What should I do?” Davis replied: “Bill, nobody cares, just coach your team.” That might be the best CEO advice ever. Because you see, nobody cares. And they are right not to care. A great reason for failing won’t preserve one dollar for your investors, won’t save one employee’s job, or get you one new customer. It especially won’t make you feel one bit better when you shut down your company and declare bankruptcy. All the mental energy that you use to elaborate your misery would be far better used trying to find the one, seemingly impossible way out of your current mess. A16z |
6. (Marketing) If cheap share of voice is available in recessions, it’s a good value way to buy a bigger share of your sector later on But what that share is worth depends on how big your sector is now, and after the recession. If the payoff is a slice of a smaller pie, share of voice has to be very cheap to make spending worth it. In this calculation, the cost of media matters, and so does what competitors do. But whether to go dark in a recession or not also depends on the trajectory your category is and will be on. The “Don’t go dark” advice is advertising’s equivalent of a strategy investors use – buying the dip. You buy an asset for cheap when no one else is buying, in this case, mental availability. Then you sit back and enjoy the profits when demand recovers, and with it, the value of your asset. This strategy works as long as your sector is secure. In FMCG, which was a secure sector during COVID, advertisers followed the advice. They increased spending at a time when media costs were low, and they got high returns per £1 spent. Magic Numbers |
7. (Society) Childhood, as a time of innocence, is a modern creation Traditionally, for Christians at least, humans were thought to be born with corrupted souls and harboured within them the nastiest and meanest of instincts. Childhood, as a time of innocence, is a modern creation. As pointed out by French historian Phillipe Aries, in Centuries of Childhood, before the 17th-century children were thought to be merely small adults, possessing the same qualities and natures as grownups. Children weren’t little darlings or cute cherubs, as we often refer to children today. Rather they were fallen angels, like Lucifer. One of the earliest observations of children’s spontaneous inclination towards sympathy came in the early 18th century, near the beginning of the Romantic period. It was as though for the first time people could see their children other than as little beasts. What happened to cause this change? Under a series of changes wrought by the Renaissance and Reformation and propelled by the development of a market economy and burgeoning capitalism, the feudal system, in place for more than a thousand years, cracked and crumbled. This opened up the possibility of directed change based on the optimistic idea that the human condition could be improved through human effort. Psychology Today |
Fun things to click on:
On Screeplays you will find thousands of screenplays for movies and TV shows. It’s easy to search and a fun way to look “behind the scenes” of your favourite movies and shows. The creative legacy of GIFs. A tool for seeing your internet latency (rather than just bandwith in similar sites).
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