SD#61: Disruptive technologies, breathing, and power
April 30, 2023
Welcome to the 61 edition of Seven Dawns, a weekly newsletter by me, Tomas Ausra, with a focus on getting better every day. A very warm welcome to the new subscribers who joined since last week. I’m glad you’re here.
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Hi friends,
Are we over ChatGPT yet? I doubt it. It’s likely here to stay as the possibilities remain mostly uncovered. People are fretting about how it will take away our jobs, but what does history tell us about new technology and job creation? Usually, it creates more jobs than it takes as new areas of work are imagined. Fear not though as today’s newsletter also looks into breathing and how we can control our emotions through different ways of breathing. Let’s dive in.
🔎 Our seven ideas this week:
1. (Society) Disruptive technologies cause employment instability for only short periods. The market crisply reorganises itself around innovation and job growth increases from there A technology is introduced — say, the car — and an existing sector is made irrelevant overnight (e.g., horse and carriage). In the short term, we’re fixated on how many horses will be out of a job. Harder to imagine, however, is how many jobs the car will create — as well as the different kinds of jobs it will create. It’s hard to envision radios, turn-signal lights, motion sensors, and heated seats. Let alone NASCAR, The Italian Job, and the drive-through window. In other words, disruptive technology results in demand for things we never knew we wanted. The anxiety for the past couple of decades has been over robots and automation. And it’s true that many routines and low-skilled jobs were automated away. What’s also true is that new jobs, again, filled the void. One study found that between 1999 and 2016, automated technology created roughly 23 million jobs in Europe — that’s half the increase in employment during that period. McKinsey estimates that future advances in automation will kill a third of American jobs and that it will create more than it kills. Specifically: tech jobs, care-worker jobs, building jobs, education jobs, management jobs, and creative jobs. Net-net, technology expands employment. 👉 No Mercy / No Malice |
2. (Marketing) Online ad fraud is costing marketers tens of billions annually Nobody knows the exact extent of ad fraud, but several credible organisations estimate worldwide ad fraud in the range of $60 to $80 billion. Juniper Research has estimated it at $68 billion. Ad Age magazine estimated it at 20% of online ad spending – about $80 billion today. The ANA (Association of National Advertisers) in the U.S. estimated it variously at $80 billion and $120 billion. The WFA (World Federation of Advertisers) said that by 2025 ad fraud could become the second largest source of criminal income in the world, after drug trafficking. According to experts, the bulk of online ad fraud occurs in programmatic advertising where tracking provides the data that fuels most activity. 👉 The Ad Contrarian |
3. (Psychology) There are as many ways to breathe as there are foods to eat and each way we breathe will affect our bodies in different ways Breathing is both an automatic function and a voluntary one. Humans discovered long ago, first intuitively and then systematically, that they could hack their bodies with their breath. “We can’t control our kidney function, or our liver function, or our stomachs,” says Nestor, “but by controlling our breathing, we can influence all those functions.” Breathing affects how we feel, but we can also use it to change how we feel. The healthiest people are the ones who can immediately turn on their stress—and quickly turn it off. Unfortunately, most of us are not in such great shape. Once we feel anxiety it can take more than an hour for us to come back down to our normal resting level. For 21st-century digitally augmented humans, that life-preserving jolt of cortisol has turned into something else. Everything has become a perceived threat. Looking at the news 20 times a day, it’s this constant drip of stress into our lives, which is extremely injurious to our health. When your inhale is longer than your exhale, your heart speeds up; when your exhale is longer, it slows down. If you’re stressed out at work the easiest thing you can do with breathing is to exhale more than you’re inhaling. Many experts believe that most people inhale too much. In our anxiety and distraction, with bad posture and laptops propped on kitchen tables, we gasp for air as if we were drowning. Many of the world’s spiritual traditions have practices that train the mind to both slow respiration and even it out. Instead of thinking about breath in binary terms, in or out, these practices encourage a view of breathing as a continuous gesture—the inhale flowing into the exhale, and so on. 👉 The Mind at Work |
4. (Productivity) Form habits through emotion, not repetition Before making a decision, ask yourself these two questions: Will it help you do what you already want to do? Will it help you feel successful? The answers to those questions are freeing because if the change program doesn’t satisfy these two requirements, it’s not worth your time. Form habits through emotion, not repetition: habits can form very quickly, often in just a few days, as long as people have a strong positive emotion connected to the behaviour… Speaking about human behaviour, it can be boiled down to three words to make the point crystal clear: emotions create habits. Not repetition. Not frequency. Not fairy dust. Emotions. 👉 Tiny Habits by BJ Fogg |
5. (Psychology) Power, over time, makes one more impulsive, more reckless and less able to see things from others’ points of view. It also leads one to be rude, more likely to cheat on one’s spouse, less attentive to other people, and less interested in the experiences of others The historian Henry Adams described power as “a sort of tumour that ends by killing the victim’s sympathies.” This may sound like hyperbole, but it has been borne out by years of lab and field experiments. Dacher Keltner, a psychology professor at UC Berkeley, has been studying the influence of power on individuals. He puts people in positions of power relative to each other in different settings. He has consistently found that power, over time, makes one more impulsive, more reckless and less able to see things from others’ points of view. It also leads one to be rude, more likely to cheat on one’s spouse, less attentive to other people, and less interested in the experiences of others. Does that sound familiar? It turns out that power actually gives you brain damage. This even shows up in brain scans. Sukhvinder Obhi, a neuroscientist at McMaster University in Ontario, recently examined the brain patterns of the powerful and the not-so-powerful in a transcranial-magnetic-stimulation machine. He found that those with power are impaired in a specific neural process — mirroring — that leads to empathy. Perhaps most distressing is that in lab settings the powerful can’t address this shortcoming even if told to try. Subjects in one study were told that their mirroring impulse was the issue and to make a conscious effort to relate to the experiences of others. They still couldn’t do it. Effort and awareness made no difference in their abilities. 👉 Andrew Yang shares his experience from running for president |
6. (Marketing) Ads that perform well at short-term activation are conspicuously bad, for the most part, at building brand over the long term. But the same cannot be said for long-term brand building ads – there are many cases where an ad that builds the brand for the long term also drives short-term sales This relationship is significant. Not only is it possible for long-term brand building ads to also deliver short-term sales activation, but we can conclude that the better an ad is at brand building, the more likely it becomes that it will deliver on short-term sales too. We can refer to this as the ‘asymmetry of long and short effects’. The short of it, for the most part, does little for long-term brand building in most cases. But the long of it delivers on both fronts. And the implication for marketers is doubly significant. First, we can reframe the risk of short-termism in even clearer terms. Marketers should continue to invest in short-term sales activation because it shifts more units, usually with splendid efficiency and ROI. For those reasons, the short of it will always have a place in every marketer’s armoury. But the danger of overinvesting or only investing in short-term tactical activation now becomes all the more apparent, given the general inability of this kind of advertising investment to build brand for future sales. It leaves the brand at risk of ever-decreasing circles of demand while mopping up the current in-market potential. In contrast, the case for brand building is now strengthened further. Partly because the harmonious growth of any brand depends on the right balance of long and short investments. Partly because in most contexts the optimal budget allocation usually favours more spend on brand building than short-term activation. But also because long-term ads can also have a significant short-term impact. 👉 Marketing Week |
7. (Psychology) The paradox of goals: setting goals is a guarantee for disillusionment whether we reach the desired state or not, and yet working toward goals is an important part of evolving as a person When we talk about goals, we suggest a desired outcome attained through some form of prolonged effort. Goal-setting usually goes like this: we define a target state, and then we map our journey to get there. It all sounds sensible: goal-setting allows you to decide where you want to go, and to define how you will get there. Then, we expect to reach our goal. And this is where things start to go wrong. See, there are only two possible outcomes: either we successfully reach our goal, or we fail. It’s easy to see why failure leads to disappointment. When any outcome other than the expected one is perceived as a failure, it’s no wonder we start questioning our self-worth, wondering what went wrong, or blaming external factors — rightly so or not. Two key ingredients are required to pursue a goal: the will and the way. The will is our motivation — a reason why we want to achieve the goal, which gives us the energy to push ourselves. The way is our ability to map out the steps to take and acquire the skills we need to execute the required actions. In simple situations, or when following a default path as prescribed by society, the will and the way are fairly easy to define. For instance, your goal might be to get a promotion, and the steps might even be outlined in a corporate handbook with a clear rating scale. However, life is rarely this simple — and you may not want to live such a life where your goals are predefined and the way to achieve them is preprocessed for you. What if we don’t know where we are and where we want to go? What happens when the will and the way are unclear? The solution, inspired by nature itself, is to design growth loops by practising deliberate experimentation. A teleological approach consists in choosing your next action based on its end goal. In contrast, growth loops can be viewed as making small changes to something in an attempt to improve it. If the first attempt works, that’s great. If it doesn’t, we try again. This process sets in motion a cycle of deliberate experimentation: First, we commit to an action. Then, we execute the target behaviour. Finally, we learn from our experience and adjust our future actions accordingly. 👉 Ness Labs |
👨🏫 Quote of the week:
“To be simple means to make a choice about what’s important, and let go of all the rest. When we are able to do this, our vision expands, our heads clear, and we can better see the details of our lives in all their incredible wonder and beauty.”
John Daido Loori
🎁 Fun things to click on:
A Manifesto by Ai Weiwei — The artist’s 10 rules for life and creativity. This live feed of a watering hole in the Nabib Desert streams live 24/7. Where does your time go? Use Harvest’s Google doc template to keep track of the day.
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