SD#62: One thing a day, going through the motions and brand revitalisation
May 14, 2023
Welcome to the 62 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,
The topic of change has been in my mind a lot lately as I’ve been reading through Marcus Aurelius ‘Meditations’. They say the only constant thing in life is change and it’s inevitable, then why do we fear it so much?
“Is any man afraid of change? What can take place without change? What then is more pleasing or more suitable to the universal nature? And can you take a hot bath unless the wood for the fire undergoes a change? And can you be nourished unless the food undergoes a change? And can anything else that is useful be accomplished without change? Do you not see then that for yourself also to change is just the same, and equally necessary for the universal nature?”
🔎 Our seven ideas this week:
1. (Philosophy) Just do one thing every day Seneca wrote a lot of letters to his friend Lucilius. “Each day,” he told Lucilius, you should “acquire something that will fortify you against poverty, against death, indeed against other misfortunes, as well.” Just one thing. One nugget. And that’s what most of Seneca’s letters to his friend are about. They have a quote in them. Or a little prescription. Or a story. One little thing to make Lucilius stronger, smarter, wiser, calmer. This is the way to improvement: Incremental, consistent, humble, persistent work. Your business, your book, your career, your body—it doesn’t matter—you build them with little things, day after day. This is how the newsletter Seven Dawns was born. The idea that we can learn something new every day and improve our lives little by little. I hope you’re enjoying this journey with me. 👉 Daily Stoic |
2. (Productivity) Building a reward system is a powerful way to boost your productivity, reducing the need to rely on intrinsic motivation to complete the work you need (and want) to do It is becoming more widely accepted that having a separate incentive to reach a goal has many benefits. Far from being frivolous, rewards are considered by researchers to be “the most crucial objects for life.” Rewards are needed to encourage us to eat and drink, and even to mate. In evolutionary terms, the better we are at striving for rewards, the greater our chances of survival. Rewards that are related to the task are likely to be more effective. This is known as “proximity to the reward”, and scientists have noted that a related reward can be a particularly salient factor in enhancing motivation. It can take time and multiple adjustments to build a reward system that will work for you. For operant conditioning to occur – when an association is made between a behaviour and a consequence – the scheduling of rewards must be carefully planned to assist us in establishing new habits. A study conducted in 2018 compared the benefit of receiving frequent rewards for completing small tasks with the promise of a reward for finishing a long project. The researchers, Kaitlin Woolley and Ayelet Fishbach, found that when a small, regular reward was available, participants experienced greater interest and enjoyment in their work than those waiting for the delayed reward. Although Woolley and Fishbach demonstrated that regular rewards incentivized individuals to keep going with a project, to build a successful reward system you should first consider trying continuous reinforcement. 👉 Ness Labs |
3. (Psychology) Live differently to live better To live better means that you’ll live differently—somehow, you’ll make some kind of change. Your life will be different tomorrow than it is today. Naturally, some changes are easier than others. By regularly exposing yourself to new ideas and practices, you can learn to think and live differently. Here are a few ideas to try: – Get better at taking notes. Find a system that works for you (there’s no one-size-fits-all solution) and use it every day. If you don’t write things down, you’ll forget the majority of what you learn. Use spaced repetition to reinforce what you learn. – Think about the political party or group you most identify with, and consider what you disagree with them about. Do the same for any religious affiliation, nationality, organization, and so on. You’ll never learn to think independently if you adopt a platform without scrutinizing it. – Exercise isn’t always enjoyable, but feeling strong and healthy is. When you’re trying to decide if you should work out, think about how you’ll feel after it’s over. – Stick to a schedule most days, and once in a while, break it entirely. Both are critical to success. Some of the most ambitious people live the most boring lives—they know what they need to do, so they keep their head down and focus on that. But if you do that all the time, you risk becoming stagnant and stuck in your ways. 👉 The art of non-conformity |
4. (Copywriting) Going through the motions is the artist’s great secret for getting started If you don’t know what to write in your diary, you write the date at the top of the page as neatly and slowly as you can and things will come to you. “Going through the motions” is often thought of as a bad thing, but it is the artist’s great secret for getting started. If we just start going through the motions, if we strum a guitar, shuffle sticky notes around a conference table, or start kneading clay, the motion kickstarts our brain into thinking. Get your pen moving, and something will come out. (It might be trash, but it will be something.) 👉 Austin Kleon |
5. (Society) A 4-day-work week has been a success in virtually every dimension: performance, productivity, and overall experience 2022 has been the year of the 4-day week. It was named by CNN for its prestigious “Risk Takers” as one of the nine most important new ideas in business. Many national governments have announced sponsored trials of 4-day weeks. Interest from companies, employees, nonprofits, and researchers has surged around the world. As people struggle to recover from the pandemic, workplace stress, long hours and the pressures of daily life have emerged as urgent problems. As the most popular form of work time reduction, a 4-day, 32-hour work week has been gaining momentum in recent years. Given this growth in interest, 4 Day Week Global began supporting companies and non-profit organisations that wanted to try a 4-day, 32-hour work week with no reduction in pay. In 2022, their efforts led to the world’s first coordinated trials and the large-scale independent research effort on the impacts of a 4-day week. The results are now in: The trials have been a resounding success in virtually every dimension. Companies are extremely pleased with their performance, productivity and overall experience, with almost all of them already committing or planning to continue with the 4-day week schedule. Revenue has risen throughout the trial. Sick days and absenteeism are down. Companies are hiring. Resignations fell slightly, a striking finding during the “Great Resignation.” Employees are similarly enthusiastic. And climate impacts, while less well-measured, are also encouraging. 👉 Boston College, University College Dublin and Cambridge University |
6. (Marketing) Less glamorous, more sensitive and 9 times out of 10, more likely to prove ultimately successful, brand revitalisation is the better choice than repositioning or rebrand Repositioning is one of those business topics that everyone loves until it comes to finding successful examples of brands that have changed – completely – what they stand for in the market. If you understand the nuances of perception, if you appreciate the time it takes to actually build brand image, and if you have any conception of what branding costs, then repositioning is almost immediately wiped off the whiteboard of strategic options. Rebranding – in which we not only attempt to change the perception of the brand but also its name and livery – is an even more unpalatable option. Take all the disadvantages of repositioning and then add the massive additional disadvantage of losing all awareness, salience and familiarity, and then having to build them from scratch, and you begin to glimpse the enormous fallacy of rebranding. You do it for only one reason – because for legal reasons you have to. So, what does an organisation dissatisfied with its current brand do instead? Suck it up? No. There is a third option. Less glamorous. More sensitive. And 9 times out of 10, more likely to prove ultimately successful. The right path is brand revitalisation. 👉 Marketing Week |
7. (Society) A judge in Colombia used ChatGPT to make a court ruling, in what is apparently the first time a legal decision has been made with the help of an AI text generator This is a more newsy learning than I usually include in Seven Dawns but I thought it was damn cool. Judge Juan Manuel Padilla Garcia, who presides over the First Circuit Court in the city of Cartagena, said he used the AI tool to pose legal questions about the case and included its responses in his decision. Garcia included the chatbot’s full responses in the decision, apparently marking the first time a judge has admitted to doing so. The judge also included his own insights into applicable legal precedents, and said the AI was used to “extend the arguments of the adopted decision.” After detailing the exchanges with the AI, the judge then adopts its responses and his own legal arguments as grounds for its decision. Colombian law does not forbid the use of AI in court decisions, but systems like ChatGPT are known for giving answers that are biased, discriminatory, or just plain wrong. This is because the language model holds no actual “understanding” of the text—it merely synthesises sentences based on probability from the millions of examples used to train the system. Although the Colombian court filing indicates that the AI was mostly used to speed up drafting a decision and that its responses were fact-checked, it’s likely a sign that more is on the way. 👉 Vice |
👨🏫 Quote of the week:
“Human beings, it seems, are at their best when immersed deeply in something challenging.”
Cal Newport
🎁 Fun things to click on:
10 little-known websites that give you superpowers. Good book recommendations are hard to come by. Readow.ai uses reviews from readers to give unbiased suggestions on what to read next. It’s time to talk to yourself: The Guardian’s Chris Clarke shares his technique for problem-solving.
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