SD#63: Perception, wealth, and introspection
May 28, 2023
Welcome to the 63 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,
Our brains are the most magnificent creations. They can adapt to changes and make parts of the brain take over functions from others. They process millions of things happening around us at all times and flag what needs to be most important to us. They have also adapted to processing sight and filling in details before we actually see them. Isn’t it crazy that we see things as they happen only because our brain pre-processed what should be happening 50 milliseconds in advance?
🔎 Our seven ideas this week:
1. (Psychology) Our brains unconsciously bend our perception of reality to meet our desires or expectations. And they fill in gaps using our past experiences “It’s really important to understand we’re not seeing reality,” says neuroscientist Patrick Cavanagh, a research professor at Dartmouth College and a senior fellow at Glendon College in Canada. “We’re seeing a story that’s being created for us.” Most of the time, the story our brains generate matches the real, physical world — but not always. Our brains also unconsciously bend our perception of reality to meet our desires or expectations. And they fill in gaps using our past experiences. “The dirty little secret about sensory systems is that they’re slow, they’re lagged, they’re not about what’s happening right now but what’s happening 50 milliseconds ago, or, in the case of vision, hundreds of milliseconds ago,” says Adam Hantman, a neuroscientist at Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Janelia Research Campus. If we relied solely on this outdated information, though, we wouldn’t be able to hit baseballs with bats or swat annoying flies away from our faces. We’d be less coordinated, and possibly get hurt more often. The big principles that underlie how our brains process what we see also underlie most of our thinking. Illusions are “the basis of superstition, the basis of magical thinking,” Martinez-Conde says. “It’s the basis for a lot of erroneous beliefs. We’re very uncomfortable with uncertainty. The ambiguity is going to be resolved one way or another, and sometimes in a way that does not match reality.” 👉 Vox |
2. (Marketing) Good creative is still the most important contributor to driving sales For every ad campaign they execute, brand and agency leaders have to decide on an array of variables: how much to spend on creative development and testing; whether to seek high reach or more precise targets; the context for the message; and how to add an element of recency to deliver the ad before the next expected purchase. But it wasn’t too long ago that creative was the most important part of the mix by far. It was a pretty simple formula: Good creative sold products, bad creative didn’t. In 2006, Project Apollo found that 65% of a brand’s sales lift from advertising came from the creative. While creative remains the undisputed champ in terms of sales drivers, new research from NCSolutions highlights how the other elements of factor into the overall sales picture. While the equation today involves several factors, good creative is still the most important element. The findings also highlight how media is playing a more important role than ever. Because of breakthroughs in data and technology, the elements of targeting, reach and recency can significantly affect sales outcome of a campaign. In fact, the effect of media on sales has increased to 36% from 15% over the past 11 years. 👉 Nielsen |
3. (Wealth) Which resources you consider valuable is just as important as the abundance of resources themselves. The key is optimising for the right form of wealth What comes to mind when you think of wealth? Money doesn’t have a monopoly on wealth. Wealth is defined as “an abundance of valuable material possessions or resources,” but nowhere in this definition is money listed as the singular valuable possession or resource. Money is the simplest, most obvious form of wealth because it can be quantified. Subconsciously, money becomes a competition. Like any other competition, we want to beat our peers. Make more money. Acquire more possessions. Indulge in more pleasures. Anything to win the game. What gets missed is that beyond a certain point, money is a seductive scoreboard but a poor measure of wealth. It has diminishing returns. The biggest problem with pursuing monetary wealth over everything else is the opportunity cost associated with it. How many hours will it take to scale your income from $250k to $500k? $1M? $10M? Will any amount of money ever be enough? What other forms of wealth will you have to sacrifice to get there? The key is optimising the right form of wealth. 1) Knowledge. Like money, knowledge is an accumulated form of wealth. However, unlike money, it is difficult to compare “knowledge” from person to person. 2) Time. We only become aware of the value of time when ours is almost gone. 3) Health. Much like time, we rarely think of health while we have it. But once you lose it? It is the only thing that you can think about. Confucius put it best when he said, “A healthy man wants a thousand things, a sick man only wants one.” 4) Relationships. We are social creatures, and relationships are critical for the soul. 5) Experiences. Experiences are our opportunities to cash in our other forms of wealth for something memorable. Some experiences cost money, but the most valuable experiences aren’t defined by their price tags. 👉 Young Money |
4. (Philosophy) Finding beauty within the shrubs In 1819, in the morning after a horrific March storm, John Adams was hit with an epiphany. Even though the storm had ruined his farm’s harvest, all he could see was beauty. He could see it in the utterly ordinary and plain winter landscape: “The icicles on every sprig glowed in all the luster of diamonds. Every tree was a chandelier of cut glass. I have seen a Queen of France with eighteen millions of livres of diamonds upon her person and I declare that all the charms of her face and figure added to all the glitter of her jewels did not make an impression on me equal to that presented by every shrub. The whole world was glittering with precious stones.” There’s no anguish, despair, or discontent present in the marvelling mind. There’s complete tranquillity and stillness—the height of brilliance. It’s always within our reach. Beauty surrounds us. The flame dancing atop the candle’s wick. The arm hairs standing up when it’s a little colder than usual. The brake lights moving in perfect unison when green turns to yellow. The leaves floating, swirling, and bouncing off the sidewalk on a crisp fall morning. The rising sun’s light piercing through your curtains and waking you up before the alarm was supposed to. The beautiful and the simple, the extraordinary and the mundane—never assume that you comprehend. Instead, marvel. Delight. 👉 Daily Stoic |
5. (Psychology) You could spend an infinite amount of time in introspection without emerging with any more insight than before you started – this is known as the introspection trap We think that introspection will automatically give us the answers we need, and we go for the most obvious answers — the ones that feel simple and plausible. This often results in confirmation bias, our natural tendency to interpret and remember information in a way that confirms our prior hypotheses or personal beliefs. Another way we tend to go for the easiest answers is by only considering the most recent information, a form of memory bias known as the recency effect. This is particularly the case when we practice self-reflection right after an event, instead of giving our minds some time to process the experience. For instance, let’s say that you had a fight with a colleague. You decide to grab your journal or open your daily notes to write about the conversation and how it made you feel. In that scenario, you are likely to seek justifications for why your colleague was wrong and to be influenced by the strong emotions you are still feeling after the fight that just happened. In contrast, if you wait until the next morning to practice self-reflection, you will create more distance between your present self who is journaling and your past self who went through the unpleasant event, which will allow you to consider your experience more objectively. 👉 Ness Labs |
6. (Marketing) Research shows that products with a 4 to 4.5-star rating have higher sales than the same product with a 4.5+ star rating Product purchases were most influenced by reviews with an average star rating between 4.2 and 4.5, according to research from GetApp. Products with five-star ratings were less influenced, likely due to today’s sceptical consumers’ “ too good to be true” sensibilities. Having a few less-than-perfect reviews decreases a product’s average star rating, but grows the business more. There’s a healthy cynic in us all. We know nothing is perfect. So when a consumer sees only five-star reviews, they smell something fishy, something that causes their BS meter to go off. They know that some negative opinions about a product, service or place are to be expected, and become suspicious when something is marketed as “perfect.” 👉 Tech Crunch |
7. (Psychology) Anxiety is conductive. It wants to travel from one person to another person Once a client becomes anxious, their primary goal becomes to make you anxious, because that justifies their anxiety. So if they’re freaking out and they can get you to freak out then omg we should all be freaking out! And then nothing gets done. Or worse, shit gets done but it sucks. Anxiety doesn’t produce good work. That person was probably yelling at you because someone had just finished yelling at them. So before you mention this issue to anyone on your team make sure you’re calm. Don’t repeat the pattern. Go for a walk around the block. Watch some kitten videos. Take a swig of whiskey. Smoke a bowl on the roof. Just make sure the anxiety ends with you. They say advice comes from the unlikeliest of places. The above was written in a newsletter for design students on how to deal with panicking clients. It just sounded like a thought piece we could all read. 👉 Dear Design Student |
👨🏫 Quote of the week:
“You can’t build a reputation on what you’re going to do.”
Henry Ford
🎁 Fun things to click on:
27 Life-changing micro habits that require only a few minutes. Ongoing thread of unusual party ideas (some great, some terrible). How Americans spend their money by age group.
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