Be passionate about the territory, not the map
Just finished reading Magic Words by Jonah Berger and my notes follow.
1/ Most of us spend a significant amount of time in assembling the thoughts we want to convey, but assume the words to convey them as a given.
2/ This book – written by a professor of business – takes the view that the specific words we choose to communicate have an enormous impact on the listener.
3/ Since words paint an image in the listener’s head, the same idea presented differently can paint a very different image. ...
Most likely, you’re going to read this sentence and hit the back button.
Still here?
Good, then you’re likely to scan through a few paragraphs in this article and then give up. (Unless, you’re a long-time reader and trust that my writing is worthy of your time. More on this later)
Back in the early 1990s, when the web was getting started, websites looked like this.
Today, the same website looks like this.
The answer to the question of why the web is increasingly becoming more visual and less text-heavy will also shed light on how we decide what to spend time on, a question that creators and entrepreneurs need to be obsessed with. ...
The danger of pleasing the algorithm to go viral is that gradually you end up selling yourself to big tech companies.
This is how it works:
This loop has two sinister effects:
All this to make the richest companies and their shareholders even richer.
This is why we must refuse to be dictated by the algorithm.
It’s hard, very hard.
But what is more important than likes and retweets is having an authentic voice (irrespective of whether it’s reaching to the masses or not).
PS: It’s also worth noting that the algorithm forces dull sameness of content because machines optimize for a singular metric: time-spent. While what we need to become better thinkers (and also to save the democratic process) is diversity. ...
Good definitions are powerful. Lately, while reading The Art of Game Design, it became clear to me that the author’s definition of games makes a lot of sense. He defines games as problems that people pay to solve with either their time or money.
Unlike movies or books, games are not passive: they require an active participation and in that sense, they’re problems to be solved. And the fact that we willingly pay (with time or money) to solve those problems is fascinating.
Even though I’m not a gamer, I’m building a consumer startup in the behavior change domain and that’s pushing me to study games. Specifically, I’m interested in exploring what is that about great games that people will spend many hundreds of hours trying to master them, while most consumer experiences (including courses purchased or apps installed) have a ~90% churn of users on day 1 itself. ...
After a barrage of recommendations on my twitter, I finally ended up reading Oliver Burkeman’s Four Thousand Weeks. The central premise of the book is simple: everyone has got about four thousand weeks to live, and spending that limited time chasing efficiency is wrongheaded.
The message seems old. The entire self-help industry revolves around saying variations of it. Stay in the present. Enjoy the moment. Seize the day. But where the book differs from the rest is that it’s both poetic and philosophical. It’s the kind of the book that, once you finish, you end up mumbling: gosh, I should have written it. ...
As an entrepreneur, money is obviously a massive motivation for why you’re doing what you’re doing. However, it’s essential to understand that money is not wealth.
Wealth is stuff we want and by that logic, people can be wealthy even if they don’t have a lot of money. In fact, because wealth is anything that is directly desired and attained, even animals and insects can be wealthy.
The reason money is so popular because it allows us to acquire (certain types of) wealth. Money will be worthless if what you desire cannot be bought, or if there’s nothing you desire. Because most of what we desire can be had for cheap in modern society, the importance of money in our society is reinforced by people who are excessively driven by status. ...
We want to be successful with our decisions. Even though failure is often glamorized, nobody wants it on purpose. Everyone wishes to be successful when they’re starting a company, launching a product, hiring a leader or even while buying a house.
It may sound obvious, but the bedrock of good decisions is defining what good means before you execute on a decision.
Here’s why it’s important to define a clear, objective and unambiguous criteria before making any decision. First, without a commitment to an objective criterion, your brain will latch onto your how you’re feeling to decide whether the outcome of the project is good or bad. These emotions are influenced by all sorts of subconscious cognitive biases. In the end, you will end up picking data points that support your emotional inclination while ignoring the other data points. ...
This one is a dated book – it describes advertising in the age when digital channels didn’t exist. But that doesn’t make it irrelevant.
Rather, the basic principles that made a great ad in the TV/print era remain the same. Consumer psychology is shaped by a million years of evolution, so while mediums change, what makes people buy stuff doesn’t.
Posters ...
Startups are like heat seeking missiles, except they seek profit and live in a multidimensional world where one mistake means missing the target by a mile.
Startups are hard because they require several things to go right simultaneously. It’s not sufficient to get one thing right, an entrepreneur must solve this multidimensional puzzle perfectly.
There are many smaller but important dimensions, but here are the biggest ones that need to be just right for a business to succeed:
Remember: because so many things have to go right, most successful entrepreneurs either get lucky on all these aspects or they have a unique insight or expertise about one of the above aspects that others don’t have. ...
1/ The biggest issue with social media is the bootstrap problem. People with 0 followers get no interactions on their content, so have no incentive to publish. With AI, you have hundreds of personalities ready to give relevant replies to any posted content.
2/ And since AI replies can be made to be super-relevant, and since the majority of people don’t have many followers, it turns out that most people will start deriving a lot of value from feedback they get from AI.
3/ Those who say bots are annoying are missing the point that increasingly it’ll be impossible to distinguish between bot vs humans online. ...