Sumit Gupta

Book Review

brain care coaching commitment communication conflict conflicts conversation culture deployyourself deploy yourself emotional intelligence emotions empathy energy feedback freedom future gold habits hope john maxwell language leadership lessons listening performance perspective preparation productive productivity psychological safety purpose questions relationships resolution ryan holiday seth godin simon sinek strengths struggle team trust values words

  • Brave New Work (2019) by Aaron Dignan – Book Review & Summary

    Legacy Vs. Evolutionary OS

    The world has changed. So has the working culture. The global marketplace today, is more dynamic and is constantly reinventing itself, at a pace faster than it did merely two decades ago. However, many organizations are still using the same old operating systems that were inherited over a century ago from factories and industries. 

    Brave New Work (2019) by Aaron Dignan gives a unique perspective to creating and sustaining organizational change. Using case studies and by offering suggestions, the author gives organizations subtle guidelines that can help them move from an outdated OS to a more flexible, human-centered, and open system of functioning. 

    The Old Traditional OS

    The story of the organizational setup began a little after World War II. A field manual commissioned by the director of the agency that later morphed into the CIA laid down guidelines intended to destabilize commerce and communities. It was a manual that ‘waged a war of simple sabotage’. The manual, given to citizens that were friendly with the Allies had a list of actions that interfered with organizations and production, setting up complicated bureaucratic systems, adhering to regulations at all costs, and denying shortcuts that would help speed up the process of decisions, etc.

    Looking back, the manual of sabotage seems like a regular workday today! Whether intended or not, this structure of organizations seems like sabotage and is having negative effects on companies.

    Firstly, it has affected the lifespan of companies, where a company spending about 60 years on the S&P 500, now has a lifespan of 10 years only.

    Secondly, the return on assets – the profit amount a company earns with what it owns – a hard-to-fudge performance metric, has gone down. Thirdly, despite technological advances, the production per hour is lower than it was twenty years ago, signaling a leveling off in production growth.

    While economists are scratching their heads over the reasons for these negative effects, for the employees on the ground the answer is always – bureaucracy!

    Brave New Work (2019) by Aaron Dignan

    Debt Is Dragging Businesses Down

    FAVI, the European auto manufacturer, exports auto parts to China when all other European auto part manufacturers have faced the brunt of Chinese competition. However, FAVI too struggled with bureaucracy earlier.

    For example, if a worker manning a machine had to replace worn-out gloves, the worker had to ensue a time-taking bureaucratic process of showing the manager the gloves that issued a permission slip after verification of its wear-and-tear. The worker would then have to wait with the permission slip at the place where gloves were kept to get them, then take the new gloves and then slip back to the manager for signatures.

    This process wasted about 30 minutes of a workers time before the new CEO stepped in. If one compares the price of the gloves (5 Euros), to the cost of leaving the machine unmanned for 30 minutes (5 thousand Euros), one can understand the concept of organizational debt.

    To simply put it, organizational debt amounts to all the redundant procedures and policies that may have once served a purpose. Often organizational debt is a response to a problem, where policies and procedures are set to rectify it. However, such policies and procedures that are mere attempts of having perfect order lead to disorders, resulting in a number of self-sabotaging rules and regulations affecting organizations negatively.

    This fix-with-rules habit is a century old, and breaking it needs understanding.

    Assumptions Of Legacy Organizations

    Every organization inherits assumptions that guide and underlie the system of working. This traditional, inherited Legacy OS is made up of structures, norms, and practices like performance reviews, budgets, managers that are so prevalent they are almost invisible. Moreover, in the fight between popularity and quality, the popular Legacy OS never gets questioned.

    The traditional Legacy OS, born over a century ago, as a result of less efficient factories, a lack of standard instructions for workers, and the idiosyncratic techniques that veteran machinists had. In the system, the novices learned on the job and adopted the techniques and procedures of those above them.

    Production was artisanal in nature and slow work was incentivized due to the reduction in per-piece rate if workers increased rates of production. Thus productivity was limited to avoid per-piece rate cuts.

    To this mix, Fredrick Winslow Taylor added his measuring experiments that gave birth to the legacy OS and revolutionized the world of work. He measured each and every step in the production process and ascertained exactly how long it should take to produce a given part.

    Then he offered workers a substantial raise, albeit with a catch. The 15-30% raise would only be given if the workers did exactly what he said just as he said it. And thus, the foundation of the assumption of the Legacy OS was laid with the sacrifice of employee autonomy – all for higher pay. This OS – where the managers think and the workers execute – was preserved as the business common sense in the following decades.

    Complex, Not Complicated!

    What is the difference between complicated and complex? Aren’t they synonyms? While mostly they are used synonymously, they indeed have starkly different meanings. 

    For example, a complicated system refers to a causal system, where its component parts have a cause-effect relationship. For example, if a cog is taken out of a watch, it will stop working. Put it back in its place, the watch will work again. Causal systems are predictable. One can expect the same results. Thus, an automobile engine is an example of a causal system.

    Complex systems on the other hand are dispositional. One can guess what they do, but one can never be sure. One can’t simply read a manual to understand how they work. One has to learn to read and understand the quirks of the disposition of these systems. Traffic is an example of a complex system, as is the weather.

    The Legacy OS treats organizations like complicated systems, assuming that the ‘right’ rules of work can be scientifically understood. However, the people within an organization are complex. Therefore, one can only hope to manage them, and this is the fundamental issue with the Legacy OS.

    Roundabouts, Not Traffic Signals!

    Signals and roundabouts were designed to tackle the same complex system – traffic – attempting to maximize smooth traffic flow and minimize accidents. Nevertheless, the underlying assumptions for both systems are very different.

    While a traffic signal tells the people what to do – stop at the red and go at the green, roundabouts assume the opposite. The rules of the roundabout are to follow the flow of traffic and yield to those already in the circle. However, navigation in the circle and application of these rules is up to the drivers.

    Conceptually, a roundabout is a better organizational system than a traffic signal. They reduce delays in traffic by 89%, reduce fatal collisions by 90%, are fully functional during power cuts, and are more cost-effective by a margin of $5000 to $10000. However, unlike roundabouts, traffic signals are more common in the US, with about over 300,000 traffic signals, versus one roundabout for every 1118 intersections. They are popular because they are the norm. They are familiar and people assume that they are effective.

    Legacy OS’s are more like traffic signals – popular, yet not as effective. They are the norm. They assume that people cannot be trusted and need to be told what to do, and be directed.

    What if there was a better organizational system? Without categorical rules, hierarchical structures, micromanagement, and mistrust? A system that allowed people to flow freely, use their judgment to navigate complex work issues. What if there was an Evolutionary Organization structure?

    Evolutionary Organizations

    The concept of Evolutionary Organization, though sensible, is difficult to achieve. Why?

    Because it is difficult to shift from a legacy habit to an evolutionary practice! Making the shift to an Evolutionary Organization requires an understanding of two main concepts.

    • Complexity Conscious – Evolutionary Organizations are complexity conscious. They are mindful of the complexity of business, as well as global complexity and human complexity.
    • People Positive – Evolutionary Organizations believe that when people are empowered, they have the capability of dealing with complexities.

    The performance turnaround of the USS Santa Fe under the command of David Marquet is a classic example of these concepts in action.

    Before Marquet took over, the USS Santa Fe was known as the worst sub in the fleet. Its turnaround to the best was a result of an unorthodox approach. He encouraged his crew to think about what the decision should be. As the crew got accustomed to his approach, they were able to make rational decisions and shoulder responsibility without needing to blindly follow the chain of command.

    He encouraged them to learn and experiment. He decentralized control. He enabled the crew to tackle complex problems with quick solutions. And he encouraged ownership of work.

    He applied the concepts of complexity Conscious and People Positive.

    There is no rulebook, however, for making the shift from a Legacy OS to an Evolutionary OS. The idea is to fight the dogmatism of the Legacy OS, and hence each organization has to cut its own path.

    Structure And Purpose

    The concept of Evolutionary Organizations can be applied in different domains. Marquet, for example, successfully applied it to the domain of authority.

    Similarly, the largest tomato processor in the world, The Morning star Company applied the concept of Evolutionary Organization to structure. Every year, it asks employees to write a document mapping their responsibilities to their co-workers. The co-workers then review the document, offering improvements where needed, thereby replacing top-down directives with community suggestions.

    The company also allows employees to set their own salaries. However, the suggested salaries are also subject to the same review. This change in the structure of the organization has enabled the company to consistently grow in the past 20 years with an average revenue net of over $700 million per year.

    Similarly, the Dutch homecare provider Buurtzorg has a core team of about 50 employees that manage a nurse workforce of about 14000. How do they manage it?

    They have split the 14000 nurses into teams of 12. These teams manage themselves and take care of everything ranging from recruitment to scheduling. The company functions as a collective of small businesses that work towards the same goal of providing personal and quality home care solutions.

    The concept can similarly, be applied to the domain of purpose too. To achieve that, a company has to be conducive to flourishing and human happiness, or eudemonic. Secondly, it should be translatable into concrete tasks.

    Tesla’s mission, ‘to accelerate the world’s transition to sustainable energy” is eudaemonic and inspirational, however, because it is vague, it is difficult to translate into action.

    Facebook, on the other hand, has developed a system that is both actionable and aspirational. Every six months, the people at Facebook discuss where they want to be in the next 30 years. Then they discuss what can they do in the next six months to bridge the distance between their goal. This exercise helps them to focus on the present while keeping the bigger picture in mind.

    Meetings And Membership

    The Evolutionary OS can be applied to the domains of meetings and memberships too.

    The average employee attends about 62 meetings in a month. The average employee also considers half of these meetings a waste of time. The Evolutionary OS introduces the concept of the meeting moratorium as a veritable practice. In this technique, the organization requires to cancel all meetings for two weeks.  While it might seem reckless and impossible, it has certainly helped the author.

    In one case the author and a team he worked with decided to discontinue their monthly strategy reviews. This decision led them to save about $3 million per year that was getting wasted on boring, worthless meetings that no one really liked.

    Implementing the meeting moratorium helped the author and his team do 18 hours per week, which they took 45 hours per week to achieve in meetings before it was implemented.

    The trick is to ascertain the pain points of canceling meetings for two weeks. Where does a meeting help? What does one miss without meetings? While reintroducing meetings one as to ensure that the meeting has a structure and a clear purpose. Without these, the meeting is surely unnecessary.

    While applying the Evolutionary OS to the domain of membership, one has to take a look at hiring practices. Who gets to be a member of the organization?

    While onboarding a new hire, it is essential to check whether the new employee’s passion and personality match with the environment and the company’s mission. Simultaneously, one has to be careful not to hire a culture fit. An Evolutionary OS needs people who will contribute to the culture of the organization, and not just fit within it. A culture fit almost always results in underperformance later on.

    Continuity Of Change

    Most leaders look at change as a journey from one point to another. They follow a roadmap, chart out landmarks, and pinpoint a well-defined goal. However, this practice is often misleading.

    The truth is that journeys are sequential and assimilative, where the transformation is gradual. Change works in similar ways and isn’t a series of steps marked on a map.

    Organizations, thus, need to change the way they change. Rather than the top-down, bureaucratic hierarchy that people are used to, change should be continuous and participatory.

    This can be ensured with a technique called looping. It includes three looped stages, where the last stage leads back to the first. The stages are – identifying tensions, proposing practices, and conducting experiments. These loops can happen either on a big or a small scale, slowly or quickly.

    For example, a team identifies a ‘tension’ that ‘only the loud voices in the team get heard. To clear this tension, a practice of asking every member of the team ‘how is your mood today?’ at the beginning of the meeting could ensure every person in the meeting is included in the present and has their say.

    If this practice doesn’t work, one has to keep proposing practices and conducting experiments until the tension is resolved.

    Unfortunately, there is no way to list down every tension encountered in an organization. Neither does one have a list of every practice that works for all tensions, or for all organizations. Each tension is unique as is each organization, simply because it is a complex system. It is mostly a trial and error system, where if each member of the organization accepts and understands that organizations are complex systems,  success isn’t unachievable.

    Conclusion

    The modern corporate structures work on an inherited, hierarchical Legacy OS that aims to control. This controlling system often thwarts success. Corporates should move to an Evolutionary OS, modeled on the concept of roundabouts, where control is reduced and the decision to follow the rules is discretionary.

    To implement the Evolutionary OS, organizations should decide to which domain the system should be applied. Finally, changing the way they change is key!

  • Battling Resistance – The War of Art by Steven Pressfield – Book Review & Summary

    Battling Resistance

    When we set out to pursue a creative passion, our own self-doubt and fears thwart us, most often. Steven Pressfield’s The War Of Art addresses these self-limiting creative battles and examines the negative forces of resistance that keep us from realizing our dreams and full potential.

    Resistance

    In the context of our abilities to realise our full potential and fulfill dreams, resistance is the negative force that opposes creativity. It is that feeling of inhibition that prevents one from achieving success in the pursuit of their goals.

    Resistance accompanies anything that is a deviation from one habitual routine. It is a negative, opposing force against anything new. For example, if a person wishes to start a new venture, the voice of resistance will tell him that the new venture is a risk and that he is safe in their current job. Resistance makes one procrastinate when one wishes to start a new diet and refrain from junk food.

    Feeling resistance is normal. It affects everyone and is impersonal and universal in nature. Additionally, resistance doesn’t discriminate between interests, for example, a person will naturally feel resistance whether they want to start a new venture, go on a diet, or even help in charity. Resistance, in fact, also affects experienced people and isn’t a personal target.

    For example, Henry Fonda the actor, even at a later age, would feel like throwing up before a theatre performance. His fear and resistance was present even when he was an accomplished actor.

    Resistance manifests in a number of ways including procrastination, fear of failure, or self-doubt. Everyone can overcome resistance. Commitment to one’s craft, refocusing on one’s dreams and acceptance of the presence of resistance are ways one can overcome resistance. Additionally, challenging it is necessary and is a natural part of one’s journey.

    The War Of Art by Steven Pressfield

    Using Resistance To One’s Advantage

    The one greatest passion that is soul-satisfying that everyone experiences are called ‘one’s calling’. 

    Everyone leads two different lives – their ‘lived’ lives, and their ‘unlived’ lives. While the ‘lived’ lives are the ones that people live day-in and day-out, their ‘unlived’ lives consist of unrealized, unfulfilled dreams.

    What thus, makes a person wait to follow their unfulfilled dreams?

    Resistance is the main culprit here. All the feelings of self-doubt, procrastination, etc. that prevent one from fulfilling dreams and desires are a product of resistance. For example, one’s unfulfilled dream in life of becoming a novelist could be thwarted by fear of failing to meet expectations of self and of reader, or of rejection from publishers. Such fears may even stop a person from writing at all.

    However, one should keep in mind that fear isn’t bad. It shows how passionately one feels about their dream, and can be an indicator of the fact that the dream is worth pursuing. Resistance should be used to one’s advantage. As mentioned above, even those who are accomplished in their professional fields feel fear and thus resistance.

     The host of Inside the Actor’s Studio often askes Hollywood actors that appear as guests as to why they choose certain roles. Many have answered that they choose the roles that they are afraid to do. their fear thus shows passion and acknowledges the fact that those roles are worth pursuing.

    Similarly, everyone can use fear and resistance to motivate themselves and to orient themselves towards fulfilling dreams that they are passionate about.

    Fighting Resistance – Be A Professional

    Pursuing a dream is like doing a full-time job. Working on a dream for a few spaced-out hours doesn’t work. One has to be creative while deciding how to utilize their time while planning and pursuing their dream. 

    For example, Quentin Tarantino used to direct small projects in his free time during his regular job at a small video rental store. He never attended film school. Once, one of his projects got destroyed in a fire. Rather than thinking he failed, he considered that project as a learning experience, even though he couldn’t finish the film.

    Such dedication amounts to professionalism. Not giving up despite a setback proves commitment to craft.

    Another way to fight resistance is to transfer skills from one’s regular job to one’s dream, even if there are stark differences between the two. For example, the skills of self-discipline that one hone during a regular job can be applied to one’s dream too. For example, a person can work for a set amount of time daily on their dream, or keep working even when there are distractions and do the best to avoid them. A dream is after all a passion. And its pursuit amounts to pleasure and fulfillment. Therefore, when one can push oneself to work full-time for a day job that isn’t fun, powering oneself to work on dreams shouldn’t be as difficult.

    Somerset Maugham, the writer, when asked if he followed a schedule, replied that he only writes when inspiration strikes and that fortunately, it strikes every morning at nine. Therefore, it is proof that professionals, rather than waiting for inspiration to strive to realize their dreams, work hard to achieve them.

    Fighting Resistance – Knowing Oneself And The Craft

    Feeling self-doubt and fear is normal. Thus, one must learn to fight them in order to eliminate them. And in order to eliminate these negative feelings, it is essential to know oneself and to know one’s calling. 

    Furthermore, one has to learn what their limitations are. Without knowing limitations, one tends to expect too much from oneself, often expect that one can do everything by oneself. This is when a person fails to seek help from others, especially when they need it. One should surround oneself with other like-minded professionals who will be able to help. 

    Famous director, Terry Gilliam, works on solo projects, as well as collaborates with others as a member of Monty Python. He once advised Tarantino (an upcoming filmmaker then) that being a good director means knowing when to delegate rather than doing everything on one’s own. It means knowing that others – actors, directors of photography, producers, etc. – are talented enough to be trusted with work. A great director knows limits and also knows that these areas of limitations can be eliminated with the contributions of others.

    Additionally, a professional never shies away from seeking guidance and help. Recognizing the need for, and accepting guidance can help one develop one’s craft. This is the reason why Tiger Woods, even at the peak of his professional career, still had a trainer.

    Finally, one has to keep the process of learning one’s craft ongoing even when one reach the heights of their career. True professionals master the process of learning constantly. Madonna, for instance, has had a successful career in pop music for decades because, despite her success, she has kept reinventing herself and constantly learning to ensure that her music, songs, or performances are never predictable and boring.

    Organization, Patience, And Facing Adversity

    Resistance in many ways remains a constant. In fact, at times, it can even increase as one tries to fight it. For example, a person who wishes to be a novelist has successfully managed to develop self-discipline in writing daily. Yet the feelings of resistance don’t go or diminish.

    Thus for the novelist, the trick to weaken resistance would mean to be organized, patient, and persistent. John Updike the author embodied this concept in his writing process. He would write daily, while pacing his writing evenly through the process, without setting unrealistic goals.

    Therefore, as Updike did, one must be able to have patience and focus on the process rather than the end result or try to achieve it quickly. Such focus will help weaken resistance and patience will deliver good results.

    One must also accept the fact that one could have to face some adversity on the path of realizing one’s dream. Challenges, thus, should be perceived as steps that need to be overcome in order to reach goals.

    At the start of her career, very few believed that a black woman, Oprah Winfrey, could successfully host a talk show and gain a following. When the show started, it was a white-male-dominated field, and delving into the personal lives of guests was uncommon. She, however, remained dedicated to her dream and vision and ended up creating the most-watched morning talk show in America, within a few months. She also helped bring issues such as bullying and obesity into the limelight, which were not openly discussed issues.

    Oprah used the criticisms that she faced into motivation to keep persevering and work harder.

    Counteracting Resistance – Positive Mental Forces

    Fortunately, along with the negative resistance, one also has certain positive forces that help one achieve dreams. A muse is one form of positive force. Homer’s The Odyssey discusses nine muses that are goddesses that inspire creativity within artists.

    These muses present dedicated artists with creative ideas and help them fight resistance. Homer himself called upon these muses to guide him to tell Odysseus’ struggle.

    Thus, one has to be able to invoke their muses to help counteract resistance. Dedication and hard work are the only ways to achieve it. Another positive force is described by Plato as the ‘madness’ that grips a craftsman or an artist to create. Such forces are outside one’s control and yet help in defeating resistance. This ‘madness’ is one’s super-charged creativity that shakes an artist loose from the hold of daily routine, makes one get possessed by the object of one’s creation, and helps counteract resistance.

    Counteracting Resistance – The Battle Against Hierarchy

    Hierarchy is deeply woven into the social structure, whether it is in school, Hollywood, or workplace, etc. Hierarchy is always opposed to change and dictates a fixed position for those within it. Hierarchies define people and people define themselves within the hierarchies in their lives. Thus, hierarchies are also restrictive.

    For example, organizations restricting creative freedoms to employees often see these employees struggling to find meaning or enjoyment in their work.

    Hierarchy forces people to stick within roles and censor actions. Hierarchies also force people to place success within their set rules. People who conform to hierarchies often view others within the hierarchy as means to achieving goals, rather than as individuals.

    Professionals do not conform to or get defined by hierarchies. Contrarily, they battle it and stay true to their creativity and craft. Such individuals work for the love of their craft and not for others.

    For example, Steve Jobs, who was a thorough professional, a perfectionist, and a staunch believer of his vision, insisted on making the decisions about everything, right from the design of his products, to how customers would interact with them. Apple was thus born out of his dedication to his vision. 

    Professionals thus should work to please themselves and aim to be proud of their own work. Only then will they excel at it.

    Commitment To A Territory

    All true professionals have their own territories to work. Arnold Schwarzenegger, former Mr. Universe, actor, bodybuilder, and politician, has his gym as his territory.

    A territory is where a professional feels sustenance, satisfaction, and challenge as he/she works. Schwarzenegger would feel extremely satisfied and accomplished after his gym routine. Additionally, it is the space and place to which one lays their claim through hard work, as Schwarzenegger claimed his gym as his territory for hard work. It is an endless resource for professionals, wherein only the amount of effort one puts in defines the limit of how much one’s territory gives back.

    Woody Allen, unlike Schwarzenegger, claimed the realm of film as his territory. His movies and his creative input defined his territory and his territory defined his ability to create, work hard and expand.

    Professionals who define their territory thus, also have the ability to change the larger field they work in. For example, Steve Jobs and BillGates, who made computing their territory in the early days of computers, were able to change the world.

    Conclusion

    Negative forces like resistance to pursuing dreams are present in everyone’s life. Overcoming forces of resistance such as self-doubt and fear is essential to be able to achieve goals and successfully realize dreams. One can overthrow resistance by learning to use it as an advantage, by learning first to be a professional, to know one’s own abilities and the craft they wish to pursue, and countering resistance by using positive mental forces.

    Finally, it is imperative that one realizes and accepts that resistance is a natural process and that one has to face it. Being organized and having patience will help fight resistance and succeed in achieving personal goals.

  • Loserthink: How Untrained Brains Are Ruining America by Scott Adams – Book Review & Summary

    What’s Loserthink?

    The individual mind is often inundated with ideas, opinions, and unproductive thinking habits that are continuously bombarding us with manipulative data and information. Additionally, the mind is also highly influenced by the ego, depriving us of the capability of rational thinking. 

    Scott Adams coined the term ‘loserthink’ to describe all kinds of unproductive thinking habits. Furthermore, his book Loserthink: How Untrained Brains Are Ruining America (2019) delves into this mindset with references from psychology, history, business, and global affairs to understand how and why the human mind is increasingly affected by such irrationalities and the pitfalls of unproductive thinking habits.

    The Double-Edged Sword – The Ego 

    To begin with, consider a scenario where you are at a party with capable and influential people. It isn’t unnatural to feel intimidated by the capabilities of the people surrounding you. Yet the thought never crosses your mind that each and every one of those people might have amped up their egos and could be putting up a performance to simply fit in with the crowd. 

    Some people’s performances are closer to their true selves; nevertheless many others simply fake it. How do they do it?

    The answer lies in thinking of the ego as a tool rather than a part of the personality. For example, in the above situation, if you aren’t able to build confidence to match the crowd, you can learn to fake it!

    Simply faking confidence – or believing that you are more valuable than what your achievements indicate – can improve one’s chance at romance, social, professional, and athletic performance, and even help in acing the job interview. Tuning up one’s ego a few notches up, especially in situations where the ego will work in one’s favor can help a person along the path to success because confidence and success often go hand-in-hand.

    To learn how to turn the ego into a tool, one has to understand that body language plays a vital role. One can project a strong ego by maintaining eye contact, having a good posture, and owning the space. Such body language helps to exude confidence. In turn, the confidence you exude will make people perceive you as confident and they will treat you with respect, boosting confidence further.

    Ego, however, is a double-edged sword, and tuning it up at the wrong time and place can make one seem arrogant. It is very easy to lose control of the ego, and decisions that are led by the ego are a form of loserthink!

    For example, when he started the Dilbert comic strip, Adams used funny ideas from all aspects of life. However, fans started writing to him that his office comics were the best. He then reshaped Dilbert as a workplace comic making it the national success it is today. However, had he let his ego dictate decisions, and stuck to what he personally thought worked, he would have never seen success as a cartoonist and then as an entrepreneur.

    Loserthink: How Untrained Brains Are Ruining America
    Loserthink: How Untrained Brains Are Ruining America by Scott Adams

    Overreliance On history

    It is natural to look for guidance in past patterns. However, overreliance on history can plus one deep into a trap, as historic patterns aren’t as reliable as we think.

    History is an account of the victorious. What has been written is almost always a one-sided account, and thus, there isn’t an objective interpretation of historical events. There are many versions of the same historical event because they are dictated by whose account it is.

    For example, one account states that European settlers in America were gracious enough to let the Native Americans live for free on the reservation because they were too primitive. However, from the point of view of Native Americans, it could be said that the European colonists invaded their land and stole it with mass genocide. Yet it is wise to remember that every nation teaches its citizens a version of their history that portrays them in a good light.

    If we consider the idea of the American philosopher George Santayana that ‘history repeats itself’, believers and followers of this principle, actually let the past dictate their decisions. This eventually leads to unproductive thinking.

    When Adams wrote The Dilbert Principle, his first non-fiction bestseller book, he thought that Santayana’s ‘history repeats itself’ would hold true for him too. Therefore, he jumped at his publisher’s idea of using the success of his first book to publish another book, close to his first one. The book sold only half the numbers of the first one.

    Adams learned that readers of non-fiction books – unlike fiction readers who return to the same author time and again due to the style of writing – prefer to move on to other topics, believing that have learned all about the topic. This experience made Adams wary of letting the past influence his decisions.

    The Importance Of Micro steps

    Whenever we are faced with an obstacle, ‘loserthink’ can make the task at hand seem more impossible to achieve. Getting overwhelmed can tend to psych one out and lead to loserthink. It’s a vicious cycle; nevertheless, it can be broken. The answer lies in micro steps.

    Micro steps involve getting oneself busy with the smallest of tasks when the seemingly huge obstacles can prove to be immobilizing. Let’s consider that a person is feeling overwhelmed by the responsibility of a massive project. The person just can’t seem to find the will to get up and get moving with the work at hand and feels anxiety and exhaustion at the mere thought of it.

    Here, the person can, perhaps, begin with the smallest of movement – moving the fingers of the hand. Once this is accomplished, the renewed sense of agency can be used to propel the next micro-step of moving the feet and so on, until the person can finally get up to work.

    Often, the obstacles are bigger than simply mustering the will to get up and get going. Yet, applying the logic of micro-steps works. It works because even the smallest step can gear one into action and start the process of change of mindset, towards productivity.

    Adams understood the value of micro-steps when he had decided to pursue a career as a cartoonist in 1988. Not knowing anything about being a cartoonist and spending his entire career in the corporate world seemed like a huge obstacle. 

    However, rather than think about the looming larger picture, Adams simply went out to a supply store one day and bought pens and paper. A few days later, he tried his hand at drawing. After that, he resolved to practice every day for an hour before work. While he couldn’t see the fruits of his microsteps as he took them, a year later he saw the fruits of his microsteps when Dilbert started running in newspapers.

    Clarifications Are Essential

    Adams, a public figure, and having a large following on sites like Twitter, experiences misrepresentation of his words regularly. He has been accused of being a liar, a racist, a neo-Nazi supporter, and even been criticized for supporting President Trump. However, despite the allegations, Adams is understanding the fact that the Fourth Estate is prone to misinterpretation.

    He believes the reason behind this is that fact that while humans consider themselves good at the thought guessing game, no one can read minds! Therefore, believing that one knows what another thinks is a form of loserthink too!

    Hence, it is vital to wait for at least 48 hours for some sort of clarification, before reacting. For example, in 2018, Roseanne Barr, a comedian, and actress, commented that Valerie Jarrett, the former advisor to President Barrack Obama looked like ‘an offspring of a Planet of the Apes character and the Muslim Brotherhood’. 

    Barr’s Tweet was viewed as an intentional racial slur especially because Jarrett was part African-American born in Iran. Despite Barr’s push-back that she was unaware of Jarrett’s background, her career was ruined and she was called a racist. According to Adams, however, if the critics had considered the 48-hour rule, they would have probably considered Barr’s ‘ignorance’.

    Adams also believes that what a person actually means to say should hold more weight than what others think they said. After all, the actions of a person matter more in the end, and thus, lashing out without clarifications is loserthink!

    Looking Into The Future Without Loserthink

    We are constantly bombarded with gloom-and-doom news that often makes us worry about the future. Issues such as unemployment, climate change or the healthcare crisis can create a state of anxiety, especially with overactive media adding fuel to the fire.

    However, this constant worrying, especially about the matters that one can do nothing about is loser think! If we take unemployment for example, while the world worries about robots and AI displacing low-skilled workers, technological and economical developments have shown that the end of unemployment is fast approaching. 

    Similarly, technology could help alleviate the negative effects of climate change to a certain degree. The world is taking steps to brainstorm towards the development of technologies that can help in climate change. For example, the British businessman Richard Branson has collaborated with the Indian Government to award $3 million to anyone who comes up with an effective form of air-conditioning that everyone can afford, considering that as the planet warms further, it will become a critical requirement.

    On the other hand, partially funded by Bill Gates, the Canadian company Carbon Engineering is developing technology to make jet fuel by converting carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Telemedicine and smartphone health tests are turning healthcare more affordable and easily available.

    It is one’s own choice as to which side of the coin one wishes to see and believe – the positive one, or the negative one that leads to loserthink!

    Conclusion

    Unproductive thinking or loserthink is a trap. And sadly, people fall into it without even knowing that they are stuck there. Loserthink can be seen in many forms. For example, actions and behavior that are influenced by one’s ego, believing in and letting past events and history dictate decisions, reacting without clarifications, and finally worrying about the future, especially, that which is out of one’s control, are all forms of loserthink.

    These unproductive thought patterns can be battled by being aware of what loserthink is and how it works. Changing one’s perception is the first step towards rational thinking and winning the war against loserthink. 

  • Perennial Seller by Ryan Holiday – Book Review & Summary

    Eternally Saleable

    It is true that each and every individual leaves a mark of his or her existence – in whatever small way – in the world. Whether it is a book written, a work of art, political or academic legacy, an app created, or even working on a project for one’s company, each and every individual should endeavor to make their work and creation eternal.

    However, in today’s times, the constant need and want for something new poses a challenge to ensuring that one’s work is perennial. This fact is true especially in the field of marketing, where creativity is a constant requirement, and the need to thrive and survive is at the forefront. How do company’s, therefore, ensure that they create brands that are everlasting?

    Ryan Holiday’s Perennial Seller (2017) is a guide that shows the way to perennial selling, how to ensure creativity trumps constant newness making products, services, and campaigns last.

    The Hard Graft

    It was earlier touted that the success of any product lies in 80% marketing and 20% creativity. However, this notion has been proved wrong time and again. It is in fact creativity that ensures a long-standing, perennial product. Additionally, creativity needs a lot of hard work and one’s product needs to be outstanding from the word go!

    No one has learned this lesson harder than Microsoft. The failure of their Zune MP3 player and the search engine Bing proves that marketing can never cover the shortcoming of a product. On the other hand, Microsoft Office has constantly improved over time, becoming a 25–year long, perennial success, simply due to the excellent software design.

    However, having a stunner product needs creating a stunner product. One might have the best award-winning ideas, but things will never fly off the shelf if ideas aren’t put into action. Sarah Silverman, the writer and comedian aptly said, “You needn’t wait for someone’s approval to get going: just write!”

    How does on therefore, get into the grind, to combine creativity and hard work and turn that great idea into something concrete?

    Perennial Seller by Ryan Holiday
    Perennial Seller by Ryan Holiday

    Sacrifice And Motivation Lead To Success

    Actual concrete results do not happen with the right kind of motivation. Without that strong sense of purpose no professional football player ever made it to the starry leagues. The same applies to creative work. It needs the push of purpose and motivation to overcome obstacles. If a writer with the purpose of creating change and goodwill in the world doesn’t find success in the books or articles he writes, he wouldn’t simply give up! He would strive to get creative and write better because the drive of his worthwhile agenda will motivate him.

    One’s sense of purpose can be fuelled by certain desperate situations too. A person who has desperate to provide for his family’s survival will be driven with a sense of purpose to work hard. Desperation fuels success, but it needs the willingness to make sacrifices too.

    The professional football player, for example, has the choice of chilling out with friends, partying, and enjoying their time sipping beers, but they choose to sweat it out in the gym and ensure that they keep fit. Similarly, writers and artists sacrifice by shutting themselves out from the world to achieve their creative successes.

    Thus sacrifices are vital to ensuring that hard work pays off.

    How to Be A Successful Artist

    It is a paradoxical fact that there is more to being creative than creativity alone. Writers don’t find success in simply writing a book and shipping it off to a publisher. It needs hard work, and one has to become one’s own CEO.

    Often, creative people leave the marketing, promotion, and editing of their work to others. However, that is possible only when they either have enough money to do it or are already famous for their work.

    The world is an extremely competitive market. For example, considering more than 300,000 books are published in the US yearly; writers have their hard work cut out. They will need to be more than geniuses and become their own CEOs to ensure successful strategies for their work to stand out.

    While the responsibilities of success rest on one’s own shoulders, one also needs a third-party perspective in the form of an editor. This editor should be a professional in the field and be someone who can be trusted with their honesty. For example, musicians can turn to composers and sound engineers, writers can seek assistance from actual editors, and athletes need a coach to guide them to success.

    People often tend to miss this vital step of employing an editor to oversee and critique their work. For example, the book To Kill A Mockingbird, by Harper Lee is considered a timeless classic. However, the book began its journey as an imperfect manuscript in the hands of editor Tay Hohof, a person Lee trusted. Hohof was a brutal critique. She ensured that Lee reworked the text and demanded that it was made more coherent and structured. Her editorial efforts made the book the classic it is today and Lee a renowned name.

    Testing To Perfection

    People tend to relax, as they inch closer to the finish line.  However, in order to ensure the success of the creative work, one has to become almost obsessive with perfecting it. Incorporating surprise quality control methods is one way to do this.

    Max Martin, the producer and composer, who has written songs for personalities like Adele and Celine Dion, developed the LA Car Test over the years. He cruises down the Pacific Coast Highway, playing the song he wishes to test on full blast. This enables him to hear his music like listeners would on the radio. If he likes the song then, he knows that it will work for the public too.

    One can use another method, called the One Sentence, One Paragraph, One Page method.  In this, one should compare the product in hand with the original idea and check how close the product is to what was originally imagined or decided. To do this, one can write down exactly what the project is about in one sentence. Next, describe the same thing in one paragraph and next, describe it on one page. This exercise helps in ascertaining the coherency of the project.

    For example, if a writer has written an autobiography that has some fictional content, it will be difficult to describe the book using the one sentence, one paragraph, one-page method. This will help the writer refine the content of the autobiography.

    Thus being able to describe one’s work in a convincing and concise manner is vital to ascertain whether the creation or product is perfect. Until then, one needs to keep improvising, enhancing, and testing.

    Marketing One’s Own Creation

    In every creative field, competition is rife. Therefore ensuring that one’s own work stands out and gets noticed by the audience needs serious marketing efforts. While many reach out to marketing professionals, they need to be fully invested in the marketing efforts of their creative work themselves. 

    While professionals will put in some effort because they are paid to do it, the person who has created the work will be most invested in pushing their work, and ensuring that their product or creation has been represented in the best way possible.

    Being the marketer of ones own product is extremely crucial, because one will care about it, as much the creator will.

    Additionally, the virtue of humility is vital to market one’s own product. For example, one of the author’s clients had the opportunity to advertise a new product on many successful podcasts. However, the client wanted to finish his bit in one single conference call, rather than go on each podcast. The author reminded his client that such opportunities are one in a million and that humility is an important virtue, especially if he wants others to value his new product. The client agreed, and the result was a successful marketing coup.

    The Importance Of Word-Of-Mouth

    Every creation or product begins at the point where the audience has no idea about its existence. However, there are many strategies to get the audience talking about the creation. There are no hard and fast rules to which strategies one wishes to employ to market their product or creation.

    Steven Pressfield’s 2011 ‘The Warrior Ethos’ was entirely self-published and marketed. Pressfield used a unique marketing strategy. He made a special military edition and distributed about 18,000 copies among army contacts and friends. Even though it took a whale of an effort to publish, distribute, and deliver the books, the efforts were worth it. The following months saw the sales figures shoot through the roof, with about 13,000 copies being sold even today!

    It was word-of-mouth that worked its wonders in making the book popular.

    According to the consulting firm McKinsey, about 20% to 50% of purchase decisions of consumers are based on word-of-mouth. Recommendations from friends and family amount to marketing magic! For example, people are more likely to make a purchase if the product is recommended by a close friend than if it is mentioned in passing by an acquaintance. Additionally, word-of-mouth ensures long-term sales.

    With word-of-mouth being a marketing magic wand, social media is Hogwarts!!!

    Creating A Platform

    Achieving creative excellence and/ or product success should not be one-time, flash-in-the-pan. Neither should it be the only career-defining achievement. Continued success requires a platform wherein one can nurture their persona as a creator and combine connections, communications, and skills, and link them with the audience and followers.

     Such a platform is a necessity especially when the going gets tough. His rivals for example, despite having a successful political career early on, put Winston Churchill on the back burner from 1931 to 1939 due to his radicalized stances on the independence of India. However, Churchill had a second platform ready. He spent his downtime writing articles and books, and even made radio appearances, keeping his influence alive and ensuring the people did not forget him during his time of exile. 

    Having a platform also ensures having success independent of others and truly owning it. The filmmaker Casey Neistat had a promising film career with two premiers at Cannes. However, he decided to have his own independent platform on YouTube. By cutting out the middleman, he not only ensured making and owning his own profits but also has his own audience and gets to decide what to broadcast. He created his own artistic freedom.

    The Importance Of Mailing Lists

    Imagine if suddenly an artist wakes up to find that the media is no longer interested in his work, his marketing tactics are failing and he is losing the ability to garner more followers.

    While earlier, this would have simply qualified as a sheer nightmare, today; artists have a ray of hope in the event of such a thing happening – a mailing list!

    A mailing list is a direct mode of communication with those who are interested in the work of the artist, know the value of his artwork, and are supportive in some way or the other. It, however, takes time to build such a database of fans and followers. Thus it is essential that the artists start building these mailing lists as early as possible perhaps even before the product or the artwork being ready.

    The heavy-metal band Iron Maiden used their mailing lists extremely well at a time when heavy metal was giving way to grunge music. Their mailing lists have kept them in touch with their fans, leading to sold-out concerts even today!

    The author, similarly, ensured big sales of his first book. He kept a ready mailing list of persons who would be interested in reading his book before he published it. He did this by creating a monthly newsletter with reviews of books. This way he ensured that he not only gets his mailing contacts but also a ready platform for publishing his own book and gathering followers.

    Conclusion

    Keeping one’s creative work or product alive and kicking, one needs to combine creativity and hard work, be ready to make sacrifices, be obsessive about finding perfection in their artwork, and to that effect, keep testing. 

    Additionally, ensuring that they have a perennial seller at hand, creative should be at the forefront when it comes to marketing their own work, use effective strategies such as word of mouth and mailing lists, and most importantly, create a platform wherein they have a back-up strategy to keep themselves and their product in the limelight!

  • Bird By Bird by Anne Lamott – Book Review & Summary

    The Writer’s Guide To Writing

    Finding one’s true ‘writer’s voice’, creating unforgettable characters, bringing stories to life, making memorable plots, and most importantly, overcoming the dreaded ‘writer’s block’ are just some of the things writers wish they could effortlessly take care of. 

    Novelist and memoirist Anne Lamott’s Bird By Bird is a classic guide for writers, helping them to not only write better but improve life along the way too. It is an honest, witty, distinctive, and unique perspective, dotted with personal anecdotes from Lamott’s experiences, explaining how to instil commitment, discipline, and focus into one’s writing.

    She emphasises that a good writer not necessarily follows a strict routine and that inspiration for writing can come from anywhere, especially when one slows down, observes one’s surroundings keenly, and looks deep within oneself.

    Everything That Happens

    One has to generate good material to write well. And to generate good material, one has to be a good observer. One often finds that good writers have a tendency to keep away from the crowd and observe everything in their surroundings – the people, their mannerisms, the settings, etc.

    A writer needs to articulate everything that is seen or experienced. Articulation, therefore, needs focus and a relaxed manner. Rushing, or forcing the process of articulation doesn’t help. Like it or not, writers need to be patient and learn to pay attention to everything ranging from the person’s curious gait, to how the evening sunlight frames a face, to the feelings a memory brings forth.

    Observation and noting down what one observes in the surroundings helps in conveying the truth: a quality that good writers must possess. It isn’t important whether the writer thinks that his observations will result in good material or not. What matters is that the writer is able to seek truth in observations and use them in the story that the writer wishes to tell.

    Drawing on past experiences is another ability that writers must possess. One’s own past and childhood is a treasure trove of true information. However, writers must ensure that they carefully, and truthfully, use their viewpoint to make the story compelling. Examining oneself and everything around is an intrinsic quality that writers can use.

    Bird By Bird by Anne Lamott – Book Review & Summary

    Finding One’s Own Voice

    Every writer should have his/her own ‘voice’. A ‘voice’ is a writer’s own style of not only including details but also telling a story, and honesty in expressing one’s own feelings is the only way to develop it.

    Expressing one’s true feelings cannot happen without facing some stark truths and opening emotional doors. Thus, developing an authentic ‘voice’ by discovering and confronting ones own feelings and emotions is the key to writing truthfully. For example, writing truthfully about raging anger or profound grief can only be truthfully penned down if the writer accepts and faces them during the process of writing. This is also true of painful or extremely private feelings.

    Furthermore, to truly accept such emotions and feelings, a writer has to be ‘present’ in them and be fully aware of how it feels to be experiencing them. Merely thinking about them will not lend authenticity to a writer’s voice. In other words, being in the present amounts to understanding one’s reality and being comfortable with the entire spectrum of one’s own emotions.

    Having Faith 

    To be a good writer, one has to stop worrying whether they are a good writer or not. Like everything else, writing develops with practice, and believing in one’s own ability to write is key.

    Writers have to accept that not all days are filled with a good flow of words. There will be days and weeks of blank pages and that patience is a virtue, as is determination. Such faith and persistence are important, especially for young writers.

    Over time, and with practice, a writer can feel a yearning to write. Faith in one’s own ability to write, and the yearning to write well can replace the frustration one experiences on bleak days.

    Faith is also crucial when a writer needs to believe in whatever he/she is writing. If the writer doesn’t believe in what he/she is writing, no one will. But how does a writer generate such belief?

    The answer lies in making an effort to understand and care deeply about life itself. Writers have to connect with their own stories and write about everything that is important in their life. That includes examining not only the dramatic, drastic, and important events in life but also the banalities of life.

    Establishing A Daily Routine

    The biggest assumption that writers have, is that they can write well only when inspiration strikes. However, establishing a strict daily writing routine and incorporating discipline in the routine is essential for success.

    A writer should find a place to write and go there every day, at the same time, whether productivity strikes or not. Following a routine of time and place prepares the unconscious mind to yield creativity at the time and place designated for writing.

    At first, a writer could get bored, or even not write anything at all. However, as a writer persists with the routine, the positive effects of the routine will lead to success. The mind will automatically start creating a ‘mental writing space’. Eventually, the routine will become a habit and will train the mind to ‘get creative’ at the designated time every day.

    While routine is essential to write, it isn’t the sure formula to write well. There is no secret code or password that unleashes good content. One needs commitment too, to succeed as a writer. The author, for example, realised that all good writers are not only disciplined about their writing routines but are also committed to their work.

    Just as meditation requires routine and daily practice in quietening the mind to hear the inner voice, writing requires routine, discipline, and commitment for finding the inner writing voice.

    The Shitty First Draft

    To put it bluntly, no one writes a great, elegant first draft. According to the author, all good books emerge from a series of better versions of  ‘the shitty first draft’.

    At the first stage, even the most seasoned writer finds it difficult to accept the shitty first draft. However, it is essential that all writers – seasoned or young – not only accept the shitty first draft as the first stage but also accept it as part of the writing process.

     In fact, a ‘shitty first’ is an opportunity to play around with ideas and let the mind wander. At this stage, writers should simply write, without overthinking about its quality. Overthinking can lead to blocks and frustration, where a writer could end up giving up the idea of writing completely.

    The shitty first draft should be the point where a writer should enjoy getting their hands dirty, make a mess and know that they can clean it up later. It should be the stage where the writer dumps everything that is on his/her mind because no one judges a writer by the draft.

    Once the first draft is written, the writer can revisit it, edit, and refine it, focussing on improving writing. While writing, the second draft is considered the ‘up’ draft, as a writer is fixing it ‘up’, and the third draft is called the ‘dental draft’ as it includes prodding and poking, just as a dentist first examines a patients teeth.

    The whole process is akin to watching a Polaroid develop slowly, revealing the finer story with each successive draft.

    Knowing The Characters

    A good story has memorable characters, and a writer has to know them well to make them unforgettable. It is the job of a writer to bring the characters of a story to life.

    Every character owns an emotional acre, just as a real person does. It is the space where everything about the personality grows and develops. A writer has to get a sense of each character’s emotional acre, think about what grows or blooms in it, what dies in it, the condition of the acre, etc.

    Next, a writer should get a more detailed look at the character. The writer has to think about what is happening to the character, why is it happening, and what the character is doing.

    Furthermore, a writer should not be protective of the characters. Essentially, a character should have bad things happen to them. Making a characters life ideal and painless can render the story flat and mundane.

    A character should have a voice of its own. To give characters a voice, writers should model them on real people they know. This not only gives characters a ‘true voice’ but also makes readers believe that the characters are telling the truth. Writers should understand their characters to be able to bring them to life, and allow the dialogue and plot to emerge from them naturally.

    Writers should imagine their characters in real-life situations, and think of how they will act and react in challenging situations and different settings.

    Writers should remember that dialogues reveal more than lengthy and detailed descriptions do. Hence, a writer has to pay attention to what a character says, as well as how they say it. Diction, speaking style and pace make a dialogue good and realistic. Writers should thus, read the dialogue out loud to get a feel of how the character sounds. 

    Details In The Atmosphere

    Details make a story tangible and believable. Moreover, details in storytelling help bring a reader inside the story. They involve a few important components that writers should focus on.

    The setting of a story can bring it to life. The story and the world the characters live in, get a three-dimensional feel with a good setting. Writers have the ability to tailor a set to fit their characters, as well as the story itself. For example, the details of a crime scene in a dark, dank, forest in the night will be different from those of the same forest depicted on a sunny day, where a family is enjoying a picnic.

    Settings can reveal a lot about characters too. The relationship a character has with his space can help focus on certain aspects of the character’s personality. For instance, a character that wanders around a huge empty mansion can help show the relationship the man has had with the house, his status, and even the family residing in it.

    Details can reveal themselves to a writer anytime and anywhere. Thus, to have an eye for detail, writers should carry a notebook with themselves so that they can jot down any interesting detail they observe in their surroundings.

     For example, if a writer is attending a grand event in a mansion, details such as the number of steps in the staircase, how long it takes to go from one end of the staircase to the other, the colour scheme of the walls, paintings, style of furniture, windows, etc. are details that can be used to create and describe a setting.

    Details also help in moulding the structure of a story. Writers often use a plot treatment – a detailed ‘list of details’ of all the things that happen in each chapter of their book. This helps in checking the narrative or flow of the plot. A plot treatment helps in weeding out illogical details or find missing details in the story.

    The Big, Bad, Writer’s Block

    The much-feared writer’s block is inevitable. All writers have faced it at some time or the other. It is a feeling of being ‘creatively empty’. Not having any idea of what to write can be very debilitating for writers. However, there are ways that writers can get past writer’s block.

    The first step, when a writer experiences a block is to simply accept it. Admitting that one is just not in the mood to be creative is important. However, it is important to keep following the daily routine of writing at least a page, without thinking whether it is written well or not.

    The thing that actually gets writers past writer’s block is confidence. It works like a supporting pole that gives a writer the knowledge that they will be able to write again.

    There are times, however, when a writer can lose their confidence as well as the inspiration to write. Though it is a tough situation to be in, there is a way out. Trusting one’s own ability and intuition can help a writer remain connected to writing and get back on track. However, at times, intuition can send warning signs that the story is simply not good too. Writers have to be able to respect and observe that information to ascertain whether they should trudge along and persevere, or simply let go of the story.

    Observe The Weakness And Write About It

    Denying feelings often results in loss, especially for a writer. One can learn a great deal from feeling alone. Even dangerous feelings such as jealousy can teach a person a lot.

    Jealousy can leave a writer feeling miserable and paranoid; eventually, affect the quality of writing itself. While it is unwise to let jealousy foster, writers can use it to their advantage.

    The feeling itself can be used in writing, where a writer describes the experience and reveals the beauty hidden inside the feeling through words. Writing about such negative feelings helps a writer grow, both, personally and professionally.

    Though it is incredibly difficult to face and confront certain emotions, understanding the weakness in these emotions can help a person emerge stronger, and eventually help one in seeing the humour in them. These emotions and feelings, which seem like personal weaknesses, can be ultimately used to colour the personalities of characters in the story.

    Talking To The Right People For Inspiration

    Stories are all around us. Every person has a story to tell, and just like every writer is waiting to hear the right story, a teller is waiting for the right writer. Thus, for a writer to find the right story, he/she has to talk to people.

    Writing is often seen as a solitary endeavour. Most writers end up confining themselves to isolation in search of solitude. Writers should avoid isolating themselves as it can lead to a disassociation from people and even life itself. Many writers have wasted away, unable to distinguish between reality and the fiction they write about.

    Reaching out to others and seeking inspiration from their stories can help avoid isolation and disassociation. Simply initiating a conversation with a stranger while travelling on a bus could bring inspiration for the next story, or the setting and personality of a character in one’s story.

    Sharing and discussing work with other writers is another way to get inspired. One can perhaps join a writing group, enrol for creative writing workshops or classes, and discuss their work with other writers in the writing profession.

    However, one has to be wary, as sometimes, such groups tend to be overly critical. Too much criticism from instructors, friends, and colleagues alike can lead to the shattering of one’s confidence. It is thus important to find someone who is supportive, can help with constructive criticisms and can give good writing advice.

    It’s Better To Write Well Than Get Published

    Many writers simply aim at getting their work published. While publishing one’s work and getting readers for their material is essential, it should never be the main goal of writing. Sometimes, the need to get published, garner acclaim and find a large audience can become an obsession.

    Fame is a fickle friend and obsessing over it can only lead to disappointment. Leading with the expectation that once a book is published, one attains fame and wealth is folly. Yes, publishing can give a feeling of accomplishment, get a writer noticed in the writing community, perhaps even earn a few good reviews and followers, but it can never be the yardstick that measures quality. 

    A writer that cannot write well before being published will not be able to write well after publishing either. What really matters is the journey a writer takes while writing, and the transformation experienced – personally and professionally.

    Getting one’s work published should be regarded as a treat. However, the real fruit of writing lies in getting to live a writers life, caring deeply about one’s own work, and achieving a small goal daily. Writing should be a means to live a fulfilled life and to feed the soul.

    Conclusion

    To be a good writer, one has to develop the skill of observing one’s surroundings, paying attention to small details, and endeavouring to seek the truth. Routine, discipline, faith, and confidence are the key to writing well.

    A writer should have confidence in a ‘shitty first draft’ and know that it is the base of any story. Furthermore, a writer should know and understand their characters, learn and write about their weaknesses, talk to the people around them, and never, ever, be afraid of writer’s block.

  • Growth Hacker Marketing by Ryan Holiday – Book Summary or Review

    How To Achieve Rapid Marketing Success

    Technology and advancement have completely changed the face of marketing today. While marketers are jumping on to the latest bandwagon of new marketing strategies such as big data, social media, and virality, most seem to have forgotten the crux of marketing – that is to expand their customer base and keep the incoming of new customers rolling! 

    Moreover, while these companies have understood the ‘need to have an Internet presence and go viral’, they still resort to traditional, old-school marketing strategies and concepts, without realizing that to really keep up with the new market and its trends, they have to revamp not only marketing strategies but their entire company itself.

    Growth Hacker Marketing by Ryan Holiday shows marketers the way forward, combining relevant strategies of smart product design and user data to effectively tap into consumer markets. With examples from successes like Instagram, Dropbox, Groupon, and Twitter, it charts out a path for companies to effectively and economically use the concept of growth-hacker marketing to pool in more customers.

    Rapid Growth At A Low Budget

    Today, Twitter and Dropbox have become household names. Within lesser than a decade, these companies have seen exponential growth in users. 

    While these companies have been asking the same traditional marketing questions to get answers, what has made their marketing strategies different?

    They found their answers in growth-hacker marketing, a concept that uses technology to find answers to the same questions that traditional marketing asks. They relied on tracking user behaviour to tweak products to align with what customers want. This has led them to essentially blur the lines between their product development and marketing divisions, thus redefining marketing altogether.

    The emergence of small start-ups has made gunning for big budgets virtually redundant. Instead, smaller start-ups focus on becoming the ‘next big thing’ within a small budget. Relying on a small budget means that massive media marketing campaigns are often out of reach, and getting that big customer base needs creativity.

    While traditional marketing strategies focus on creating a ‘buzz’ before the product is launched, growth-hacker marketing aims at rapid growth by constantly introducing improvements in their products after the products are already out in the markets. This strategy required marketers to measure statistics based on user data – right from Facebook ‘likes’ to website click rates – and then applying their learning to improving products and aiming to optimize them over time.

    Growth Hacker Marketing by Ryan Holiday
    Growth Hacker Marketing by Ryan Holiday

    What People Want 

    Traditionally, marketers’ weren’t fixated on creating customer-centric products. They relied on clever campaigns to sell an existing product.

    However, the growth-hacker technique focuses on a product-market fit – meaning, creating a product that fits to satisfy the needs of the consumer. This technique bypasses the need for heavy, expensive advertising tools by converting users into evangelists for their products, thus advertising the product for free!

    Instagram for example, was at first a social networking platform where users had photo options. They later realized that their users were exclusively interested in their enhanced filter options. In order to achieve the product-market fit, they focused on this filter-enhanced feature, propelling their business to success.

    They used relevant questions such as, ‘How does the product fulfill consumer needs? Do they find it useful? Does it add value to the lives of the customers?’ in order to determine their product-market fit.

    While the concept of finding a product-market fit seems elusive, it is easy as long as the marketing strategy focuses on the customers. For example, some authors use blogs to gain an understanding of what their readers are interested in. Additionally, they even ask readers for online feedback for titles and covers, to be able to deliver exactly what readers want.

    Targeting The Right Customers

    Ensuring that the product reaches the right customers is one of the most vital requirements for growth hacking to be successful. Even the best product in the market won’t be a success if consumers don’t know it exists!

    Before Aaron Swartz co-founded Reddit, he had founded 2 websites, a collaborative encyclopedia, much like Wikipedia, and Watchdog.net similar to Change.org. However, due to a lack of user attention, neither of the websites worked.

    While both, traditional and growth hackers focus on reaching customers, growth hackers get a little more creative. For example, when Dropbox launched, it was an ‘invite-only membership. This exclusivity led customers to flock waiting lists that grew from 5000 to 75000. While anyone can get Dropbox today, this creativity has led to a whopping 300-million customer base.

    Additionally, rather than simply targeting everyone, they chose to target a select few, essentially the right customers, thus avoiding a waste of time, money, and resources. 

    This ‘just right ‘ customer base is often found in the early adopters or customers who are willing to try out new trends and technologies. Once these early adopters become fans, they eventually become loyal spokespersons, recommending the products to friends and family. Such organic referrals are the key to growth.

    Uber gave free rides during the South by Southwest event in 2013, with the aim of reaching early adopters. They resorted to conventional advertising almost a year later.

    Achieving Virality

    Every marketer is talking about virality these days. However, unlike everyone else, growth hackers understand the fact that achieving virality isn’t an arbitrary phenomenon, nor is it magic. They know that in order to achieve virality that has to, once again, ask the right questions.

    Is my product worth talking about? Why would customers share this? Would it be easy to share?

    These are just a few questions that lead to the answer – customers will share, refer and recommend a product only if it is really worth sharing. Making one’s product share-worthy is a simple two-step process. 

    Firstly, focus on making the product share-worthy, and second encourage sharing! For example, Groupon devised a ‘refer a friend’ campaign, where they credited users with $10 when their referral made their first purchase. Thus they rewarded customers for sharing.

    Marketers can use publicity to encourage sharing too. According to John Berger, the virality specialist, ideas and products become popular, and thus viral when they are noticed. Spotify, for example, used the massive user base of Facebook when they integrated. Once users saw that their friends were using Spotify, everyone wanted to jump on the popular wagon!

    Similarly, when Apple manufactured their iPod cables in white rather than the usual black color, they made their cables stand out in the crowd, thus ensuring that their customers become free, walking advertisements for their product.

    Improving Products to Retain Customers

    Many marketers get simply satisfied once they have got their customers and stop paying attention to existing customers. However, the ball doesn’t stop rolling there. Growth hacking places importance on being attentive to the needs of the customers even after they have purchased the product to retain them.

    Thus, to execute this, growth hackers employ the right metric to measure the performance of their product. There are many tools available to marketers to measure conversion rates. In order to figure out and improve conversion rate, marketers have to first understand how to define their conversion rate, which essentially differs for each business.

    Twitter, for example, hired growth hackers who realized that conversion rates improved when users had the option to manually select 10 accounts to follow, as opposed to their earlier list of 20 default accounts available to users. By finding a way to improve their service with this small tweak, they were able to convert inactive users.

    Ensuring that customers stick around ensures maximization of return on investments, because it is cheaper to retain customers with product improvements than to attract new ones altogether. Market Metrics, the research firm, places profits from existing customer sales at 60-70%, as opposed to the 20% profits marketers get from new customers.

    How Growth-Hacker Marketing Actually Works

    Ryan Holiday actually practiced what he preaches. He used the concept of growth-hacker marketing to launch and market this book – Growth-Hacker Marketing!

    He began his ‘testing’ by writing an article about growth-hacker marketing for Fast Company, the business magazine. Soon Penguin Books showed interest in the article and created a short eBook based on the article. This move was cheaper and allowed them to understand the audience’s response. Once Holiday saw a positive response to the eBook, he expanded it and launched it as a paperback.

    His next growth-hacker move was to reach the right audience. To do this, he converted lessons from the book into articles, published them on sites such as The Huffington Post, MarketWatch, etc. for free to reach his audience.

    He connected with and rewarded the existing fans by giving them an opportunity to sign-up for free for his newsletter. With about 10% of his readership signing up, he was able to build an email list to notify them that his extended, hard-copy version of the book was available for purchase.

    Holiday actually reaped benefits from his employ of growth-hacker marketing technique. A simple, low-cost technique that can enable marketers anywhere to achieve truly rapid marketing success!

  • Triggers by Marshall Goldsmith – Book Review & Summary

    Understanding Triggers

    We tend to behave in ways that we don’t intend to. We experience certain triggers that make us do things contrarily than what we desire. Often, we are not aware that these ‘triggers’ affect us negatively. Triggers (2015), by Marshall Goldsmith and Mark Reiter, explains what these triggers are and how they thwart us from bringing about positive changes in ourselves. 

    Goldsmith and Reiter also show the way to deal with and overcome these triggers and focus on the path to achieving success. They show that the triggers that are out of our control, especially those in our environment can be mastered and we can rationally take control of our lives.

    Triggers Prevent Change

    What is this ‘trigger”?

    A trigger is any stimulus that reshapes our thoughts and actions. 

    Let’s understand it with an example. Imagine that you are out with your family at the beach on a pleasant, sunny morning. The smell of hot-dogs and barbecue fills the air. There is but one problem. You have just started a new diet. While you stand in the queue buying delicacies for your family, you think, “ Let me indulge for just one more day. I can always start this diet tomorrow.”

    The smell wafting in the air acted as a trigger to make you counter your decision to stay focused on the diet. In our lives, triggers can appear in the form of people, circumstances, or events. Even the mere smell of rain far away can trigger memories.

    Triggers can impact us in a number of ways. Their effects can be conscious or unconscious, external or internal, unexpected or anticipated, direct or indirect, productive, counter-productive, encouraging, or even discouraging. For example, the smile on one’s face when one sees a baby is a direct trigger. An indirect trigger is one that sets off a series of thoughts that propels one into action. For example, seeing the photo of your college reunion could trigger you to think of certain events at college, and make you contact a long-lost friend.

    While triggers can lead to positive actions and thoughts, they can also propel negative ones, and even prevent changes from taking place in one’s life. The fact of the matter is, however, that one isn’t always aware of these triggers.

    For example, for many years, influenced by his surroundings, the author couldn’t admit that he was balding. He sported a comb-over under the pressure to look young and sleek. However, when the hairdresser cut the remaining hair too short to comb, he realized his superficial, vain, perception and embraced his baldness.

    Triggers Are Part Of The Environment And Born From One’s Own Beliefs

    We are all good at making excuses to embrace changes in life. This is because our belief triggers prevent us from accepting and making those changes. Belief triggers are actually one’s inner beliefs that make one justify their resistance to making those changes.

    People commonly believe that they have the ability and the wisdom to evaluate their own behaviors. While such a trigger can make people believe that they have the ability to make changes in their lives whenever they want to and justifying one’s resistance to make the changes when needed, the reality lies in the fact that most of us inaccurately assess our own behavior, take credit for successes and blame others for failures.

    A study conducted of about 80,000 professionals who were asked to rate their own performance, showed that about 70% believed they were in the top 10%, 82% put themselves in the top 20%, and 98.5% rated themselves in the top half! In this manner, our own internal triggers can create misconceptions about our own self-improvement. 

    However, the external triggers in our environment are the ones that have a stronger influence on us. Take for example the fact that people who visit an expensive restaurant, think that they are entitled to royal treatment and thus treat the friendly staff in a rude manner. These people behave politely when they are outside the restaurant. This shows how the environment can affect or influence behavior – often for the worse. 

    If people are not aware of these external triggers, they will continue to behave undesirably.

    Triggers (2015) by Marshall Goldsmith
    Triggers (2015) by Marshall Goldsmith

    Impulsive Behaviour Can Be Checked With Self-Feedback

    The important question for everyone is – If triggers can make one behave undesirably, how does one identify and become aware?

    One of the ways that people can identify triggers is with self-feedback. For example, a person who is trying to achieve the goal of regularly exercising in the morning can make a list of the situations or people that influence the outcome, that is, whether they act as positive triggers or negative ones. A positive trigger could be a neighbor who exercises regularly and motivates, whereas a negative trigger could be a habit of spending time on social media in the morning.

    What is crucial, is to determine what one wants and needs – for example, spending time on social media is what one wants to do, as opposed to needs to do. In this scenario, chatting up with the health-conscious neighbor will help in achieving the goal of exercising – maybe by deciding to join the neighbor for a daily morning run.

    Differentiating between needs and goals helps in connecting one’s triggers to one’s behavior vis-à-vis the goals. Thus, identification also helps in avoiding impulsive actions. Over time, and with practice in identifying and differentiating between needs and goals, one develops a sense of awareness, making one adept at identifying triggers. After that, one can choose to act against the trigger.

    Adjusting To The Change By Leading

    It is unfortunate but true that negative and hostile environments are difficult to change. Often, environments and situations that are detrimental to achieving one’s goals become inevitable. In such cases, one can adapt one’s own approach to the goal rather than try to maneuver the environment itself.

    One can try to predict the environment to check if one needs to adapt one’s own approach or avoid the environment completely. For example, an Indian Tech Executive Sachi was worried about how her friends back home in India would react to her high-flying job. She worried that they would consider her a braggart and think that she had changed. 

    While she couldn’t avoid the environment (of meeting her friends when she went back home), she decided to adapt to the situation by describing her job differently. She told them that her job required her to travel extensively – a tiring ordeal – rather than tell them about her frequent visits to Paris. Thus she not only managed to be the sensitive caring person she was but also avoided being insensitive about their environment.

    Being aware and making such adjustments can help one become the leader of their own behavior. Thus it becomes easier to assess what needs to be accomplished as a leader and one can even choose one’s own leadership style. 

    Approaching the trigger in a practical, determined, and step-by-step manner can help one lead the change by comprehending what the environment requires and how to adjust to it!

    Owning The Change

    It is no doubt that resisting and maneuvering negative triggers is tough and that people often behave undesirably once they give in to these negative triggers. However, once the change is determined, one has to own the change.

    Asking oneself active questions is a great way to start. Active questions, as opposed to passive questions, focus on what one is doing rather than what needs to be done?

    For example, there is a profound difference between, “What is the goal?” and “Which goal did I achieve today?” The second active question instills a sense of fulfillment and a sense of responsibility towards achieving the goal.

    The author habituated himself to asking active questions rather than passive ones every night. He would ask, “Did I do my best to be happy?” an active question, rather than, “How happy was I today?” a passive one. Active questioning has helped the author connect with his goals and raise the level of engagement with achieving them.

    Another way to own the change and keeping track is by maintaining a track record of the progress achieved. Finding a scorekeeper – a person who could help or a system one can follow is essential, especially considering that it is difficult to measure behavior. For example, the author seeks the help of a person who calls him every night to score the questions on a scale of 0 to 10, with 0 being ‘didn’t do anything’ and 10 being ‘did my best’.

    Maintainig a scorecard helps in understanding exactly where one stands on making and achieving the behavioural change.

    Routine And Structure

    It is a common occurrence that after some time of following a system, one’s discipline tends to slacken. The good news is that this doesn’t happen because the person is weak to see the change through. In fact, one’s energy to sustain the system simply depletes.

    Roy F. Baumeister, a psychology professor in 1990, proposed the phenomenon of ego depletion. He said that humans have a limited ego-strength that depletes through the day as one makes numerous decisions, keeps fighting temptations, and use their willpower for many other things. He said that it is during this depleted state that the triggers of a negative environment affect us most.

    However, through awareness and by creating structure, this depletion can be adeptly fought off. One can bring in structure in their lives by studying the decisions needed to be made o a daily basis and sticking to the decisions by making a choice. Therefore, one does not have to rethink to make those decisions daily and thus the ego can be conserved.

    The author has employed many structures that have helped him. For example, he wears only green colored polo shirts and khaki pants to work. This ensures that the daily cumbersome decision of ‘what to wear is avoided. Similarly, all of the author’s travel decisions are managed by his assistant, helping him avoid the stress that accompanies the decision-making.

    While structures help one manage some of the predictable aspects of life, it is the unexpected events that act as surprise triggers, throwing one off balance. During these unpredictable moments during the day, one can employ active questions.

    Six Engaging Active Questions

    It is imperative that one understands when change is required and how to bring about that change. As we have already seen, one has to be consciously aware of their environment, the triggers, and thus their behavior.

    The author gives six questions that help in raising awareness. The six questions are – 

    1. Did I do my best to set clear goals?
    2. Did I do my best to make progress towards my goal?
    3. Did I do my best to find meaning?
    4. Did I do my best to be happy?
    5. Did I do my best to build positive relationships?
    6. Did I do my best to be fully engaged?

    These six active questions help in making one aware of how they are managing the triggers that affect them. This awareness, in turn, keeps one engaged and committed to creating positive change. With a regular effort to create awareness, one can create a reciprocal interplay between one’s environment and themselves.

    If one becomes actively aware of this interplay, one can make positive impacts on the people surrounding them.

    Conclusion

    The environment has triggers that can affect every aspect of one’s behaviors. Thus, even if one wishes to, making a change can be difficult especially since it is difficult to change the environment that triggers the change. 

    Employing methods of using self-feedback to check impulsive behavior, trying to adjust to the change brought about by the inevitable environment, are some of the ways one can lead the change and own it. Using active questions that help in monitoring and adjusting responses to the triggers also helps. 

    In conclusion, triggers lead to impulses. It is possible to keep triggers in check with awareness, which leads to a choice. Choices lead to behavior patterns that in turn, lead to another trigger. One has to simply create awareness of this circle to make a positive impact with positive choices.

  • The Art of Influencing Anyone by Niall Cassidy – Book Review & Summary

    Influential And Persuasive Strategies 101

    Being able to persuade and influence people is an art. Contrary to the belief that only a select few have a talent, the truth is that anyone and everyone has the capacity to be influential and persuasive to get what they want in life.

     It is true that people consider their needs and wants as more important than what rationally makes sense when others persuade them. Once this concept is clearly understood, influencing others becomes easier. Niall Cassidy discusses methods of successfully influencing the people around us.

    The Art of Influencing Anyone by Niall Cassidy is a great guide to persuasion, influencing and convincing people around us.

    Appearances And Communication

    It is a common occurrence, where a person under-qualified and less hardworking gets a promotion over another who is more deserving, hard-working, and more qualified. Why does this happen?

    It happens because decisions aren’t always logic-based. People have a tendency to put more faith in what they want to hear rather than focus on what is logical.

    Consider an example of two executives presenting ideas for a new project. One proposes a reasonable, meticulous, step-by-step method of starting the project slowly, while the other proposes that they dive straight in. While the second person doesn’t give proper logical reasons for his idea, he is full of enthusiasm.

    In most opinions, the probability of the second enthusiastic executive becoming the project lead is higher. The second executive’s enthusiasm was exactly what the boss wants to see and hear. It proves that the personality of a person and how he communicates is intrinsic to influence and is more important than either rationality or content.

    The importance of personality can be understood better in the following example. Academic journals receive a number of papers from researchers for publication. Surprisingly, for selection, they first check the author’s name and then the quality of the content. An author with a Ph.D., whose paper –full of absolute nonsense – was shocked that his paper was published. Credentials such as a Ph.D. appeared to have more credibility than the content. His article was chosen only because he had mentioned his Ph.D.!

    Therefore appearances are intrinsic to influence and persuasion too.

    The Art of Influencing Anyone by Niall Cassidy
    The Art of Influencing Anyone by Niall Cassidy

    How To Appear Reliable And Convincing

    To be influential and persuasive, one requires being reliable and convincing. And in order to do that, one has to be well informed, present detailed information, and have a warm and friendly demeanor.

    For example, a bank robber arrested for his crime and presents a shady alibi. How would the shady alibi convince the police that his account of the robbery is credible? 

    Presenting the police with as much detailed information as he can, the shady alibi can seem to be more convincing. To come up with such details, the alibi would need to lie. Though lying is risky, it can be used to persuade. 

    In the case above, say if the alibi was to give the police details such as what clothes they were wearing, where all they went together and who were the people they met (fictitious, yet details that can make the police believe), could make the story of the alibi plausible.

    In cases where conjuring up, or providing veritable details isn’t possible, mannerisms can help one to appear convincing and reliable. Having a warm and friendly manner, punctuated with humor can give the impression of knowing details and conceal the gaps inconsistency of knowledge.

    An experiment was conducted, where an actor was told to give a talk to experts and pretend that he was a knowledgeable professor in their field. While the material that the actor presented was repetitive and included contradictory statements, his warm, friendly manner and humor content that he shared made many experts believe that the talk was very informative.

    The mannerisms of the actor made him look authentic and thus reliable.

    Simplifying And Organizing Information

    At an individual level, appearances, communication, mannerisms and details can work. Businesses are however, a little different.

    A salesperson requires the skills of persuasion and influencing all of the time. In the field of sales, it is always wiser to give a customer fewer options. While details are important, customers often get overloaded with too much information, and keeping it simple for them is key. 

    For example, if a customer buying jackets is shown an entire range of different styles and colors, he will tend to get indecisive, confused and decide to not buy anything at all. On the other hand, if he is shown 2 to 3 styles, and the customer pitches in his own opinion, after weighing in the pros and cons, a sale is more likely.

    Persuasion and influence rely on organized information too. Presenting information to a buyer in a haphazard manner won’t catch their attention and confuse them. On the other hand, if the same information is structured and organized, and listed down in order, customers will be able to retain information better, ask their queries accordingly, and be in a better position to make their purchase decision.

    Talking Vaguely

    How do fortune-tellers go about their business, get people to believe in what they say, when in fact all that they say has a slim chance at probability?

    The truth is that fortune-tellers use a method called ‘cold reading’. Cold reading is a technique in which one uses a lot of vague sentences and statements that can be interpreted in a different way.

    In business, cold reading helps to build a relationship of trust with the customers. Essentially, you have to appear to know a lot about the customer when you know nothing at all!

    Say, a customer looking at washing machines in-store is approached by a salesperson. To initiate the conversation, the person could make a generalized statement such as, “laundry is such a painful chore, isn’t it?” Next, the salesperson can try to relate to a situation and the customer by saying, “Wouldn’t it be great if you could reduce laundry time by half?”

    Such statements are general and relatable and show customers that the salesperson empathizes and “understands” him, even when the salesperson doesn’t know him at all. 

    The salesperson could next fortify the customer’s trust by saying, “I have worked in this department long enough, and for me, it is very important to understand what my customers’ needs are.”

    One does not need to know a customer or delve deep into their lives to get their trust. Using broad and vague statements does the trick.

    Curiosity And Persuasion

    To persuade, one has to be able to catch the attention of people. And in order to catch their attention, they need to generate curiosity. 

    The Information and Digital Age that we are in, makes it very difficult to hold the attention of customers. Consider the number of ads, notifications, and alerts that vie for our attention every minute we look at our smartphones. Research shows that only 1 of 5 people actually read beyond the headline, and it takes them mere seconds to move on to the next. If we consider convincing customers face-to-face, the attention span is mere minutes, before they lose their focus.

    It is therefore essential to tap into the curiosity factor. Getting straight to the point is common. Therefore to grab the attention of customers, one can start with something funny, unconventional, or even controversial.

    For example, an ad grabbed the attention of its viewers because it showed a small boy playing good tennis shots and winning against an adult. The curiosity surrounding the boy’s talents kept viewers’ interests piqued. At the fag end, it was revealed that the boy was Steffi Graff and Andre Agassi’s son.

    People Put Wants Above Needs

    Commercialism works on the principle that people buy what they want as opposed to what they actually need. Keeping this in mind, marketing is based on the premise that it needs to evoke a desire for the product in customers, whether they need it or not. Most salespeople address the needs of their customers. It would be more beneficial if they focus on addressing customers’ wants.

    If we consider the habit of smoking among teens, it is found that they smoke to fit in with the crowd, and not because their bodies need nicotine. For teens, rational arguments about why smoking is bad for their health don’t really matter. Therefore, marketing for any product should focus on reasons that provoke their desires, rather than practical or logical reasons to buy it. 

    Changing customers’ perspectives about what they want can spark desire. Additionally, marketers should aim at changing customers’ self-perspectives, thus aiming to change how they think and behave. Moreover, since people desire to align their behavior with their self-perceptions, changing one will change the other.

    In an experiment, researchers asked a few people at a swimming pool about their water-saving habits (their attitudes). Most of them replied that they take saving water very seriously (self-perception). The same group of people was secretly timed by researchers while showering after their swim (the behavior). 

    It was found that the people who were asked about their habits took a significantly less amount of time while showering. The researchers were able to change their behaviors by making them aware of their attitudes towards water-saving and aligning with self-perceptions as well.

    Influencing Without Seeming Desperate

    It might seem a little incorrect, but influencing people depends on hiding ones true intentions so that the marketer does not seem desperate to sell.

    It is a fact that people tend to be more trustful of other customers who have used a product rather than the salesperson selling it. Therefore, one is truly successful at marketing when their customers recommend their products to other people and refer friends and families. Achieving this makes marketers look less desperate to sell and increases sales. Many brands have found success when they have used the opinion of other customers to sell their products.

    For example, a football club had started a ‘news updates’ via text service. However, because the service was a paid one, they had very few subscriptions. They hired actors to pose as customers, go to bars and pubs, and use the service one a match day. Other potential customers who saw the benefits of the service soon started registering, increasing the rate of subscription from 20 people to 120.

    Another way is to use social gatherings and talk about one’s own product, by telling other people success stories of their products. This should however be done discretely so that friends don’t realize that they being pitched at. Promoting business within social circles should be covert and to do that it is wise to prepare an interesting story beforehand and engage in small talk that could lead to the story.

    Utilizing Resistance While Persuasion

    We have seen how the elements of surprise and provocation can be useful to grab customers’ attention. Similarly, salespeople can use the resistance of a customer towards their sales pitch to sell the product to them. 

    Often we see salespeople trying very hard to convince a customer who has resisted buying. Research shows that when salespeople persuade customers relentlessly, the opinions of the customer become affirmed and they do not buy the product. Additionally, when a salesperson hard-sells, his desperate intentions become clear and gives the customer all the more reason not to trust him.

    In these scenarios, the trick is to embrace resistance and take advantage of it. For example, say a car salesperson finds that his effort to sell a customer a car seems to be going in vain. Here, the salesperson can actually agree with the customer. This agreement will surprise the customer and he will pay attention to what the salesperson has to say. Next, the salesperson should find a positive to the negative that he just agreed to, showing the customer that the product, despite what they felt was a negative has many pros to it too.

    This tactic helps gain customers’ trust. Once the salesperson can get the customer to hear him out despite resistance, the customer can be easily persuaded.

    Conclusion

    People who wish to better skills of influencing and persuasion should focus on appearing reliable and trustworthy; keep communication and information simple and organized, use curiosity to grab attention to persuade. Those who wish to be more influential and persuasive should not appear desperate.

    Influencing and persuasion is an art that can thus, be mastered by anyone.

  • Neuromarketing by Patrick Renvoise and Christophe Morin – Book Review & Summary

    Marketing To The Old Brain

    Despite marketing’s best efforts, consumer-buying decisions are based on much more than getting the marketing mix right and having stellar strategies in place. Today, the knowledge of neuroscience shows how consumer’s brains work, and the field of neuromarketing that enables marketers to understand precisely how consumers react to certain stimuli.

    Neuromarketing (2002) by Patrick Renvoise and Christophe Morin draws conclusions from research on the brain’s ancient decision-making processes and innovative marketing techniques to understand why people buy.

    The Old Brain

    The obvious daily choices that people make – like getting that cappuccino on the way to work – aren’t always based on rational, thought-out decisions. They do not flit from café to café; compare products and prices in order to get that cappuccino. Such decisions are made impulsively, on the go, without much thought to the process.

    This kind of thinking is managed by the ‘old brain’, the decision-making center of the brain. The old brain takes and assesses information from the ‘new brain’ and the ‘middle brain’ to make decisions. While the new brain works rationally, the middle brain relies on emotions and gut feelings. Therefore, to influence consumers buying decisions, marketers need to target the old brain.

    The ‘old brain’ of humans is 450 million years old, much older than either spoken or written language, that are 40000 years and 10000 years old. It, therefore, cannot be captivated easily with language.

    The old brain is self-centered and lazy. It focuses on survival and prosperity. Additionally, it also focuses on the beginning and the end of any information rather than the middle. It is therefore essential that marketers focus on how the lives of their customers can be improved with their products. Where advertising these products are concerned, they should focus on having an attention-grabbing start and end to their ads so that customers remember the product.

    Neuromarketing by Patrick Renvoise and Christophe Morin
    Neuromarketing by Patrick Renvoise and Christophe Morin

    The Right Kind Of Preparation

    Preparation is essential for any strategy or process to work. While targeting any message to the ‘old brain’, marketers should use the following steps.

    • Diagnose The Pain – The ‘pain’ of the customers tells marketers what is the issue or deficiency that their lives lack, that can be fulfilled by the product. Marketers should pay attention to understand why customers need the product. For example, a company selling industrial drills should be able to identify that their customer’s pain is that they need to probably drill a dense surface and don’t have the right equipment for it.
    • Differentiate Claims – Marketers should be able to ascertain how their product and their company are different, and how they can ease the pain of their customers. These questions should reveal concrete answers. Therefore the industrial drill company could advertise that they are different from others in having the most reliable products, or the best customer service.
    • Show The Gain – Marketers should then aim to show or demonstrate to customers how their product can ease the pain and additionally add value to their lives. This is where marketers need to show customers hard evidence using testimonials, success stories, prototype demos, share data, etc. to make customers see and understand the pros of the product. For example, the industrial drill company could share a story of how their product enabled smooth and swift completion of a water pump project in the city.

    Once marketers have their prep in place, they can effectively move ahead to deliver the message to appeal to the old brain.

    Structuring An Appealing Message

    Once marketers do their preparation, it’s time to structure a clear message that will appeal to the consumer’s old brain. Structuring the message uses the following building blocks.

    • Using Big Pictures – Using images can help structure a clear picture. Customers should be able to visualize the solution that the product offers. Demonstrating a ‘before and after’ scenario works well here. For example, a mattress selling company could use images of a tired and sleepy person at work contrasting with images of the same man sleeping soundly on the company’s mattress.
    • Proof Of Gain – Showing customers proof or evidence of the success of the product, or showing them how the product will improve their life by using statistics is the next building block, for example, giving statistics such as ‘99% of our customers say their sleep has improved with our mattresses.’ 
    • Using Impact Boosters – Impact boosters are small details about the product that are based on visual, auditory, and kinaesthetic learning. Such boosters help in fine-tuning the message, therefore marketers should attempt to use all three in their messages. The visual described earlier could be accented with soothing music, or even inviting customers to share their experiences are great examples.

    Present To Appeal To The Old Brain

    The most obvious method of marketing and advertising is the face-to-face presentation. However, no matter what form of marketing is used, it is imperative to appeal to the old brain, especially during the presentation.

    Presentations should aim at grabbing the attention of customers from the word go. In order to successfully get them to notice the product, marketers can use the following ‘grabbers’ or techniques that grab the customers’ attention.

    • Mini Dramas – Mini dramas show or depict the customer-facing the pain that a product will ease. Next, marketers can show customers a ‘before and after’ contrast change that occurs after they use the product. Mini dramas can make any product memorable. A company that sells ‘toughbooks’ – almost unbreakable laptops – can use a mini-drama that shows the pain of a person who drops their laptop. Just as it is about to hit the floor, the person remembers that they are using a ‘toughbook’ and have no reason to worry about it breaking.
    • The Rhetorical Question – Rhetorical questions, though not meant to be answered, get the customer thinking and can be used to illustrate a point. Questions drawing comparisons or contrasts, or hypothetical questions propel the old brain into thinking of the solution (the marketer’s product).
    • Props – Using props to show customers the value of the solution helps them remember the presentation. For example, a company selling security solutions can use their automated locks as a prop.

    These grabbers target the old brain and help marketers grab the attention of their customers successfully through their message.

    Confidence While Handling Objections

    Doubt is a natural phenomenon that marketers face. It is, in fact, a sign indicating that the customer is considering buying. However, salespeople should always clear doubt and never leave it unanswered. Therefore, they should have strategies in place that can manage customers’ last-minute objections and doubts.

    It is however essential, that marketers understand the difference between objections that are valid and misunderstandings. Often, when presentations aren’t as clear as they should be, customers could misunderstand what’s being presented and have objections. The following steps can be used to clear any objections customers could have.

    • Rephrasing The Objection – Marketers should firstly rephrase the objection, to be sure about what customers are worried about.
    • Stepping Into The Objection – ‘Stepping into’ includes physically getting closer or moving towards the customer who has raised the objection. This shows that the marketer is keen to hear out the customers objection and unafraid to face them.
    • Listening To The Customer – This includes patiently hearing the customer out and giving them time to express their perceptions and opinions.
    • Proving The Point – Once the customer has given their perspective, it time for the marketer to prove his point. Marketers can show or perhaps offer them a prototype, telling the customer success stories, etc. that appeal to the old brain.
    • Expressing One’s Own Opinion – Sometimes, misunderstandings are not the basis of an objection. For example, the customer might feel that the product is expensive (that is an opinion rather than a misunderstanding). In such cases, marketers can begin with the aforementioned steps and next move on to confidently express their opinions to the customer that the product is actually not expensive. 
    • Highlighting A Positive Aspect Of The Objection – Here, marketers should appeal to the old brain by telling stories that can link to the customer’s objection. They can give the customer subsequent proof by saying, “Our prices are actually competitive, considering the higher quality of our products.’

    Credibility Builds Trust

    Credibility is often the basis on which customers trust products and brands. Especially in presentations, it is essential that marketers build credibility first. It is essential to remember that one cannot pretend to be credible, however, even if one does lack it, one can take steps to increase credibility.

    The first requirement for marketers to build credibility is to have passion and integrity. No one will believe in the product if those selling it are not passionate about it. 

    Secondly, people tend to be attracted to those who are similar to them. Therefore, marketers need to thoroughly research the audience they are going to present their product to and then perhaps pointing out those similarities to them. 

    Third, expressions and communications are vital to building credibility. People tend to shut off if the presenter fumbles and mumbles, and seems unsure while presenting. 

    Fourth, presenters should be able to have flexibility in their presentation and creatively fit it to the audience. For example, one can change the colors of the presentation to blue to appeal to an elder audience as it represents trust and authority.

    Finally, confidence is key. Those who exude fearlessness often present with enthusiasm. Such enthusiasm will attract customers and keep their attention and gain their trust.

    Emotions And Language Can Make  A Message Stick

    Let us compare the message to a cupcake. The cupcake in itself is the real substance. However, the cupcake still needs Choco-chips and sprinkles to make it more enticing. Therefore, it is language, emotions, and stories that make a message more enticing to the old brain and more likely to stick.

    The old brain loves being directly spoken to. Therefore, using the work ‘you’ helps to catch its attention. It also responds better to sharp contrasts such as with/without the product, before/after, comparisons between competing products in the market, etc. However, it is important to remember that the old brain has a short attention span. Therefore, keeping it short and concise works best.

    The old brain also connects faster to messages that elicit emotions. For example, to make a presentation memorable for the old brain, marketers could use happy stories, images, etc. The old brain also cannot differentiate between a really good story and reality, and the truth is that the old brain loves stories.

    Therefore, incorporating a well-detailed story, describing why the story matters to the customers, will keep their old brain glued! The message will be more memorable if it has an appealing, funny, engaging, punch line.

    The Old Brain And Job Interviews

    A job interview is not very different from a sales pitch. The interviewee, after all, needs to sell his own credentials to the interviewer. In this case, the very same principles of preparation can be used to excel at interviews.

    • Diagnose The Pain – This works just like a marketing situation. While going for an interview, the interviewee should research the ‘pain’ that the company wishes to ease by filling in the position applied for. Maybe the previous employee left the job within a few months, thus the company’s pain could be ‘retention’. The interviewee could mention that he is looking for a long-term position.
    • Differentiating Claims – The interviewee should first keenly listen to what the interviewer is saying, what information he is revealing about the position, the competition, or the interviewee himself, and then drive his claim home. He should focus on how he, the interviewee, can help ease the company’s pain. For example, rather than saying he is a great project manager, the interviewee could elaborate on how his management skills can be an asset to the team.
    • Demonstrating Gains – An interviewee should be very specific in telling the interviewer what his company could gain by hiring him. For example, the interviewee could bring along certificates of specialized management courses he has taken, or even provide an overview of successful project completion in the previous company.
    • Appeal To The Old Brain – Right from managing communication, expression, using language and emotions to appeal, building credibility, handling objections with confidence, and using the right grabbers, interviewees can use these tactics to appeal to the old brain of their interviewers.

    Conclusion

    The old brain is the decision-making center of the brain. For marketers, therefore, it is essential to have a clear understanding of how the old brain works and how to use tactics to get their marketing messages to appeal to the old brain.

    Communicating with the old brain directly will help marketers win their customer’s trust and get them compelled enough to choose their products, thereby enhancing sales. 

  • Behave by Robert Sapolsky – Book Review & Summary

    What Influences Behaviour?

    Behaviour is unique to each individual, yet it has its roots in society and culture that define the modern world. Additionally, it is a result of many factors. A number of complexes ranging from the brain’s chemistry to social and environmental conditions affect human behaviors. Moreover, these tendencies to behave in a particular manner have evolved over thousands of years, influenced and affected by human history and different civilizations. 

    Robert Sapolsky’s Behave (2017) delves deep into how human conditioning results in different human behaviours.

    Culture, History, And Biology

    To understand human behavior, understanding human biology is vital. The human brain is perhaps the oldest, and the most wondrous part of the anatomy, and the way the brain works can be linked to evolutionary factors. Every human act first begins as a reaction in the brain. In fact, even the basic instincts such as the fear of dying are processed by the brain’s oldest parts that have been essentially inherited.

    For example, when a person shoots a gun, it is the very basic, inherited, evolutionary, and emotional trigger in the brain that creates the impulse to pull the trigger. In addition to these factors, the brain processes sensory information – visual and auditory – from its surrounding environment to trigger the behavior. If we consider a war zone, it is the heightened sense of danger in the surroundings to makes people act aggressively. These biological behavioral responses are also influenced by human history, society, and culture.

    History, society, and culture shape behavior right from childhood. People from different societies will react differently to situations. For example, people who are used to violence in their society and culture tend to be generally more violent in nature.

    Additionally, ancestral ecology and geography also affect behaviour. Considering all these factors that affect human behaviour, we can see that behaviour is an extremely complex phenomenon that needs has answers in different disciplines.

    Behave by Robert M Sapolsky - Book Review
    Behave by Robert M Sapolsky – Book Review

    How The Brain Controls Aggression

    When it comes to processing and controlling aggression, the amygdala and the frontal cortex of the brain are involved in the split-second decisions that lead to aggressive behavior.

    The amygdala, located in the cerebral cortex (the biggest region of the brain) controls fear and aggression. Experiments conducted have shown brain activity in the amygdala when subjects were shown images stimulating fear or anger.

    In 1966, Charles Whitman killed his mother and his wife before he went on a shooting rampage at the University of Texas. Additionally, he had left a note near his wife’s body stating that he couldn’t ‘rationally specify any reason for his act’.

    While his motives were not clear, the autopsy conducted revealed a tumor pressing his amygdala. The autopsy made it clear why a happily married man would suddenly behave in such a violent manner. Prior to his act, he had even complained to his doctor of having violent impulses and headaches. It was the neurological changes caused by his amygdala that resulted in his behavior.

    The frontal cortex of the brain, on the other hand, controls impulsiveness and regulates emotions such as aggression. The case of Phineas Gage shows the link. In 1848, Phineas Gage was working at a Railroad Company in Vermont. Gage met with an unfortunate accident where a sudden explosion sent an iron rod through his skull piercing his frontal cortex. Shockingly, he survived the accident and lived for more than a decade after the accident.

    After recovery, while gage showed normal brain functioning in areas of intelligence, cognition, perception, memory, and language, according to his friends, he was no longer the same person he was before. He lost respect for social conventions, started swearing, lying, ignoring sound advice, and became impulsive. This proved that the frontal cortex is vital to regulating aggression and determining appropriate behavior.

    A number of case studies of violent psychopaths and criminals have shown that their behaviors have been results of either having injured the frontal cortex or having lower activity in the region.

    Behaviour Is Shaped By The Environment

    The five senses are constantly sending information they receive from the environment. This information or sensory cues, shape human behavior too.

    Visual cues alter people’s perceptions. Cues such as faces, and even skin color can change one’s attitude towards others. When images were shown to white participants for 1:10th of a second, it was observed that the activity in their amygdala increased when they saw images of people from other ethnic backgrounds. Furthermore, when the duration of the images of ethnically different people was increased, their frontal cortex rationalized their initial responses triggered by the amygdala. Naturally, for non-racists, the response of fear from the amygdala typically gets quelled. 

    However, these findings of the initial amygdala responses are intrinsic to why longer sentences for the same crime are given to a stereotypical African face than to a white one. These findings have also helped many defense attorneys change their strategies such as giving male black clients chunky glasses to make their faces more associable with nerd whites than black criminals.

    Cues that are auditory can similarly generate feelings of fear.

    Another similar experiment showed that when researchers played rap music (identifiable with African American culture), and death metal music, associated with whites while showing participants images, the rap music showed increased activity in the amygdalae of the participants while death metal had the opposite effect.

    In addition to visual and auditory cues, behaviors are also affected by one’s immediate social contexts. It is found that men tend to be more akin to risks while they are near women, choose luxury items than buy daily essentials around them. This generosity is seen because, in the company of women, males are unconsciously giving mating signals.

    How Hormones Influence Behaviour

    The relationship between behavior and hormones is quite complex. Hormones are chemicals that form in different glands in the body and when discharged into the bloodstream, affect different parts of the human brain.

    Testosterone is produced in the male testes and the female ovaries, and though isn’t a direct cause of aggression, studies have revealed links between the two. It is a known fact that castration can reduce the level of aggression among males. Therefore, even if sex offenders are punished by castration, one has to consider the factor of context, which also affects behaviors.

     According to some studies, male prisoners have higher levels of testosterone if they exhibit aggression. Thus, contrary to belief, it is a higher level of aggression that increases levels of testosterone secretion and not vice-versa.

    Ironically, the amygdala has a high number of testosterone receptors, and thus, increased levels of testosterone can lead to aggression, but only if an individual is predisposed to aggressive behavior.

    Similarly, oxytocin – which is associated with positive emotions and trust – inhibits amygdala activity. Hence, oxytocin is known to correlate with pro-social behaviors.

    Studies involving economic games showed subjects having higher oxytocin levels viewing others as trustworthy. Considering trust, lower oxytocin levels should have made the subjects in the study distrust deceitful players. However, as the game progressed, the subjects, nevertheless, trusted the deceitful players. Oxytocin too works within the boundaries of context. The subjects exhibited higher levels of trust only when the players were in front of them in the same room.

    The Impact Of Childhood Experiences

    About 85% of the human brain develops within the first two years of life. The other 15% that includes behavioral development develops as the child grows. The frontal cortex of the brain develops much later on, closer to the mid-’20s.

    The adolescent years of a human are extremely critical for behavior development. It is during the adolescent years when the frontal cortex (still undeveloped), can lead to risk-taking, impulsiveness, and even spike up violent traits. Thus an undeveloped adolescent frontal cortex can negatively influence behaviors.

    This knowledge has indeed seen some countries like the US treat younger offenders more leniently, with the Supreme Court ruling in a landmark case that it is illegal to sentence juveniles with life sentences without parole.

    Additionally, a difficult childhood can cause increased levels of violence among youngsters for life. The brain’s neural plasticity – or the ability to absorb information – is much faster among children than in adults. Thus repeated negative experiences or childhood abuse can cause these children to themselves abuse their own children in adulthood.

    Any adversity such as violence or poverty experienced in childhood can cause overdevelopment in the amygdala and underdevelopment in the frontal cortex. Therefore, since the frontal cortex is vital to inhibiting the amygdala’s impulsiveness, an overdeveloped amygdala with an underdeveloped frontal cortex result in violent tendencies in later life and poor behavioral regulation.

    Cultural Factors And Societal Behaviour

    In addition to neurobiology, cultural factors are equally intrinsic to human behavior. For example, if Honduras sees four hundred and fifty times more murder cases than Singapore does, it is evident that cultural conditioning also plays a vital role.

    If we consider different cultures such as the individualistic US and the collective culture of East Asia, we can see that culturally, the people of the United States tend to focus on personal achievement and individual rights. On the other hand, collective cultures focus on the needs of the group before individual ones.

    Studies in brain activity have shown that when Americans are shown pictures of themselves, their frontal cortices activate faster than when they are shown pictures of relatives, an impulse that isn’t as strong in East Asians.

    Cultural differences also affect sensory processes. For example, when East Asians are shown a picture of a person standing alone in a complex scene, they are more likely to focus on the surrounding scene than the individual. Americans would focus more on the details of the individual.

    Cultural differences also result in varied moral systems. In collective cultures, utilitarian moral stances are more common because they value the needs of the many. Therefore, they also place more value on the greater good, especially in criminal justice. These cultures would be more willing to arrest innocent people if it would be the means to stop a riot. Contrarily, in individualistic cultures, individual rights would take precedence, and imprisonment of the innocent without due process would go against societal norms.

    The Influence Of Local Ecology And Geography

    The development of collective or individualistic cultures can be attributed to the surrounding environment, geography, and local ecology, especially since the development of culture is a slow, but sure centuries-long process.

    For example, East Asian countries are predominantly rice-cultivating agricultures. Growing rice is a collective communal labor activity, as opposed to growing wheat, like in North China, where rice is difficult to grow. It is observed that in the North china regions, divorce is more common than in other surrounding rice-growing regions. Additionally, the individualistic wheat-growing culture has resulted in more patents filed in the northern regions.

    The United States, being a predominantly immigrant nation, sees immigrants who are essentially seen as outcasts, criminals, or second-class citizens in their native countries. America is perceived as a place to start life afresh, most because immigrants see it not only as a way out of their original social contexts but also as a new geographical environment. If we consider the geographical context of colonial America, we can see that the country needed immigrants to develop and civilize the land, especially for growth. This individualistic, self-reliant, and even aggressive sense of development prevailed as long-standing character traits; traits that are seen in many southern states even today.

    America has historically been rural and pastoral geography, making it tougher for the center to implement laws. This made people take law into their own hands, increasing instances of violence and making violent traits more common, even to this day.

    Neurobiology, Political Views And Morality

    Morality and political views are also influenced by neurobiology. In fact, there is a correlation between the brain and whether a person has a conservative or political perception. A study that interviewed people of both these political views, saw both sides answer that the roots of poverty lay in the laziness of the poor. However, when the group was asked to rationalize their perceptions, it was found that the liberals gave a situational response that the odds were stacked against the poor.

    A similar mentality can be seen when different people are presented with non-political topics. For example, both, liberals and conservatives initially blamed the clumsiness of a dancer who falls while dancing, however, given time, the liberals were able to rationalize that perhaps the difficulty of the steps could also be blamed.

    Additionally, studies have found neurobiological differences between liberals and conservatives. It is observed that liberals possess more grey matter in the areas of the brain that controls empathy – the cingulate cortex. Contrarily, conservatives have a heightened response to fear due to their enlarged amygdalae, making them more anxious in situations that are risky.

    The brain’s neurobiological connections are also responsible for morality. For example, telling a lie against better judgment leads to activity in the frontal cortex. The act of hiding the truth puts pressure on the frontal cortex to work at full throttle, as strategic deceit is far more difficult for the brain than to simply tell the truth.

    On the other hand, honest individuals’ frontal cortices do not activate during an opportunity to deceive at all simply because they don’t consider deception at all, and thus their frontal cortices do not need to stress themselves out at all.

    The Differences Between Empathy And Compassion

    Let’s begin with an example. When we see someone prick their finger with a needle, the responses that generate from us are purely physical. Our own hands would tighten up, indicating that empathy is connected with avoiding physical pain.

     The Anterior Cingulate Cortex or the ACC links both the amygdala and the frontal cortex. It gets activated when we see others’ pain. It helps the brain learn fear from observed bad experiences, indicating that empathy actually results out of self-preservation than compassion for others’ pain.

    How empathetic one feels depends on sensory factors. We know that visual perceptions of different ethnic people can trigger the fear-inducing amygdala to activate, thus making them less empathetic. Now consider how empathy is affected if the person who pricked his finger is racially different.

    A study conducted on the relationship between empathy and compassion found that while both are perceived as closely associated, they have completely different origins in the brain and activated b different reactions to other peoples’ pain. 

    In the study, two parallel training sessions were conducted. The study group was asked to feel the pain of a suffering subject. The activation of the amygdala that followed resulted in negative feelings and anxiety among the group. In the second training, they were asked to feel the warmth and completely avoid empathizing with the distressed subject. This time, instead of the amygdala, the frontal cortex was activated and the group felt pro-social, positive feelings proving that behaviors leading to empathy and compassion have completely different connotations.

    Conclusion

    The study of human behaviour is an old endeavour that seems to get more complex as research delves deeper into it. However, it is clear that behaviour is an extremely complex phenomenon that is influenced and affected not only by the environment and society but also by historical conditioning, geographical implications and even the smallest neurobiological responses seen in different parts of the brain.

  • Flow by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi – Book Summary And Review

    Seeking True Enjoyment

    Why do we often feel as though we are stuck in rut? Why does it feel as though the joy that we once found in our work is lost and we are merely trudging along with life – just because we have to? Why does one feel, that despite being creatively active, boredom swoops in and takes a hold of the mind?

    Flow (1990), by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, explores the reasons we feel a lack of enjoyment in our work. It delves into why people become too focused on other’s opinions and external rewards, and lose touch with their relationships with work and the meaning of their lives. With examples from ancient wisdom, modern psychology, and philosophy, it is a groundbreaking, empirical work of research that shows how one can truly focus on intrinsic rewards – where one can purely focus on their interests without letting the external rewards and others’ opinions hinder them in doing their best at work and leading truly contented lives.

    Religion And Luxury Lead To Indifference And Meaninglessness

    Religion helps us cope with feelings of unhappiness and lack of fulfillment. This comfort in organized religion stems from the fact that these religions have set rules within which society runs its basic faculties and finds meaning within them. Nevertheless, discovering the predicament of the universe has shown us that the principles of religion are wrong. Yet, people have time and again turned to religion, and still do. For example, at the peak of their power, the Romans thought that they had conquered their fates, until their empires collapsed, breaking their bubbles of comfort.

    People often turn to external rewards such as fame and wealth to seek comfort too. Today, the luxuries of modern life make people believe and struggle for the comforts they offer, without realizing that these don’t bring happiness either. It is a fact that the wealthiest man won’t be truly free from unhappiness. Yet in order to derive meaning, people show off their wealth or seek positions of power to change their environment to sustain happiness.

    This is the reason why a closer look at our lives shows us how unhappy we really are, as compared to viewing it from a distance.

    Genes Push Us Towards Basic Pleasures

    True enjoyment in life is difficult to attain. Moreover, the attention span of humans is limited and we prefer to seek instant gratification from the simpler pleasures rather than pursue the ‘hard-to-attain fruits of true enjoyment. We are simply genetically bound to seeking the restorative order of basic pleasures. For example, our bodies have evolved to feel hungry when our blood sugar dips low.

    True enjoyment, on the other hand, requires one to concentrate and use their skills and to stretch their limits and go beyond the confines of one’s genes, pushing one to focus and control their attention towards attaining their goals. For example, when a person tries to make a complicated dish, he uses all his patience and skill, as well as the understanding of a sophisticated palate, in order to be able to enjoy every bit of the final dish.

    Even then, the person seeks pleasure rather than enjoyment.

    Take for example, when people wind down on the weekend after a particularly difficult week, they prefer to sit with a drink, or even indulge in recreational drugs. While these provide relaxation, they often deplete our ability to concentrate and make us lose control. These are forms of external rewards that do not need one to exert their skills or focus on goals.

    Thus, pleasures take us down the path of distraction and least resistance.

    Flow (1990) by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
    Flow (1990) by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

    The Elements Of Enjoyment

    Enjoyment can be defined as a feeling experienced when one has a clear goal, engages in an activity to reach that goal which has a balance of challenges and skills and receives immediate feedback. Yet, people experience enjoyment in different unique ways and use different terms to express what they feel.

    For example, surgeons get immediate visual feedback of how well they are performing an operation when they are seeing less blood in an incision or extract a diseased organ successfully. On the other hand, doctors who practice internal medicine, do not get an immediate visual of their success, even though they have clear goals as well.  They need to set different goals for enjoyment – such as being able to correctly identify an illness and treat it successfully with the right medicine.

    Truly enjoying the task at hand, or getting ‘in the zone’ involves having a feeling of being in control with awareness and action. Rock climbers, for example, have to devote their complete attention to successfully assessing the dangers in the task at hand. Their enjoyment lies in quelling their fears by using their expertise.

    The complete concentration and immersion we see in surgeons or rock climbers is powerful enough to take a person away from self-consciousness and anxiety. Such concentration can make a person lose track of time, enabling them to truly enjoy what they do.

    Personal Rewards Incite Skill Development

    Once, a US tourist walked into an antique store in Naples, looking to buy a sculpture. The owner of the store quoted a very steep price on the sculpture. When the tourist agreed to pay the quoted price, the owner said that the sculpture wasn’t available for sale.

    Here, the owner changed his stance not to exploit the tourist, but because he enjoyed bargaining and the sharpening of his mental dexterity and selling skills. People tend to try to achieve more and expand their personal limits when a task is neither difficult nor easy. A tennis player, for example, will simply enjoy getting the ball across the net as a beginner. With practice, as the task isn’t challenging anymore, the player will set his sights on something more difficult – like practicing the perfect serve or playing against another skilled player.

    If the player finds a highly skillful opponent, he may feel out of depth and even give up because the challenge is too difficult. However, if the opponent is just a notch above the player’s skill level, he could actually have a chance at improving his skills at tennis. However, for skill improvement, it is essential that the player’s skills be aligned with his personal goals, remain unaffected by external rewards, or threats of punishment. 

    Eva Zeisel was a ceramist who was imprisoned by Stalin’s Police. In order to maintain her sanity while in prison, she would play chess with herself in her mind, did gymnastics, and even memorized her own poetry. Her personal goal kept her motivated to improve her skills and control her consciousness at a time when there was little else that could motivate her.

    Discipline Can Lead to A Heightened State Of Awareness

    Consider walking. It is a mundane, routine activity that we never pay attention to. However, paying attention to the surroundings, the sights, smells, people, architecture, etc., one can even transform this mundane activity into a source of inspiration.

    Mindfulness and awareness of one’s surroundings can lead to creating a meaningful connection with the surroundings, and the mind can be trained to perceive more than what one’s automated responses to the surroundings allow.

    Today, we have an unlimited choice of music available at the click of a button. Yet, we do not enjoy it in its full complexity. If we are mindful enough, we will be able to understand this complexity and enjoy the music for its true sensory meaning, where the body is able to respond to its rhythm, to its analogic meaning that conjures up images while listening to the music, and the analytical meaning, where we can analyze it and compare it with other pieces of music, different composers, etc.

    Such mindfulness comes from a strong sense of self-control, which can be sought through the ancient Eastern wisdom of yoga practice. Yoga believes in the practices of obedience, cleanliness, non-violence, and above all discipline. It uses the acknowledgment of a higher power to gain self-control and to steer one’s attention to a positive goal, which is aligned with a specific personal goal. It is a method that encourages one to free the self from ego and exercise mind-control by using the body.

    Focus On Ideas Rather Than Flaws

    Sport and exercise require focussed attention. People engaged in such activities seek enjoyment from the concentration and attention required to reach fitness goals. Humans have the capability to use their minds to seek similar enjoyment too. Such a ‘state of flow’ of enjoyment also comes when one engages in exercises and games of language or memory. 

    For example, by simply solving a crossword, one merely attains an external reward. Instead, one can create one’s own crosswords puzzles to sharpen language skills thereby attaining intrinsic rewards. Memory skills can be sharpened by absorbing everything about any particular subject of interest, such as the works of a particular poet or events of World War I, etc. Such activities can help one get ‘into the flow’.

    Bertrand Russell, in order to make himself happy, focussed on the external world, rather than dwell on his flaws. Focussing on the external world, on people who one admires, fields of knowledge and interest rather than one’s own flaws can help one connect with the ‘flow state.

    Many scientists such as Isaac Newton focused on improving their scientific skills simply because they enjoyed the act of improvement. Even Einstein focussed on using his free time to work on his famous theories.

    Treat Work Like A Game

    Dissatisfaction in life often stems from the fact that people are unhappy with their daily routines – mostly their jobs. Additionally, they spend their leisure time trying to recover from their dissatisfaction. It is, however, possible to derive enjoyment from work by turning ‘work’ into a challenge that requires one to focus their attention to achieve a goal and reduce anxiety.

    In a small hamlet in the Italian Alps, the elderly residents of the community would begin their day at five in the morning, milk and feed their cows after carrying bales of hay for miles, tend their orchards, and cook. However, when they were asked what would they change about their lives if they were wealthy, they said that wouldn’t want to change anything. This was because they didn’t distinguish between tier work and their leisure time. 

    Similarly, there are many people who find enjoyment in their work than while they aren’t working. These people also report an increase in their creative capabilities and concentration. Setting intrinsic goals for oneself that are not motivated by the extrinsic factors of wealth or fame, and trying to exceed one’s own levels of learning or performance is a great way to get into the ‘state of flow’.

    For example, a railroad car welder was known among his colleagues because he had learned all the jobs in his assembly line and enjoyed doing all of them. He would refuse promotions and enjoyed turning various manual tasks into a challenge. He pursued gardening in his free time. He never felt the need to escape the drudgery of routine.

    It is thus essential to cultivate challenges in work and try to learn all there is about the work in one’s own organization. This helps one escape the drudgery of simply clocking in and out.

    Engage With Friends And Family

    While spending quality time alone is essential, it can also lead to boredom. Moreover, daily routines, the hustle, and the bustle of daily travel can sap away one’s individuality and freedom. This is when one turns to their social circle of neighbors, friends, and family.

    Family is an important social construct that can give an individual unconditional acceptance and honest feedback. Moreover, happy and supportive families can be both, differentiated – where everyone accepts each family member for their differences, distinct skills, and traits; and integrated as well, where they can be downright honest, fair in judgments, and inclusive of all members in the family.

    For example, the children of parents who engage in challenging tasks and hobbies try to emulate these habits, than if they were passive and indulging in TV-viewing and drinking in their free time.

    Similarly, having good friendships can help sharpen and strengthen one’s creative side. Humans have instrumental skills – like professional skills or survival skills – and expressive skills – skills that enable us to express and communicate our personalities. Spending time with friends can hone these expressive skills than being alone, producing higher levels of motivation, strength, happiness, and self-esteem.

    Family and friends are also intrinsic to growth and novelty in life. For example, Canadian Indian tribes create permanent settlements in areas that are rich in food resources. However, with every next generation, they uproot themselves and move to a different area, starting from scratch. They search for new ways of finding and harvesting food. This process shocks them out of routine to learn new skills.

    The Pros Of Focussed Attention

    We have seen earlier how focussing our attention can help gain new perspectives, reduce anxiety, and help one find new ways to grow. In order to do this successfully, one can employ the following strategies.

    • Letting go of the ego – We feel frustrated when things out of our control disrupt schedules or put a halt in our work. When such situations come in direct conflict with intentions, trusting and putting faith in their own abilities to manage situations as they arise is essential. For example, when the computer stops working for no reason right in the middle of some important work, we should put aside our ego and frustration and understand that there are higher laws that govern things and that everything isn’t always within our control.
    • Practice being mindful of our environment – Charles Lindbergh, the first person to cross the Atlantic in a plane all alone, knew that his endeavor was a risky one. Rather than focus on his fear, he chose to be more mindful of his surroundings. He concentrated on the levers, knobs, and the welding marks inside the cockpit. This cleared his anxiety.
    • Do not give up – Everyone faces difficult situations at some point. Rather than giving up when a task seems too difficult, one should the difficulty to find new solutions. For example, if your boss’ camaraderie with another colleague thwarts your chances of being promoted, you can either try to win the boss’ favor by fawning over him like the colleague does, or find a new career altogether. While neither of these solutions might be good decisions per se, the latter choice can prove to be a novel way of finding and pursuing new challenges in life.

    Remember, there is always another option where one can channel and focus their attention to a new challenge. It is simply a matter of choice.

    Putting Unified Goals Into Action

    Everyone has his or her own purpose or goal in life. One only has to discover it. This can be done by focusing on that purpose or goal and by choosing to create meaning in life. It is important to remember that the end result of the pursuit isn’t as important as the journey, especially if one is completely immersed in the challenges that the pursuit brings forth.

    Once the goal or purpose is established, one should put them into action with strong resolutions and intentions. For example, Antonio Gramsci was a vociferous political activist who spoke against Fascism, and who grew up living in poverty and illness through his childhood. His greatness as one of Fascism’s strongest opponents was a result of the strength in his resolve to fight against the social conditions that challenged his family.

    One’s goals and purpose should have a life theme and the resolutions one has should be harmonious. Malcolm X started his life in poverty too. He went to jail for dealing drugs. However, while in jail, he gained self-knowledge by reading and by reflecting on his actions. His focussed attention on civil rights drove him to become an activist and improve the lives of others.

    Conclusion

    True enjoyment comes when one focuses on the intrinsic rewards in life. The opinions of others, fame, and wealth are just external rewards that can divert one’s focus from truly enjoying their work.

    In order to get into the ‘flow-state that leads to true enjoyment, it is essential to focus one’s attention, completely immerse oneself in the task at hand, set clear personal goals, and work towards cultivating new challenges. Moreover, one should put these goals into action with strong resolutions and intentions. 

    Additionally, having a disciplined outlook, being mindful of one’s environment, and most importantly, treating work as a game can bring true contentment and enjoyment in work.

  • Buyology by Martin Lindstrom – Book Review & Summary

    Why Neuromarketing Works Best

    What motivates people to make the purchase decisions they do? In reality, people make their purchase decisions based on an innate, unexplainable, gut feeling, rather than by weighing the pros of cons of products every time. These purchasing decisions are actually made at a deeper level rather than being cut and dry.

    Buyology by Martin Lindstrom explores and examines the hidden motives behind buying decisions by delving into the cutting-edge methods of neuromarketing. It assesses the workings of the brain and shows why traditional forms of marketing research such as surveys and questionnaires don’t always work.

    Often, the brain’s decision and reasons to buy contradict what a buyer actually wants. In order to gauge this contradiction, Lindstrom believes that neuromarketing, a method based on sophisticated neuroimaging machinery, can lead entrepreneurs to information that can help in creating the best marketing strategies for their products and services.

    The Influence Of Mirror Neurons

    Studies have revealed that mirror neurons are the reason behind contagious yawning. When someone around us yawns, we feel an urge to yawn too. Similarly, seeing someone smile can put a beaming smile on the watchers face too.

    In a study conducted on macaques by Giacomo Rizzolatti, a scientist, in 1992, showed an astonishing connection. He found that the premotor neurons in the macaques’ brain lit up while it reached for a nut, but also lit up while watching another macaque reaching for a nut too.

    The study proves that these mirror neurons and certain regions of the brain were activated equally while the subject performed an action itself as well as when it watched another so the same action. The same can be said for humans, wherein, as we observe someone else performing an action, we re-enact the action in our brains too.

    Marketing strategies and targeted advertising aim to stimulate these mirror neurons while making buying decisions. For example, the mirror neurons of the brain react to targeted gestures of someone sipping a cool cola in an ad. Similarly, attractive models in clothing brand ads target the mirror neurons, promising them a perfect look.

    Mirror neurons, however, work in tandem with the happy hormone dopamine that creates a feeling of pleasure, influencing one’s buying decisions. The rush of dopamine is also the cause of the happy feeling we get after ‘retail therapy. It is this feeling that influences one to buy more than what rationality would otherwise allow.

    Additionally, the same rush of dopamine can be linked to purchase decisions that indicate an increase in one’s social status. These choices are dictated by evolution. An increase in social status leads to an increase in one’s chances of reproduction. Biologically, the survival instinct of the body causes the brain to flood with dopamine, urging us to buy that bigger house or the flashy car.

    Buyology by Martin Lindstrom
    Buyology by Martin Lindstrom

    Somatic Markers And Product Perception

    We see many choices at the store. What makes us choose one particular brand every time as opposed to the other competitors on the shelf? 

    Shortcuts that trigger automatic responses – the somatic markers of the brain – explain this. The brain processes a number of ideas and thoughts, condensing them all into a single response. Based on past experiences, the brain, rather than generate a new process every time, creates a shortcut leading to one’s buying decision.

    A recent German study showed that about fifty percent of one’s buying decisions are made on spontaneous and unconscious reactions, due to the pre-made purchase-decision map already existing within the brain’s somatic markers. These somatic markers drive the preference of one brand over another. 

    For example, researchers saw that buyers preferred Andrex toilet paper to Kleenex. While the results might seem strange, they were based on the fact that people liked the cute Labrador puppy mascot Andrex used. People linked the image of the puppy with toilet training, a young family, and these conceptual links strengthened the brand’s perception. 

    These somatic markers are also what make people associate German products with technological superiority, making the brain’s somatic markers a veritable marketing tool. Thus advertisers often create associations between wildly different concepts to attract somatic markers of the consumer’s brains.

    For example, Lindstrom convinced the manager of the struggling bank to paint everything in the bank a vivid pink. After a few months, the bank started flourishing because people associated the pink color with their childhood piggy banks. This shows how color can influence somatic markers greatly.

    How Fear Works In Marketing

    Using somatic markers to influence buying decisions can be relatively harmless. However, some marketing techniques are created to exploit certain negative emotions such as fear. When a person experiences fear, they tend to seek solace in pleasant experiences and solid foundations – often in retail therapy. As we have seen earlier, retail therapy induces the rush of dopamine that makes a person forget the stress caused by fear, pushing him/her to buy more.

    Lyndon B. Johnson’s, 1964 iconic commercial ‘Daisy’ is a perfect example. The advert showed a little girl playing with daisies, just as a nuclear explosion erupts in the background. The message in the ad was clear – vote for Johnson or for nuclear war! Political strategist Tom Freedman studied the effects of the commercial on the amygdala (the part of the brain that controls fear) among voters recently. He found a noticeable activity increase in the subject’s amygdala – proof that the commercial was successful in winning Johnson the presidency in that year.

    Somatic markers in the brain associated with fear can also link products with the absence of negative feelings. For example, diet products instill the fears of unwanted, undesirable consequences linking them with not using the product. This encourages buyers to purchase the products to avoid those negative consequences.

    Similarly, Johnson & Johnson’s No More Tears Shampoo works on the same concept. With promises of avoiding burning eyes in the bathtub, they have successfully marketed their product using the concept of fear.

    Subliminal Messages In Marketing

    Subliminal messages in advertising mean using auditory, visual, and other sensory messages directed at the subconscious. It is a concept that has been under the radar since 1957 when the concept was still in its nascent stages. The National Association of Broadcasters banned subliminal messaging even though the concept was determined to be fake.

    If we consider any message in advertising that influences the subconscious to make purchase decisions, one can say that modern advertising does include subliminal messages, or any form of sensory stimulation that causes an obvious subconscious response, for example, the smell of the insides of a new car as a person takes the car for a test drive; we can say that subliminal marketing works.

    For example, Marlboro’s owner Philip Morris pays clubs and bars to match their interiors with the brand’s colour scheme and put up ashtrays and other symbols that are similar to the Marlboro logo.

    Neuromarketing research shows that subliminal messages work. A study showed that a simple grumpy or happy face affects how much a consumer is willing to pay for any product. Participants of the study were asked to see a sad or happy face, pour themselves a beverage, and then decide how much would they pay for it. Those who saw the happy face actually poured themselves more and were willing to pay double what the participants who sad faces were willing to pay.

    It proved that simply seeing a smiling face at the checkout counter could greatly impact sales of a product.

    The Impact Of health Warnings And Disclaimers

    All cigarette packs have health warnings printed on them. Despite these warnings, statistics show that about fifteen billion cigarettes are sold on a daily basis. The question therefore is, do these disclaimers work at all?

    A study asked smokers to see health warning images and rate their urges to have a cigarette. The brain scans of the participants showed that on a neurological level, the images had no effect on the participants’ cravings whatsoever. The study in fact showed that the nucleus accumbens – the brain’s ‘cravings spot’ – was actually stimulated by the images rather than repulsing the smoker.

    Lindstrom, along with his research team conducted a similar experiment, showing participants a very repulsive ad. It featured a group of people sitting together enjoying cigarettes, while the cigarette emits disgusting green globs of fat, rather than smoke. As the group of people kept smoking, the globs of fat oozed out unnoticeably onto their clothes and surroundings. 

    The aim of the ad was clear. Smoking causes globs of fat to circulate throughout one’s bloodstream causing damage to the arteries. Yet the ad had no effect on the study group. In fact, their brain focussed on the fun, social setup, and friendly atmosphere in the ad, increasing their desire to smoke.

    Thus disclaimers actually promote addictive habits rather than discourage them.

    Religion, Loyalty, And Marketing 

    Marketing strategies aim at acquiring loyalty from customers. For example, if we look at the Oreo Cookie’s ‘twist, and lick’ or the ‘dunk in the milk’ way of enjoying the cookie cream, it has become a ritual. The strategy encouraged people to become ‘a part’ of the crowd that believes that these are the best ways of enjoying an Oreo. They ritualized the actions, making them almost religious, cementing customers’ loyalty to their product.

    The major religions of the world work in a similar manner to ensure the loyalty of their followers. The Catholic Church, for example, encourages people to form emotional connections that make their beliefs strong and them loyal. Religions also create an ‘us vs. the others’ mentality to gain loyalty. Many marketing strategies adopt the same methods to create loyalty among customers. Similarly, major competing brands such as Coke, Pepsi, Visa, MasterCard, etc., create distinctions between competing products to define themselves. Such distinctions help in attracting a fanatical following of loyal users.

    Moreover, iconography in marketing such as symbols, or the logo of a brand (the golden arches of McDonald’s or the Nike swoosh) is quite similar to the iconography that is present in religions. Symbols such as the Cross, angels, and the Crown of Thorns help followers associate feelings with religion.

    There is a similarity between religious connotations and references and strong brands too, especially in the way the brain processes these messages. 

    A study in neuromarketing showed that the brains of participants presented almost identical activity while they were viewing images of religious symbols and images of strong brands such as Ferrari, iPod, Harley Davidson, etc. Thus, emotional resonance and engagement with the marketing of strong brands are similar to one’s spiritual attachment was clearly evident.

    Sexual References In Advertising

    The use of sexual references in advertising is a thriving and age-old practice. However, are these strategies effective enough?

    Take, for example, the National Airlines commercial that featured a sexy air stewardess claiming to “fly you like you’ve never flown before”, or Vulva, the perfume brand claiming to have captured the enticing scent of the vagina. Sexual references in many ads suggest ‘sex sells’, however, certain studies have claimed that sex has no effect whatsoever on customers buying decisions.

    One study showed two groups of different shows with commercials in between. While one group watched some explicit scenes of Sex And The City, the second group watched the family comedy Malcolm In The Middle. The group that watched Sex In The City surprisingly was less likely to remember the commercials shown than the second group.

    In fact, a study conducted by MediaAnalyzer Software and Research proved that sexual content in advertising actually takes a viewer’s attention off the actual product. They showed participants a few print ads that ranged from highly sexual to absolutely bland and asked them to specify which ads caught their attention. While the sexual ads gathered more attention, the viewers could not remember the brand names and logos of the ads, proving that sex does sell but at a price. This phenomenon was named the Vampire Effect, where explicit content actually sucks the attention of viewers away from products.

    Nevertheless, sexual content, for its shock and controversial virtue can indeed be good for marketing. Thus, sex in itself sells, but it doesn’t help sell a product. It is rather the controversy that sells.

    Neuromarketing And Market Research – Conclusion

    It is proved that neuromarketing strategies can outperform traditional marketing tools such as surveys, mainly because most consumer choices are unconsciously made.

    A comparative study showed participants 3 shows, How Clean is Your House, The Swan, and Quizmania.  After watching, they were asked to rate which show would they prefer to watch again. While traditional surveys pointed at How Clean is Your House and The Swan most preferred, brain scans later showed that How Clean Is Your House?  was a clear preference followed by Quizmania, with The Swan taking third place. 

    Neuromarketing thus has the ability to gauge whether a marketing strategy could backfire or be ineffective altogether. It can also help determine the true motive behind purchase decisions, helping companies tweak their marketing and products accordingly.

    By looking at the biological aspects of brain activity, neuromarketing proves to be a more accurate method to influence a customer’s purchase decisions.

  • How Emotions Are Made by Lisa Feldman Barrett – Book Review & Summary

    The Factory Of Human Emotions

    Pixar’s 2015 movie Inside Out, cartoonified human emotions of joy, sadness, fear, anger, and disgust. The movie not only touched the heartstrings of adults and children alike, but it also gave us a deeper insight into how humans perceive emotions. Lisa Feldman Barrett’s How Emotions Are Made (2017) gives a completely different view of how we understand our emotions. She shows how culture influences one’s emotions and how the human brain processes them.

    We often think of our emotions as fundamental forces that develop from the very nature of humans – fully formed. We perceive them as distinct sentiments that need to be mastered. Barrett shows that emotions do not merely emerge. They are constructed in the mind and shaped by culture.

    The Classical Perception Of Emotions

    For more than thousands of years, humans have understood emotions to be reflexes, often influenced by evolution and existing beyond rationality. It is believed that one cannot truly control one’s emotions. Thinkers, philosophers, and even modern-day psychologists such as Aristotle, Darwin, The Buddha, Freud, Descartes, The Dalai Lama, Steven Pinker, Paul Ekman, and many others ratified this classical perception. 

    This perception of emotions is understood as universal, taught in psychology textbooks the world over, and is even reflected in the manner in which media depicts and discusses them. It is believed that emotions get triggered in different regions of the brain automatically and are hardwired.

    The views show that each emotion has an underlying property and some can be ‘universally’ seen all over the world. This connotation of having ‘essence’ is called ‘essentialism’. It stands by the assumption that every person can equally express these emotions and also recognize them within others around them.

    Biologically, the view propounds the fact that the brain is pre-wired with certain specific neurons linked to specific emotions, and once triggered, they generate physical responses. These specific characteristics are called fingerprints that help identify emotions. For example, an irritating friend triggers anger neurons, generating a physical response of a scowl on the face. Similarly, the death of a relative triggers sadness neurons generating a response of crying.

    New Scientific Evidence

    In reality, everyone does not respond in the same way to the same emotions. Nor do they have the same physical reactions to set emotions. These differences challenge the assumptions of the classical views of emotions.

    For example, we do not have the same responses for sadness, happiness, anger, awe, etc. There is a whole range of reactions that depend on the situations that trigger them. Moreover, experiments conducted have proved that emotions or any specific emotion aren’t restricted to any one region of the brain. Therefore, new scientific evidence disproves the fingerprint theory too.

    Barrett’s team of neurologists at her Interdisciplinary Affective Science Laboratory analyzed brain-imagery between 1990 and 2011. As a patient experienced emotions of happiness, anger, sadness, fear, etc., they computed the probability of increased brain activation by dividing the brain into small, virtual 3D pixel cubes and analyzing the responses within each cube.

    Their experiment showed that the brain regions get activated during non-emotional perceptions and thoughts as well. This proved that there are no obligatory, or single responses in the brain regions for emotions, even though the classical view places expressive patterns to emotions in society. For example, just because a person smiles, does not mean that they are happy.

    In 2007, the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) developed a method called SPOT (Screening Passengers by Observation Techniques). The technique was used to identify potential suspicious terrorists based on body movements and facial patterns. Given the new scientific evidence, this initiative was a flop, costing the American taxpayer 900 million dollars.

    Lisa Feldman Barrett’s How Emotions Are Made
    Lisa Feldman Barrett’s How Emotions Are Made

    Spontaneous, Concurrent, And Experience-Based Emotions

    Barrett believes in the theory of constructed emotions. The theory believes that emotions develop spontaneously, simultaneously, and concurrently in different regions of the brain. This would imply that emotions are not innate, involuntarily triggered, or natural responses, even though it seems counterintuitive.

    The theory states that each emotion is influenced by people’s experiences. Sensory inputs, whether visual, auditory, olfactory, or gustatory, pre-dictate responses, which the brain either affirms or alters based on prior experiences along with the sensory inputs to guide actions. According to Barrett, all emotional responses are created in a similar manner.

    For example, the emotion anger can generate myriad responses, each having its own neural pattern and generating unique bodily movements and changes. The brain has a selection of mechanisms to determine which situation needs which anger response. For example, in anger, one might scowl in one situation, yell in another, and completely quiet down in a third. Variations in emotional responses are quite normal because it is the context that determines which response gets stimulated out of those myriad responses.

    For Barrett, emotions are not innate or fixed but are constructed by humans who are the architects of their own experiences.

    The System Of Emotion Is Predictive

    The brain runs most of the body functions, especially the involuntary, on ‘autopilot’. Just like a person driving for a long time tends to engage the clutch and shift gears without much thought, the brain smoothly manages the systems that are predictive and ongoing. This ‘autopilot’ system is called interoception.

    The brain is constantly processing external and internal sensations, which get repurposed as emotions due to the process of interoception. Thus, interoception is at the base of creating emotions and is predictive.

    Interoception has two basic spectrums. Each spectrum covers two Affects. Affects are the aspects of consciousness, whether the brain is using them to create emotions perceptions or thought, or not. The first spectrum manages effects of pleasure and displeasure, whereas, agitation and calmness are managed by the second spectrum.

    For example, the calmness that one feels while hearing the waves at the seashore, the pleasant feeling of a summer breeze, or the agitation one feels during a tummy-ache, one experiences affective feelings. However, they are not actually emotions and don’t make one feel happy or sad in themselves.

    Babies can perceive affects of pleasure and displeasure from birth. These affects result in wailing, cooing, or crying.

    The Interoception System Is Regulatory

    During interoception, a number of regions of the brain get activated at the same time to implement it. This interoceptive network contains two components.

    • The Body Budgeting System – Using past experiences, this system estimates what the body needs, and controls the body’s internal environment by sending pre-empted messages throughout the body. For example, when one decides to amp up their exercise routine by an hour, it tells the heart to pump faster and instructs the metabolic system to break down more glucose to incorporate the new change.
    • The Primary Interoceptive Cortex – The Primary Interoceptive Cortex manages the sensations we feel inside the body, for example, the heartbeat.

    Both these systems help the body budget its resources by forming a loop of feedback. It is this budgeting that helps the body regulate resources such as cortisol, glucose, and involuntary actions such as heart rate and breathing. 

    This system of budgeting also helps stimulate emotions. The body is constantly working. Even while one is working, or merely sitting down and thinking, the budgeting system works in the background. For example, while writing an examination, and the invigilator announces that there are only five more minutes, you panic, the heart starts pounding faster, and you start increasing the speed of writing. These emotions and movements, voluntary and involuntary, are all regulated by interoception’s body budgeting system.

    In a scenario, if the body’s budget gets imbalanced, one feels agitation, a response to the body having a lack of resources to function normally in the situation. The brain then starts firing emotions to counter the imbalance. To explain it in terms of effects, when a person is displeased and aroused, one can experience the emotion of fear.

    Emotions And The Influence Of Culture

    In Tahitian culture, sadness is explained by a word that means, ‘fatigue that is associated with the flu’. In different cultures, sadness would have different meanings and connotations. This shows that people understand concepts, and emotions, based on the connotations they see in their environment. Therefore, one’s culture influences one’s understanding of certain concepts.

    For example, people argue about the difference between a cupcake and a muffin. Though both are more-or-less the same, made with similar ingredients, the difference lies in their culturally associated meanings. Cupcakes are desserts, and muffins are eaten at breakfast. Thus the differences are based on the social reality that is defined by social agreement.

    The social agreement can be seen all around us in many examples, such as paper money. While the paper has no inherent value, it is via a social agreement that people know and understand that different sized and colored paper denote the difference between one US dollar, 20 Euros, or 100 Indian rupees.

    Similarly, emotions ride on cultural conventions too. In ancient Greek and Roman civilizations, there was no word for ‘smiling’. This was because, as opposed to today, smiling wasn’t culturally associated with happiness.

    Suppressing our emotions can cause a lot of damage
    Suppressing our emotions can cause a lot of damage
    Exploding In Anger Often Leads to Regret Later On
    Exploding in emotions can do the same

    Emotions Are Learnt From Birth, And We Can Learn More

    We have already seen how babies have effects that help them emote. However, emotional concepts are explicitly learned as we grow from parents, culture, and society. Therefore, the author says that emotions such as anger, depression, happiness, fear, etc. are not universal.

    For example, if a parent asks a crying toddler, “Are you crying because you’re angry that it’s time to sleep?” the parent has inherently linked crying with anger, disappointment, or sadness. This linking continues from one’s childhood, as the brain uses past and new experiences to reshape old concepts and learn new ones.

    This learning capacity of the brain helps us to regulate emotion concepts by getting better at distinguishing between them. For example, until recently, there was no word in English that described feeling happiness at someone else’s hardships. There was simply no word to describe it, even though the feeling wasn’t a new one. The German word Schadenfreude was borrowed by the English language to explain the feeling.

    Similarly, if a new expression is heard frequently, the brain tries to link it with similar past experiences, enabling one to ‘feel’ it. This amounts to practicing ‘feeling emotions’, making people better at distinguishing them. Hence, as a person invests in creating new experiences, they, in turn, become the base of new emotions of the future.

    Conclusion

    Emotions are not innate or inborn. They are shaped by culture, society, and the environment that surrounds us. Emotions are constructed and regulated by systems of the brain that enables humans to identify, understand and distinguish emotion concepts, based on the brain’s past experiences through observing and understanding the culture that surrounds us.

  • Maps of Meaning by Jordan B Peterson – Book Review & Summary

    Meaningful Living Through Myths

    Legends, myths, and stories have been part of our lives since the time we were born, and part of civilization since ancient times. These myths and legends were intrinsic to communicating, teaching, and imbibing various lessons of culture, morality and lend meaning to the lives of the people in a community and society at large.

    Jordan B. Peterson, in his Maps of Meaning (1999), uses historical analysis, social, and psychoanalysis to understand how these myths and legends have shaped the culture and in turn, shaped humans. He argues that myths that have been handed down from generation to generation are the way to not only understand present human nature and culture but also derive meaning from our lives and reach individual potential.

    The Fear Of The Unknown

    Let’s take rats for example. A rat freezes when it is put in a new cage. Its reaction to unfamiliar territory is primarily caution. The rat will slowly explore its new cage by scratching, sniffing, and licking its new cage, getting accustomed to this new surrounding, and becoming calmer.

    Humans, though more complex than rats, understand the world in a similar manner. For humans too, the world is divided into the known, and the unknown. 

    While the known comprises of all things familiar where things that have been previously explored, things that make sense, things that are known due to shared culture, things that give a sense of calm and safety. The unknown is the unfamiliar – a new situation, unexpected behaviour, unexplained phenomenon, etc. Anything that is an anomaly will throw humans off their guard and make them stop in their tracks.

    However, anomalies rake up dual feelings – of being promising and threatening at the same time. Moreover, the intensity of unexpectedness determines whether it is fear or curiosity that will dominate the senses. For example, a letter with ‘open at your own risk’ written on top will generate feelings of anxiousness as well as excitement. However, if the letter is from a known friend, the feeling of curiosity will take over and one will feel less anxious to open it.

    Once the initial fear of the unknown passes, humans tend to have a natural proclivity to explore the unknown – to make the unfamiliar, familiar. The goal is to reduce anxiety and attach a sense of safety.

    Humans, unlike rats, have the ability of thought, in addition to action to rationalize the unknown. For example, apart from smelling the unopened letter, holding it against the light to check its insides, or ripping it open, we have the ability to ponder and think about who sent it, and why. This ability to rationalize is what has shaped the world today and is continuing to shape it.

    Maps of Meaning by Jordan B Peterson
    Maps of Meaning by Jordan B Peterson

    How Stories Give Meaning To Our World

    Science and scientific development help us understand our surroundings rationally. However, feelings and emotions are critical to understanding the world too. The judgment of whether something is bad or good is determined by emotions and feelings, in turn determining how we approach the unknown. It is the social and cultural context with which we approach any situation or thing in life to derive meaning. 

    For example, one’s liking for a piece of cheesecake depends on the effective, or emotional meaning one attaches to it. While rationally – and scientifically – the cheesecake is the same, its affective meaning changes depending on whether offered by a stranger or a loved one, or whether one is on a diet. Therefore, science in itself cannot help one understand the world, let alone navigate it because feelings and emotions are always tied to the fact.

    Humans have stories, an ingenious way of deriving meaning. Shared stories, myths, and legends such as The Passion of the Christ, tales of Greek and Roman Gods, cosmologic stories of the ancient Egyptians, stories of monsters, kings, heroes, etc., are some of the most important stories that have hidden cultural meaning.

    In the book Maps of Meaning, Jordan Peterson emphasises that in the modern context, these stories are considered fabulations, yet they have cultural and psychological significance. They give meaning to major human experiences such as the creation of man, forces of nature, and the origin of the cosmos that would otherwise, have been unfamiliar and frightening to ancient humans.

    The Basic Structure Of Myths

    Myths from different places of the world have some common characteristics because of shared human nature. Whether it is the story of Homer’s Odyssey, the Passion of the Christ, stories of creation in Mesopotamia or Egypt, they all have one commonality – the journey of a brave hero and his triumphant return from the unknown.

    The primal forces of nature form the basis of most myths. They represent the unknown, from wherein all life originates. Its creative and destructive nature is mostly represented as feminine. For example, according to the Mesopotamian myth of creation, the unknown is a ferocious Mother Dragon Tiamat from whose pieces the cosmos was created. In Sumerian creation myth, the sea goddess Nammu birthed the sky and the earth.

    The feminine, often the mother, is portrayed as either ‘great’, or ‘terrible’, where the terrible unknown is shown in forms of an evil monster, a stepmother, or a storm; the great, or promising unknown is often characterized by a fairy godmother, a treasure or a magical place.

    In mythology, the opposite of the Great and Terrible Mother, is the Great and Terrible Father. The father represents the structured, known territories of culture that man has built for protection. The father is most often represented as an old, wise king – great when he is just, protective and wise, and terrible when he is oppressive, tyrannical, or evil.

    Finally, the hero of the story is the brave explorer, trapped between the unknown forces of the Mother and Father – or nature and culture. He is the one who fights the negatives of nature and culture and wins by bringing out the positives, proving to be a role model for humans.

    Myths Are A Framework For Humans And Society

    All myths and legends are a framework idealizing how society should be built and how individuals should behave within it. It is often seen that myths are based on stories of kings, queens, princes, etc. They justify authoritarian culture, legitimize them, and at the same time provide templates and examples of how power should be used (or not).

    For example, the Mesopotamian emperor was believed to be an emissary of the hero Marduk, who constructed the cosmos from pieces of Tiamat. The emperor, just like Marduk was to bring order from the chaos in society.

    Myths describe the dualities of the Mother (nature) and the Father (culture). Where the Mother is creative and destructive, the Father is protective and tyrannical. These differences described in stories of kings or gods show to balance tradition and innovation in culture and society. 

    The Egyptian story of Horus is a great example. The divine king Osiris is too fixated on traditional ways and doesn’t see the evil nature of his brother Seth, who eventually kills him to get the throne. Horus, Osiris’ son is an ‘updated’ version of Osiris himself, ventures into the underworld (unknown) to find his father. Seeing his father blind, he gives Osiris one of his own eyes, and the two emerge from the underworld to reclaim their throne.

    Myths also chart out the ideal behaviour for individuals in society. They are guidelines that teach people to face challenges (venturing into the unknown) and not hide from them. The hero, opposed by an evil tyrant shows society behaviours that are not accepted and that reward-punishment. For example, Seth shows disrespect for the divine order by murdering Osiris and gets duly punished. Thus, myths were a moral compass for individuals to learn and follow, before laws were written or before behavioural rules were formalized by institutional religion.

    Lessons Of Growing Up In Myths

    Children are protected from the dangers of the unknown by their parents. Parents, by embodying the values of their culture teach children moral and behavioural values. Thus protection and values of parents take an upper hand over the values and protection given by culture. As a child grows up, these parental values and the protection get replaced with those of the culture surrounding them.

    The first step of this shift can be seen when teenagers rebel against parental authority, in order to embrace the values of their friends. Teenage rebellion is, therefore, a natural socialization process. However, this growing-up phase leads to a paradox, where as soon as children are liberated from the authority of parents, they have to embrace the values, rules, and norms of society, which are just as arbitrary.

    For example, people in the West are expected to have or learn a specialized profession. While humans could have perfectly well survived without the need to have a profession, they have to function within this framework that is set by the culture. This framework, though arbitrary, helps humans to make their surroundings familiar and keep the unknown at bay.

    Myths and legends are a device to encode these very rules, norms, and values of the culture. The downsides to abiding blindly to this framework of culture lead to succumbing to the tyrannical side of culture (Father), and are often known to encourage fascism and authoritarianism.

    However, on the upside, myths also give humans a way to identify with heroes and thus focus on individuality, rather than just identifying with the rules of culture. They show that the hero isn’t afraid to overthrow the power of the Father if needed for the greater social good. This is one of the main messages of the book “Maps of Meaning” by the author.

    Anomalies Make Humans Adapt

    The existence of the unfamiliar and unknown is a given. There will always be things that man will never understand. While culture provides protection from the unknown, it is also a fact that the chaos of the unknown will show itself when least expected.

    Just as for rats, the unknown is unsettling for humans too, especially when they are unexpected. Moreover, if the intensity of the unknown anomaly is too high to be comprehended, it turns into a crisis. These crises can be on an individual level or at a cultural level. For example, political crises, a natural disaster, or a war can be cultural crises, whereas the death of a loved one, an uncomfortable realization, or a career setback can be individual crises.

    Cultural or individual, these anomalies of the unknown always force people to adapt. Minor crises lead to normal adaptation. For example, if you spill coffee on your new dress, you adapt to the unknown unexpected situation by changing your dress and getting it dry-cleaned.

    Major crises lead to evolutionary adaptation. Here, encountering the unknown forces to change one’s own outlook and perspective, and of the world too. We then end up changing our values, goals, and even our behaviours to accommodate the crises. Major crises and revolutionary adaptation can lead to major psychological crises on an individual level and social crises on a cultural level.

    Revolutionary adaptation always leads to using the anomaly to update one’s view of the world. However, if such anomalies keep piling up, it becomes a clear indication of the fact that the existing model of the world isn’t working.

    How Limitations Lead To A Meaningful Existence

    A symbol of a self-consuming snake, or an ouroboros, can be found in many cultures in India, Mexico, and Africa. It is first known to have appeared in Babylon and represents the primordial state of the cosmos. It represents a pre-existent state, where everything is in perfect harmony. It is the state where there is no distinction between the known and the unknown, order and chaos because humans do not exist to know the difference.

    This state of pre-existence is represented as the Garden of Eden in Christian mythology, where Adam and Eve are not humans, as we understand today. They do not know pain, sorrow or death, or anything much. It is only after they eat the Forbidden Fruit of the Tree of Knowledge, do they become self-conscious – differentiating themselves from animals. They become aware of their nudity and cover themselves up with fig leaves.

    However, they get expelled from paradise for their transgression – a heavy price for their consciousness. This is the point in Christian mythology where the primordial pre-existence state is broken, dividing order and chaos, good and evil, and life and death. It is the point of birth of humans, where Adam and Eve get the responsibility to navigate and make sense of their new world. This view shows that the limitations and faults of humans are the preconditions for our very existence.

    The Christian myth emphasizes the fact that humans have the responsibility to chart out their own meaningful path. Because without this basic limitation, how would humans do good without evil, strive for order without chaos, do the right without any wrong in the world, or even understand the meaning of life without death?

    The Human Capacity For Evil

    When we speak of evil, we often consider it to be the product of an unjust social or economic condition, a bad upbringing, or a psychological defect. However, Hanna Arendt, the German philosopher, said that everyone, even ordinary people are capable of true evil. She understood this ‘banality of evil’ when she was contemplating the evil that penetrated the Third Reich.

    Most myths, especially the religious ones, address this evil that resides within all of us. In myths, this evil is often portrayed as a hero’s evil brother, or an evil conniving king’s advisor, etc. 

    Christianity gives perhaps the most impressive version of evil, Satan – a fallen angel having delusions of grandeur, arrogance, ignorance, and self-deceit. In the play Faust, by Goethe, Satan claims to be the ‘spirit that denies’. 

    What does Satan deny?

    Satan (or evil) denies that the unknown exists at all. While the unknown can be frightening, it isn’t evil. As we have seen, exploration of the unknown can bring rewards too. It is the base of knowledge and growth for humans. Satan denies this very possibility for knowledge and growth – a truly arrogant, cowardly belief that is the basis of true evil. Satan represents the antihero, who rejects creative exploration and anomaly, and hence a chance for growth and adaptation.

    The evil that rejects the unknown pushes humans towards two options – 

    • First, blindly adhering to culture and tradition, leads to fascism. For example, the Nazis who committed atrocities and then claimed that they were only ‘following orders.
    • Second, losing oneself to self-indulgence and adulation, leading to decadence, wherein individuals are too lazy to accept any responsibility for the current state of the world.

    Myths, therefore, help us understand that we are all capable of evil and that we can choose the better path.

    How To Reach One’s Own Potential

    Humans have devised many strategies to avoid facing the uncomfortable unknown. One strategy is to lose oneself in ideology. However, being an ideologist translates to rejecting creative exploration and thus growth.

    For example, a person who is a national supremacist will believe that his country is better than others so vehemently, that he will actively deny, avoid, and suppress any anomalies that suggest an alternative truth or go against his narrative. 

    Ideologists seek solace in their own readymade worldview rather than embarking on their own creative exploration. Their ideology and its perusal replace identification with a mythical hero. Some ideologists perceive their own culture, race, or nationality as superior, encourage individual identities that align with their own, and consider others out of their culture, race, or nationality as anomalies. For them, anything foreign becomes evil. Some other ideologies completely reject culture itself, blame anomalies on everyone else, and do not take responsibility for their states.

    Thus, ideologists do not accept any discrepancies between their perceptions of the world and their experiences. They deny and reject anything other than their static perceptions of their world. Considering the Christian myth, where the rejection of creative exploration is true evil, any ideologies, and atrocities committed under them (like fascism and communism), prove the Christian myth as true.

    Conclusion

    Resorting to the comfort of any ideology, therefore, means not being able to live a meaningful life. It means rejecting growth and learning, as it rejects the idea of a mythical hero and perceiving life as a fulfilling journey. 

    Humans, therefore, have the responsibility to perceive culture as their framework and use myths to create a sense of individuality, to add meaning to their journey into the unknown. This is what Jordan Peterson has tried to convey in this book titled Maps of Meaning.

  • Truth, Lies, and Advertising by Jon Steel – Book Review & Summary

    Bridging The Gap With Account Planning

    Don Draper romanticized the world of advertising. He made the world believe that advertising is all about the handsomely suited men in penthouses cleverly dishing out an award-winning copy for massive clients. However, the real world of advertising is completely different. Leading account planner Jon Steel unveils the real world in his Truth, Lies, and Advertising (1998), and shows that without the genius of the account planner, there would be a clear disconnect between the consumer, the client, the rest of the advertising team and their clever ad campaigns.

    The Most Important Link – The Account Planner

    The account planner, though it seems otherwise holds the most important position in an advertising agency. The planner is the one who links the client and the creative, does the research, analyses the feedback, and ensures that the client’s interests are paid attention to. He is the one who knows the consumer and works hard to connect the ever-elusive consumer to the client’s brand, products, and services, ensuring that the client gets exactly what they pay for.

    An account planner is intrinsic to ensuring that the agency produces next-level advertising that focuses on really reaching out to consumers’ needs. It is his responsibility to get information on the customer’s needs – by conducting customer interviews, or gathering market and sales data – to solve the client’s problems.

    It is also his responsibility to ensure that the creative team gets the necessary information and works in line with what the client wants and the information given. An account planner makes ideas happen rather than just make the decisions for the agency.

    When Steel was working on a project for Isuzu’s Rodeo model, he hosted various focus groups at dealerships to get a clear idea of the customer base for individual models. Based on the information he relayed, the creative team came up with a commercial of a father and a son visiting a toy store and finding a Rodeo packaged like a toy car. The tagline for the commercial was, “The Rodeo. Grow up. Not old.”

    The success of the campaign was not only about the creative team’s work but also more about the in-depth research the account planner put in to get the information for the creative team.

    It is for this reason that account planners should not work with more than three clients at a time. To ensure that the project is successful and that lasting relationships are built with the clients, planners should avoid overwhelming work pressure. Not cutting corners with existing clients, after all, will help in building an impressive portfolio and make profits for the agency.

    Truth, Lies and Advertising by Jon Steel Book Review and Summary
    Truth, Lies and Advertising

    The Account Planners Research

    How does an ad agency ensure a perfect liaison between the client’s needs and the creative team’s output? The answer is a resounding, “Listen well, and ask the obvious questions.”

    An account planner needs to talk to customers, ask even the most obvious questions, and most importantly listen well to what they have to say.  For example, when the author asked a focus group how much milk did they drink every day, most of the participants of the group answered, “Very little.” They did not factor in the amount of milk they added to their cereal and coffee daily.

    Similarly, in a blind survey for a new formula conducted by Coca-Cola, most testers preferred the new product to the original taste. However, when based on this survey, the new version was launched, it failed. This was because the public emotionally resonated with the original Coca-Cola. 

    Thus, the opinion of focus groups can have a major impact on business, and the account planner has to keep in mind the fact that while conducting customer interviews, it is better to interview them within the comforts of their homes, rather than in an impersonal, shiny conference room, a strategy that worked well for Sega. Sega conducted interviews of kids playing games in their own homes and asked them questions immediately after.

    Another important factor that planners need to keep in mind, is to have a comfortable interviewing style, where focus groups are encouraged to participate rather than interrogated.

    The Creative Team’s Guide

    The account planner’s next responsibilities are to gather the research information and hand it over to the creative team. This research information is presented as a creative brief, which is a structured report of the overall strategy of the creative campaign.

    The creative brief, whether presented in a written form or orally conveyed, should include the following information.

    • The business problems that the campaign should solve for the client. For example, why didn’t the product work earlier?
    • The desired effects of the campaign and the objectives. For example, is the aim to attract new customers, to encourage old ones or enter a new market altogether. The priority of these objectives should also be clearly laid out.
    • Specify the target audience. Is the campaign targeting women of a specific demographic? Mothers of infants?
    • Concrete information about the target customers. How does the product or the service feature or change the lives of the target audience?

    While these points make up the chunk of the report, the proposition lies at its core. The proposition is the core message, written in one single sentence, that the creative team will convey in their final advert. The proposition of the creative brief communicates the specialties of the product in an entertaining fashion to the team, which then relays that information in their ads.

    For example, when the Cuervo focus group was asked to think of a guest arriving with a Cuervo bottle in hand, the participants started laughing. This reaction told the account planner that Cuervo means party, a vital piece of information, that he included in the creative brief, with a proposition sentence, “A party waiting to happen.”

    Merging Client Expectation With Campaign Concept

    The creative team adds flair to the creative brief given by the planner. When Steel was working on the Sega account, he noticed that children preferred the Sega console to Nintendo’s. he compared the experience of using the console to getting chosen in a baseball Major League in his creative brief. He called it ‘The show’.

    While the author took two weeks to get his idea, the creative team to a mere 30 seconds to come up with the tagline, “Welcome to the next level,” translating baseball jargon into gamer-speak!

    Once the creative team develops the campaign, the planner has to test it and make improvements by checking consumer response data and incorporating client feedback.

    When Steel was working on the Foster Farms account, the core message of the campaign was that the Californian company’s chicken was more expensive yet it was natural, local, and fresh, and not frozen and imported.

    The creative team developed an ad where they showed chicken puppets driving to California, to pass themselves off as Foster Farms high-quality chickens. The car was cluttered with beer cans and cigarettes. The client, not approving the beer and cigarettes, scrapped the idea, asking for two new concepts. The creative came up with what the client wanted but also changed the beer and cigarettes to junk food in the original idea.

    However, during consumer testing, the author found that the focus group was more excited about the chicken puppets. The results of the testing convinced the President of Foster Farms to go with the chicken puppets idea. While the account planner didn’t really give the client what he had asked for, he gave the client a solution that eventually won him over.

    The Account Planning Process – Start To Finish

    Jon Steel emphasizes the importance of following the account planning process. His experience in one of the most famous campaigns, “Got Milk” of all times, for the California Fluid Milk Processors Advisory Board (CFMPAB), is a great example.

    The client wanted to increase the consumption of milk. Steel started researching the reasons for the decreasing milk consumption levels. In his research to understand how milk features in the lives of the target customers, he found that the decrease was due to the fact that people found milk fatty, childish and boring. He also found that people do drink consume milk, mostly combined with other things.

    He then conducted a focus group, where he paid the participants to forego milk for a week. In the resultant discussion, he found the participants describing how they actually liked milk and missed having it with cookies or a sandwich. His creative brief then included the strategy to remind people to stock up on mild, to avoid feeling deprived when they wanted to augment their food with milk. He had understood that creating a desire for certain foods will, in turn, create a desire for milk.

    The creative team used this brief to portray milk as the essential companion to other foods. Thus the ‘Got milk?’  tagline was developed. The CFMPAB liked the idea. Additionally, since the author’s research showed that milk is most often consumed at home, the campaign was first tested on TV and next on billboards near grocery stores. They also ran print ads in magazines with a bitten chocolate chip cookie with “Got Milk?” written underneath.

    Focus group data showed that the campaign increased the consumption of milk in California by raising awareness about milk, and in 1993 when the campaign ran, the consumption of milk outpaced the consumption in every other state. The campaign also achieved similar success when the campaign ran nationally in 1995.

    Conclusion

    The role of the account planner in advertising is intrinsic to bridging the gap between the client, the creative, and the consumer. The planner is at the crux and has the most important responsibility to conduct meaningful research that can be used to create great ad campaigns.