Why promoting yourself/your business/your ideas feels uncomfortable:

You must repeat things that are obvious to you until they become obvious to others.

10 reasons your product will fail.

Words: @BrianNorgard

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1. Too complex

2. Can't be easily described

10 ideas that changed my life: (thread)

Illustrations by @visualizevalue

1/ Get more done by doing less.

2/ You can't get better unless you get started.

3/ Zoom out. It's getting better. (IP via @behaviorgap)

4/ 'Normal is an illusion. What is normal for the spider is chaos for the fly.' — Charles Addams

Hindsight in 2020: (10 thoughts)

Relationships > everything:

My relationship with @celiapreihs is the foundation of all the good things in my life, and has amplified the quality of hundreds of relationships with people I've got to know and learn from this year.

Shiny objects make us duller:

The grass is always greener until you're standing on it. "No" is still the highest ROI word in my vocabulary.

The internet is very, very big:

Make something work for one person (could also be yourself), then work on distribution.

Scale is seductive but you can't get it if you don't have something people want.

You can't please everyone:

If you could, there would be no point anyway - it's tough when someone doesn't love your work but it's how markets function.

The blows hit harder in the early rounds, just keep getting up.

Circle of Competence 101:

@SahilBloom x @jackbutcher

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1/

A Circle of Competence is the set of topic areas that align with a person's expertise.

If the entire world of information were to be expressed in a circle, an individual's Circle of Competence is the small sub-circle that represents their expertise.

2/

The idea surfaced in the 1996 BH annual letter.

"You don’t have to be an expert on every company...you only have to be able to evaluate companies within your circle of competence. The size of that circle is not very important; knowing its boundaries, however, is vital."

3/

A Circle of Competence is built over time.

It is built through experience, reading, dedicated study, and effort.

It is dynamic, not static.

It can expand as you deepen your knowledge in new areas. It can contract if you fail to nurture your existing areas of expertise.

4/

To engage this mental model in your life, there are two key processes to go through:

(1) Identify what falls within your circle
(2) Identify the boundaries of your circle

(1) is all about figuring out what you know, while (2) is about humbly admitting what you don’t.

Why you need to be selfish: (thread)

I have had countless conversations with people looking for a way to build a brand/audience/community online.

Here's the one thing I think everyone asking that question should be thinking about.

You need to be selfish.

Why?

Because (at a high level) if it helps you, it will eventually help others.

At a tactical level, it's provides the motivation to keep going.

The lack of instant feedback on what we share publically is enough to extinguish most projects before they even get moving.

But allow me to reframe the idea:

You need to do things that benefit you even if no one sees them.

Did posting @visualizevalue images into a void 18 months ago do anything for my career as a designer?

Yes.

Would I have kept going if there wasn't some selfish drive to be more competent? (and make more money, work with better clients, etc)

No.

THREAD: The top 0.1% of marketing mental models.

Compressing a 6-year career into the best 8 ideas:

1. Contrast Is A Drug

• Rolls Royce stopped exhibiting at car shows

• They started exhibiting at private aircraft shows

• "If you've been looking at jets all afternoon, a £300,000 car is an impulse buy. It's like putting the sweets next to the counter" - @rorysutherland

2. The Best Content Involves A Red Pill

• "If you want to build a good podcast, following, or blog - you've gotta create your red pill"

• Hand society something they're not hearing anywhere

• Society says blue pill. Your content says red pill.

(@finnscave via @ShaanVP)

• The irony is that the red pill metaphor is itself a red pill - once you see it, you can never unsee it.

• The best content creators on the internet all have their own red pill, which makes their content so enticing.

E.g. @jockowillink's red pill:

• Society's Blue Pill: Writing is a boring activity from school

• @david_perell's Red Pill: Writing online is the fastest way to accelerate your career

THREAD:

Machiavellianism in Different Professions

SALES:

It has been said that a con-man is just a salesmen without a product, but this is a lie; a salesman is just a con-man with a product.

Your job is to persuade people to buy product, regardless of whether or not it is in their best interest to do so.

Charm and Persuasion are your tools.

Keep in mind that Charm fuels Persuasion, in the sense that many people will buy from you simply because they like you, not necessarily because they are in love with the product itself.

Zero sum negotiation (an intrinsically machiavellian domain of performance) is a key job function within sales; you will have to negotiate price and deal terms.

Notably, zero sum negotiation is also common within Law and Finance.

How complex the manipulations you must engage in for the sake of persuading a target to buy product will vary from one industry to another.

As a door to door magazine salesmen, simply being good looking and hyping up the product by being extroverted may be enough.

I took Ogilvy's course on Behavioural Economics and Comsumer psychology.

Here are the 10 important theory's I learned from it which you'd be a fool to miss out on:

Loss aversion theory:

The negative psychological impact we feel from losing something is about twice as strong as the positive impact of gaining the same thing.

Finding ₹100$ would makes us happy
Losing ₹100$ would makes us 2X unhappy

Sentence Framing:

The way you frame your sentences is very important. Make them forget about the negative thing by reiterating something which might be positive. We have a stronger bias for things that sound positive.

10% chance of death Vs 90% chance of survival

Goal Gradient Hypothesis:

Humans are hardwired for instant gratification.
as people get closer to the reward, they speed their behavior. So, reward people sooner instead of later

eg: Don't make a goal of reading 52 books a year, make it 1 chapter per day.

Mental Anchoring:

It's the phenomenon where our decisions are heavily based on the 1st piece of information we receive, regardless of whether the information is relevant or not.

Make the first piece of information powerful.