Strands of Genius: Making Makes You Feel Good, Not Just Dopamine, High Performing Women Get Negative Feedback
Strands of Genius: Making Makes You Feel Good, Not Just Dopamine, High Performing Women Get Negative Feedback
Plus: economics, fun words we (mostly) didn't know
WRITING FROM | Chattanooga, TN
WORKING ON | Final touches and prep for new keynote, health, mental fitness (the election will be a lot), plans
LOOKING AHEAD
Now-Sept 24 | Chattanooga, TN
Sept 25-28 | New York, NY
:: WHAT’S NEW & WEEKLY GRATITUDE ::
Oh hi, sorry didn’t see you there, do come in! Always a pleasure, can we get you a cup of tea? Sit down, take a load off, let’s chat. How you doing? No, really, how you doing?
This year has been tough and weird in the industry, and in general, if you’ve been following the ever-increasingly absurdist but absolutely real and incredibly important quadrennial bought of *waves hands* that is the US election.
The US election is an uncertainty event horizon because beyond which it is impossible to accurately forecast risk, therefore businesses and their budgets are a little restrained and will continue to be. So it goes. It is at best myopic and at worst nonsensical to think about marketing without considering economics. The world of $ is fundamentally different now than it has been since 2008, which I suspect many people in our business have limited ability to emotionally relate to because we are a young industry and many people simply weren’t working then.
Having worked through 2000 and 2008, Faris keeps thinking about this. The climate for money post 2008 once dust settled etc is historically very unusual because we had ZIRP in place for a long time, which forced capital to seek returns in riskier longer term investments and there was also dominant tech-driven thesis that hyper-scaling a business unprofitably with VC money into a functional monopoly was a good approach, zero to one and all that. Those conditions are no longer in place and will likely not return for a long time, if ever. So, that seems important to keep in mind, generally.
Anyway, we went to Atlanta for a surprise 40th birthday it was delightful and the weather has cooled off and Fall feels fab right now. Hope you are all doing great, reply to this email, we love to hear from you.
This week, we’re especially thankful for:
Mike&Rachel, Sarah and the rest of the fam for their wonderful hospitality, Costco, intergenerational field day games, Alex&Collin, Colin&Morgan, MaryMoney, Josh&Elea&Leona, Wolf 359 (fiction podcast), The Black Locomotive, House of the Dragon Season 2, Kaos, health, & YOU.
:: THE LINKS ::
CREATIVITY MAKES YOU FEEL GOOD
The title of this piece has been changed to “arts and crafts improves your mental health as much as having a job”, which certainly hits different but is more accurate because wellbeing research is really hard to do and make comparisons and so on. Look, humans aren’t simple, so as a rule of thumb simple explanations for impossibly complex phenomena, such as human behavior and wellbeing, should be assumed to be wrong by default. That said, the essence of this feels right and I think applies to advertising, because creatives need and love the craft, which is where ideas can soar or fail, and actually making things makes humans happy. “All forms of art can be beneficial in boosting mental health. Benefits include: increase in self-esteem, reduction in anxiety/stress, improving communication, and fostering creativity,” said Dr. Frank Clark, a psychiatrist with Prisma Health and a poet, via email. Clark was not involved in the study.” We don’t need to get into industrial alienation and so on to feel the truth of this. (CNN)
IT’S NOT JUST DOPAMINE
Speaking of inaccurate simple explanations for complex psycho-social phenomena, this piece makes the case that ‘dopamine fasts’ simply cannot help and are a misunderstanding of the role and importance of one of the more popular neurotransmitters of the moment. “America’s problem isn’t that we’re a bunch of hedonists hooked on capitalism’s “dopamine hits” — it’s that so many of us aren’t able to get our social, physical and emotional needs met in healthy ways. The solution, then, isn’t to ban or quit potentially addictive escapes, though they should be regulated to minimize harm. Instead of a dopamine fast, what we really need is a dopamine feast — one that makes us want experiences we actually like, rather than compulsively responding to cravings.” (NYTimes Gift Link)
Yes, I’m doing two links in this section - I know! But this stuff is very important and we have found ourselves using ‘dopamine’ as a useful shorthand for intermittent variable rewards used to ‘hook’ users, and gamblers, and so on. It became the way to explain media consumption that tends to make you feel bad after some duration of consumption. See our Media Pyramid for more on that.
But these just so stories can be dangerous. A HUGE AND IMPORTANT example is this: “The biggest paper in Alzheimer’s disease is a fake.” It’s complex but one study that appears to have been faked led Alzheimer research in the wrong direction for a decade - and this is the tip of an iceberg. “The decades of research dominated by the ACH had failed to reverse, stop, or even meaningfully slow the progress of the disease. Not a single clinical trial confirmed that targeting amyloid beta could stop or even dramatically slow the progress of the disease. Nonetheless, pharmaceutical companies forged on to move new candidates forward, but nothing panned out.” (ZME Science)NB: For those practitioners in our industry writ large with a passion for behavioral economics, it’s worth looking at which of the canonical experiments, say The marshmallow test or certain kinds of priming studies, have ever been successfully replicated (the answer is that mostly no, they haven’t, and this should be of interest and concern if you are building your thinking exclusively on such).
MOST HIGH PERFORMING WOMEN RECEIVE NEGATIVE FEEDBACK (ONLY 2% OF MEN DO)
While this article leads with this issue — “About 76% of top-performing working women received negative feedback from their bosses compared to just 2% of high-achieving men, according to a new report from management software company Textio, which analyzed performance reviews for more than 23,000 workers across over 250 organizations.” — It also dives into the kind of feedback that women tend to get: focused on demeanor, personality, even looks, rather than those focused on work. One of the big issues is that men tend to get actionable feedback, while women are told to quiet down — and by the way, this doesn’t seem to differ depending on who is providing the feedback (meaning women are also more critical of other women’s performances.) (Fortune)
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:: FUN WORDS WE (MOSTLY) DIDN’T KNOW ::
(We screen grabbed this from Instagram and then promptly closed the tab and forgot who posted it. If it was you, sorry!) Faris loves words especially this kind of word and he only got 4/5 lol.
If we can ever be of help to you, even outside of a formal engagement, please don’t hesitate to let us know.
rockON,
faris & rosie | your friends over at geniussteals.co
(still want more? @faris is still “tweeting” while @rosieyakob prefers instagram stories)
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It's called Genius Steals because we believe ideas are new combinations and that nothing can come from nothing. But copying is lazy. We believe the best way to innovate is to look at the best of that which came before and combine those elements into new solutions.
Co-Founders Faris & Rosie are award-winning strategists and creative directors, writers, consultants and public speakers who have been living on the road/runway since March 2013, working with companies all over the world. We have a distributed team ourselves, an accounting team is based in Tennessee where our company is registered, our admin extraordinaire is based in Playa del Carmen, and our collaborators are all over the world. Being nomadic allows us to go wherever clients need us to be, and to be inspired by the world in between.
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