Strands of Genius: Mental Immunity, American Women are Not OK, How To Get Lucky
plus, our thoughts on: the four day work week
WRITING FROM | Nashville, TN
WORKING ON | principles of creative effectiveness, research reviews,
LOOKING AHEAD
April 1-29 | Beersheba Springs, TN
April 29-May 1 | Nashville, TN
May 1-28 | London, UK
May 28-June 6 | TBD: Portugal or France
June 6-24 | London, UK
June 24-27 | New York, NY
June 27-July 12 | Wingdale, NY
:: WHAT’S NEW & WEEKLY GRATITUDE ::
We drove into the city from our mountain abode for a single night - and had a little laugh about it. Normally we’re driving to the Cumberland Mountains for a weekend, but having it as a home base for the month meant that we dove into Nashville for Easter celebrations with extended family over at my mom’s house. Now we’re headed back up to nature where we’ll be for the next 10 days before jumping back on the city bandwagon ;)
This week, we’re especially thankful for:
Judy & Lillian’s fabulous Easter decorations, the Easter bunny, Reese’s eggs (by far the best Easter candy), lamb & gravy, Dogfish Head Sea Quench Sour, random art visit to a neighbor. all our family & YOU.
We’re also grateful to our friends @Twitter who have invited Faris to speak about one of their key trends from their report “The Conversation” this year - this THURSDAY April 21, 9am PT/12pm ET - alongside Kathryn Lunstrom (Sustainability Editor at Adweek) and Corina Newsome (Conservation Scientist, National Wildlife Federation).
Event Name: Twitter Trends 2022 - The Great Restoration
Date: Thursday, April 21, 2022
Time: 9am PT/12pm ET
Length: 45 minutes
Where: @TwitterMktg Twitter Spaces
:: THE LINKS ::
MENTAL IMMUNITY PROTECTS US FROM BAD IDEAS
Prior to reading this article, I wasn’t familiar with the concept of cognitive immunology (though reading about it immediately made me think of Rian Hughes’ The XX, which you 100% need to read if you like Sci Fi) Dr. Hannah England says, “People with a healthy mental immune system are more likely to detect misinformation. A strong cognitive immune system can also help spot bad ideas at an earlier stage, so you may avoid wasting time, energy or money.” More on cognitive immunology, as well as three ways you can strengthen your mental immune system. (Ness Labs)
HOW TO GET LUCKY
Do you feel lucky? Do we ‘make our own luck’? Faris’s column looks at the role of luck in business and brand successes and then steals from Andy Nairn’s lovely book Go Luck Yourself to explore how we can get lucky. (WARC)
AMERICAN WOMEN ARE NOT OKAY
Really loved this piece from Lyz, who frequently writes about the intersection of the personal and the political, often as it relates to gender. Here’s a quote from this piece, which was depressing but also enlightening:
Violence against Asian women is on the rise. Women are drinking more. Dating less. Marrying less. Divorcing more. Our mental health is abysmal. America still has the highest maternal mortality rate among developed nations. And oh yeah, we are being forced back into offices and facing down a summer of inconsistent and expensive childcare (if it’s even available). Whatever help we were getting from the government is now gone. No more beefed-up unemployment benefits.In sum, women are being legislated out of existence. And the response of our country is: Get back to work. Stop making excuses. This was exactly the advice given to one exhausted parent who wrote into Slate’s Care and Feeding column. Suck it up. Do it anyway. Stop making excuses while the world collapses around you.
… If 2020 was the summer of women’s primal scream, then 2022 is the year of the heavy, protracted sigh. We’ve been yelling and yelling about these problems. But no one is listening.
(Men Yell At Me)
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:: WHAT WE’RE THINKING ABOUT: THE 4-DAY WORK WEEK ::
When Faris and I first started working for ourselves, we decided that we wanted to do things differently. When we thought about what we wanted to do differently, there were three key things:
We’d pay our contractors and partners in 2 weeks or less, with an attempt to pay within 48 hours of receiving an invoice. (I still feel corporate guilt from how many freelancers we paid so incredibly late when I worked in big agencies in NYC.)
We would sell deliverable-based products rather than our time.
We wouldn’t work on Mondays before noon, and we’d take every Friday off.
We were all too familiar with the “Sunday Scaries” that creep in Sunday night as you remember that you have to go back to work. We thought if we didn’t have to work Monday mornings, we could eliminate or reduce the Sunday Scaries. And y’all… It worked. Occasionally they’ll pop up, but they are few and far between rather than a weekly occurrence.
We initially thought we’d have to “make up” the time elsewhere, but when you’re paid for products instead of presence (or, ahem, tools instead of time) it’s simply not the case. These days we aim for a 3-day work week, Tues/Weds/Thurs and we’re frequently able to make it work.
The 40 hour work week was made popular by the Ford Corporation, but at the time it was actually a reduction in the average weekly work. Employees of Ford had previously been working 48 hours a week - 8 hours a day, 6 days a week. Removing one day of working, Ford found that his workers were actually more productive — working 40hrs/week rather than 48. Many manufacturing companies all over the USA adopted the 40-hr work week.
According to Culture Amp, “It’s also been shown that the most productive companies aren’t necessarily the ones who work the most hours. In fact, data from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development found that countries with the highest average number of working hours were some of the least productive. Whereas Luxembourg, the most productive country, had an average work week of just 29 hours.”
Today, the 4-day work week is something that more and more companies are considering. Reading about California’s attempt to set 32 hours as the standard work week (instead of 40), I was shocked with the opening quote from Quartz:
“The drive for the four-day workweek has become serious.”
A feature writer for the New York Times Magazine made that argument… in 1964.
Seriously - We’ve been talking about this since 1964!! And there’s been evidence that working 40 hours a week is still too much.
During the first two months of 1974, government officials in the United Kingdom limited the workweek to three days in an attempt to save energy. Though people were working two fewer days a week, production only dropped 6%. People worked fewer hours, but they were more productive and less likely to miss work. - Okta
We’ve seen companies like Kickstarter and Basecamp offer 4 day work weeks, but it’s really a scattering of companies. Most professionals agree that it would take legislation from the government to really impact the standard number of working hours in a week. Which is why the California bill is interesting.
“If passed, bill AB293 would require companies to provide overtime pay for people whose hours exceed the new legal threshold, but it would only apply to companies with more than 500 workers. Still, that would impact an estimated 2,600 firms in the state and 3.6 million people in a workforce of about 17 million, the San Francisco Chronicle reports,” writes Lila MacLellan for Quartz.
Many people aren’t convinced that California has gotten it right — but this bill makes me hopeful. I think we so often want a tried and tested solution, and if we don’t feel like we have it, we don’t implement a damn thing. What if, instead, we started trialing various solutions, seeing how they impact people’s health as well as the economy? Just because we don’t have the right answer now doesn’t mean we can’t figure out the right answer later.
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rockON,
faris & rosie & ashley | your friends over at geniussteals.co
@faris is always tweeting
@rosieyakob hangs out on instagram
@ashley also writes for deaf, tattooed & employed
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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. Our Director of Operations is nomadic like us, our accounting team is based out of Washington, our company is registered in Tennessee, 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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