#37 – On learnings, small numbers, big numbers, Christmas music, and disorienting sprawls
Heja.
This is issue 37 of Strategy Bites’ Six Links of Inspiration – and I promise you that this is not a “year in review” post. I’m not going to tell you how many links you received, how many you clicked, how much inspiration you gained compared to the average subscriber. None of that. Instead, I’ll leave you with six links of inspiration for the holiday season. And a list of the most inspiring/challenging books I’ve read this year.
You’re welcome - and here we go.
Six Links of Inspiration:
50 x 25 – Ten Things I’ve Found To Be True. Career advice is always annoying, mostly wrong, and only occasionally useful. Which is why Ben Malbon didn’t write a post full of career advice but one about his observations over what sounds like an exciting journey so far. Read it for yourself, it’s entertaining and will hopefully make you think. I certainly felt found out when I made it to his second point: slow down to speed up. “I was impatient to the point of virtually self combusting with energy. Keen to impress. Eager to ‘catch up’. But I wish now I’d been more content to just ‘be’. To enjoy the moments, the teams, the projects for what they were.” There is so much truth in this – but I’m most certain that this is a truth that can only be appreciated in hindsight. (Or maybe the younger strategists in the industry will prove me wrong…)
Prof G Person of the Year. As entertaining and audacious as ever, Scott Galloway announces his person of the year. A person with many faces and outsized influence on everything we do (and don’t do) – money.
Why the Human Brain Perceives Small Numbers Better. As a strategist you probably have heard about, thought about, and talked about how to use numbers a lot. Bullet points on a slide, objects in a list, and all that good stuff. Now here’s an interesting bit of neuroscience on small numbers, how your brain processes them, and why you might want to keep your lists and arguments and twists in a narrative to four. (I know, it pains me to see it’s not an uneven number, too.)
New Thing in Same as Old Thing Shock. A lot has been said about how streaming is going to change how we consume content and entertainment (and, actually, everything.) That new rules will be written, and it’s a new exciting era for new exciting content etcetera etcetera. Turns out, streaming is just a new distribution channel for exactly the same stuff that we’ve done before. Most of the things we stream are the same things we’d watch on traditional TV: “What this data shows us, quite clearly, is how similarly the Netflix platform behaves in comparison to good old fashioned linear broadcasting. The stuff which drives the bulk of the engagement - or viewing hours - is not necessarily the content which Netflix is , or would like to be, famous for.”
Nobody Knows What’s Happening Online Anymore. Charlie Warzel wrote an interesting piece about the internet, which he calls a “disorienting sprawl.” There’s so much stuff going on, real and/or fake, that nobody can possibly know what’s going on anymore. Chasing “what’s trending” doesn’t make much sense anymore, because “trends” lose all of their (populistic) meaning when they’re too fragmented to create mass momentum. Something to keep in mind while we’re out there trying to build brands people know about.
The Economics of Christmas Music. This post by Jadrian Wooten explores the economics of Christmas music and why we’re keep hearing the same old classics (or trash) that we’ve heard over the last decades or so. His post reminded me of a conversation between Thomas Germain and Drew Gillis on the Quartz Obsession podcast where they explore how Spotify has changed how we track and evaluate success of songs – and they’re using Christmas songs as an example.
That’s the links for this week (and for the rest of the year.) If you enjoyed these, please consider sharing them with some of your friends that might be stuck at airports, train stations, or somewhere on the road.
Considering that you’ll spend a few weeks without this newsletter now and you hopefully find yourself with a bit of spare time (and maybe a gift cards for books), I thought I share some of the books I found interesting, inspiring (or challenging) this year:
The Master and his Emissary by Iain McGilchrist
Foolproof: Why We Fall for Misinformation and How to Build Immunity by Sander van der Linden
When we cease to understand the world by Benjamín Labatut
The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life by Erving Goffman
Paid Attention by Faris Yakob
The Identity Trap by Yascha Mounk
The Sense of Style by Steven Pinker
Understanding Popular Culture by John Fiske
That’s it for me for this year. Plenty of stuff to read. Thanks for making it all the way to the end – and to subscribing to this little experiment of mine.
Merry Christmas, happy holidays, and see you all in 2024.
Maximilian