Category: Contentions
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Remembering the good stuff that your brain forgets
There’s a narrative floating around on Twitter (Exhibit 1, 2) that we’re meant to forget things that are unimportant to us. Forgetting is an incredibly useful feature of the brain. The brain does also have a knack to boomerang really valuable memories or ideas back—often in an exciting, relevant, way. We have a name for…
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Collecting to build and demonstrate expertise
I’m a big fan of services businesses (so much so that I’d started my own!). I’m an even bigger fan of those services businesses leveraging their teams to expand beyond client services, into building its own products. It’s tough—Metalab founder Andrew Wilkinson lost $10 million doing it!—but it’s not impossible. One great small bet can…
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The power of the rubber duck
There’s a lot of power in talking through a problem, sometimes even if no one is around to hear it. You may be thinking out loud. This is known as rubber duck problem solving, because people often talk to rubber ducks. You make progress by talking to an inanimate object, or yourself; you either solve…
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The cost of a free lunch
In front of the townhouse, there were two drawers, one stacked on top of the other, wrapped with bright, cartoon, decals. You couldn’t miss it. As if anticipating the question as you passed by, there was a piece of paper confirming, “Free.” When I was a child, I constantly heard the phrase, “There is no…
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Not actual gameplay
A significant part of the reason why marketing—and the people who work in it—gets a bad rap is it’s not very straightforward. It’s often very story-driven. Done well, the story is almost completely ignored; it’s presented, and often received, as evidence and facts. It’s entirely believable, not only because of charisma, but because the marketer…
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5 hook sentences to compress your ideas
Compression is the new creation. These sentence structures enable you to frame your point in a clear, powerful, and interesting way that “hooks” readers in. 1. [X] is the [Y] to [Z]. Example: “Writing is the antidote to confusion.” — James Clear 2. “We [X] our [Y], and then our [Y] [X] us.” Modification: “We…
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Business trust over business size
A Redditor asks, “How do I look bigger than I am?” with some context: I own a startup that provides a service to organizations. I’m about 6 months in and I’ve grown monthly revenue to about 4k. I am the only employee (like most startups) and I’m finding as I move upstream, I’m getting asked…
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Great Writing Is an Extension of the Product
In 2008, designer Paul Armstrong launched web.without.words, a project where he eliminated words and turned popular websites into wireframes. For example, he covered what Apple’s website would look like without words, which frankly doesn’t look all too dissimilar from what one of its product pages looks like today. Armstrong wanted to, “visually represent [his] core…
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Why Keanu Reeves Practiced Holding a Diamond with Tweezers for Weeks
How the search for shortcuts is actually costing you precious time
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4 ways to read more books this year
When applied properly, this technique can help you get much more out of what you read and increase the amount of reading you do.