Category: Contentions
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Brain Age
Nintendo has sold over 35 million copies of Brain Age. (All of these people also had to play the game on a console.) Brain Age was based on the bestselling books, No wo Kitaeru Otona no Keisan Doriru and No wo Kitaeru Otona no Onyomi Doriru, which sold over 2 million copies and were authored…
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Contentions: Put a price on your marketing
There’s a reason to make people pay for your work. While profitability would be nice, it’s not the main goal. People being willing to pay for your work suggests brand engagement; you’ve made something people want. It also encourages them to actually use the thing. Consider the Michelin Guide, one of the original pieces of…
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Create a lot of value, extract a small part of it
Ryan Holiday writes in his lessons from writing The Daily Stoic for seven years: Give a lot of value away and capture a small percentage. I mentioned that we’ve essentially published seven books for free through the Daily Stoic email. On top of that, over the years, we’ve essentially created the largest Stoic library in…
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The little poster that Steve Jobs made famous
Millions of people—including me—found out about the Whole Earth Catalog when Steve Jobs closed off his Stanford commencement speech with it. A new archive of it just went online, along with this ad that Steve quotes: Making memorable things. Share it with people. It’ll all be worth it somehow.
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Contentions: Do something nobody else can
When I first entered the marketing profession, there was a popular saying, “Every company is a media company.” The saying was punchy and catchy, and fascinating because media companies themselves were in the midst of drastic change and adaptation. For example, as a business, The New York Times looks very different today than it did…
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Gohar World
Entrepreneurs and artists Laila and Nadia Gohar built a world for their tableware products. Laila tells me that she and Nadia kind of imagine Gohar World, the Cairo-born sisters’ nine-month-old line of cheeky and exquisite host- and tableware, as a planet. Laila is standing in a voluminous white Simone Rocha skirt and snub-nosed Gucci slides…
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A meme can be a spine for your creative work
When you get to know your creative idea better, you need to preserve the core of it to help you focus. That’s what its spine is for. One interesting prompt is to see if you can express your idea through a meme. Kind of like this: Choosing the meme, naming the characters—all of this encourages…
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Contentions: Poor Charlie’s Almanack, Stripe Press, and why it all works
A good friend of mine recently showed me Stripe’s new book, Poor Charlie’s Almanack. One of Stripe Press’s tactics is to republish old works with new packaging, and this one was a great choice. The original book was made nearly two decades ago by Peter Kaufman, who compiled quotes from Charlie Munger’s speeches, and put…
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Permission marketing, consistent distribution
“My passengers surprised me,” Gavin says, remembering his early days. “I thought they would be silent or on the phone. But most people wanted to talk. When I mentioned my jewelry, they asked for business cards, but I didn’t have any.” That’s when a light bulb went off in his mind: Why stop at business…
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Future fables
Aesop partnered with Literary Hub to release the second season of a podcast entitled Future Fables, where each episode is a bedtime story for adults in the form of the fable. There’s a lot to like about this, from the creative premise (“What sort of fables might its namesake—Aesop, the ancient Greek fabulist—write [today]?”), to…