“People don’t believe what you tell them.
They rarely believe what you show them.
They often believe what their friends tell them.
They always believe what they tell themselves.”

Asking for a guarantee before you start isn’t helpful. Instead, we need to look at a concept, an idea, and be willing to try it out with intent because if we do, if we try it on for size, we will figure out if it fits us as opposed to the opposite which is spending a lot of time figuring out who we are and then going and finding the things that fit us

The change you Seek to make

• Are you here to make a contribution or are you here to take something? 
• Are you here to do what you are told or are you here to question and to make things different?

Answering that question honestly is really difficult because it’s all about the story we tell ourselves. If we can figure out how to tell ourselves a different story, then we might be able to make a different level of contribution. 

• • Some people wake up in the morning and say, “How do I double my net worth?”
  • Some people wake up in the morning and say, “How do I help the people in Bareilly, India, get through another night without electricity?” 

Those are two totally different kinds of changes that you seek to make in the world but they are both a change.

What possibility do you see?

The second pillar, which fits into the first one because I think the first one is too hard to start with is, what possibility do you see? We have indoctrinated people from birth to either to believe that they are entitled or not, to believe that they are special or not, to believe that they have leverage or not. 

• Do you see a possibility in the change you seek to make? 
• The flip side of that, which goes with it, is learning to see the world as it is. 

Learning to see the world as it is because it’s so easy to imagine we get to make it the way we want it to be but we don’t.

The world is the way it is and learning to see that reality is critical. It changes our understanding of what is possible. If no one has ever done the work you hope to do then you might be deluding yourself. If, on the other hand, there’s a well-trodden path and people have gone on that path, then you might be able to follow it.

How much emotional labor are you able and willing to expend to accomplish the thing you set out to do?

When I think about learning versus education, which I can talk about for hours, education is compliance, education is compulsory, education is coercion. Learning is serial incompetence on our way to getting better. The pairing, the tandem of emotional labor is do you care enough to learn something. There are all these things in my life I don’t care enough to learn. That I could go get a book from the library or I could go listen to 20 podcasts or I could go practice something and I would get better at it. I haven’t done it and I’m 60 years old. The honest answer is not because I’m talented or not talented. It’s just that I don’t care enough to expend the energy of what it would take to get good at that. 

– Seth Godin

• What should I do when I grow up?
•  Principles to live by
• I was lost and now I’m found 

Fluid intelligence involves being able to think and reason abstractly and solve problems. This ability is considered independent of learning, experience, and education.

Generational Intelligences

People often claim that their intelligence seems to decline as they age. However, research suggests that while fluid intelligence begins to decrease after adolescence, crystallized intelligence continues to increase throughout adulthood.

Psychologist Raymond Cattell first proposed the concepts of fluid and crystallized intelligence and further developed the theory with his student John Horn. The Cattell-Horn theory of fluid and crystallized intelligence suggests that intelligence is composed of different abilities that interact and work together to produce overall individual intelligence.

What is Fluid Intelligence?

• Global capacity to reason
• Ability to learn new things
• Think abstractly and solve new problems
• Both types of intelligence increase throughout childhood and adolescence.
• Crystallized intelligence continues to grow throughout adulthood.
• Many aspects of fluid intelligence peak in adolescence and begin to decline progressively beginning around age 30 or 40.

What is Crystallized Intelligence?

• Prior learning and past experiences 
• Based on facts
• Increases with age

• Crystallized intelligence continues to grow throughout adulthood.

• Many aspects of fluid intelligence peak in adolescence and begin to decline progressively beginning around age 30 or 40.

The ability to perceive relationships independent of previous specific practice or instruction concerning those relationships. This aspect of intelligence involves the ability to solve problems and reason about things independent of previously existing knowledge.1 When you encounter an entirely new problem that cannot be solved with your existing knowledge, you must rely on fluid intelligence to solve it.

Fluid intelligence tends to decline during late adulthood. Certain cognitive skills associated with fluid intelligence tend to decline as people reach later adulthood. Fluid intelligence has long been believed to peak quite early in life, but research published in 2015 suggests that some aspects of fluid intelligence may peak as late as age 40.

 
Crystallized intelligence does tend to peak later in life, hitting its apex around age 60 or 70.

• Extended self
• Digital self
• Customer loyalty
• Object attachment
• Social media 

“If something is a tool, it genuinely is just sitting there, waiting patiently. If something is not a tool it’s demanding things from you. It’s seducing you, it’s manipulating you, it wants things from you. We’ve moved away from a tools-based technology environment, to an addiction and manipulation-used technology environment. Social media isn’t a tool waiting to be used. It has its own goals, and it has its own means of pursuing them by using your psychology against you.”

The Netflix documentary “The Social Dilemma” is a must-watch. I found several of the quotes throughout the documentary to be positively chilling and slightly disturbing. So, of course, this article features some of the wildest quotes featured in the documentary. 

1. “If you’re not paying for the product, then you are the product” — Daniel Hövermann

Jaron Lainer, a computer scientist and virtual reality pioneer, responded with a slight disagreement: “It’s the gradual, slight, imperceptible change in your own behavior and perception that is the product.”

I often find myself wondering how applications like Instagram and Twitter make money … and now I know. I always figured my attention was worth something, but apparently, it’s worth millions of dollars. 

2. “There are only two industries that call their customers “users”: illegal drugs and software.” — Edward Tufte

It’s unsettling to consider that some of the most powerful people in the world refer to human beings as users of their products. Of course, this adds to social media dehumanization, rapidly increasing our daily intake of photoshopped images without a thought of how that changes people psychologically or emotionally. As long as they’re making money, nothing else matters. 

3. “Nothing vast enters the life of mortals without a curse.” — Sophocles 

A cynical outlook on life, but he’s not wrong. Just like people have good and bad sides, there’s a good and a bad side to everything. Every creation, invention, or object can be used wholesomely and with good intent or used in manipulative agitation or to purposefully cause harm. It’s imperative that we remain aware of the dangers our new technologies bring to the table. 

4. “We curate our lives around this perceived sense of perfection because we get rewarded in these short-term signals: hearts, likes, thumbs up and we conflate that with value and we conflate it with the truth. And instead, what it is is fake brittle popularity that’s short-term and that leaves you even more, and admit it, vacant and empty before you did it. Because that enforces you into a vicious cycle where you’re like what’s the next thing that I need to do now because I need it back. Think about that compounded by two billion people and then think about how then people react to then to the perceptions of others.” — Chamath Palihapitiya, CEO of Social Capital

Social media has proved to be a source of loneliness and constant comparison. Likes and shares aren’t a true or accurate indication of how much someone cares or doesn’t care about you. Comparison between yourself and the doctored photos on social media creates a hurt that isn’t examined enough, and the whole world is doing it. The whole world is immersed in loneliness and feeling of inadequacy, impairing our ability to be there for each other because we’re so deep into our own hurt to heal others. 

5. “We’re training and conditioning a whole new generation of people that when we are uncomfortable or lonely or uncertain or afraid we have a digital pacifier for ourselves that is kind of atrophying our own ability to deal with that.” — Tristan Harris, former design ethicist at Google and co-founder of Centre for Humane Technologies

On a global scale, our ability to handle negative situations or experiences is rapidly deteriorating. By using our cell phones as a crutch, we are essentially disabling our ability to connect with everyone around us. We’re turning off our Wi-Fi and going onto airplane mode, not on our phones, but in real life. 

6. “We’ve created a world in which online connection has become primary. Especially for younger generations. And yet, in that world, anytime two people connect, the only way it’s financed is through a sneaky third person who’s paying to manipulate those two people. So we’ve created an entire global generation of people who were raised within a context with the very meaning of communication, the very meaning of culture is manipulation.” — Jaron Lainer, computer scientist and virtual reality pioneer

If manipulation has truly taken over our communications, is a connection even possible? Are we missing out on real life because of a sneaky third party, manipulating everything we see and every thought we have? Find out on “The Social Dilemma.”

• Extended self
• Digital self
• Customer loyalty
• Object attachment
• Social media 

“Any intelligent fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more violent. It takes a touch of genius—and a lot of courage—to move in the opposite direction.”

1. Pretend to teach a concept you want to learn about to a student in the sixth grade
2. Identify gaps in your explanation. Go back to the source material to better understand it
3. Organize and simplify
4. Transmit (optional)

Step 1: Pretend to teach it to a 2 year old or a friend that’s open to listening

Take out a blank sheet of paper. At the top, write the subject you want to learn. Now write out everything you know about the subject as if you were teaching it to a child or a rubber duck sitting on your desk. You are not teaching to your smart adult friend, but rather a child who has just enough vocabulary and attention span to understand basic concepts and relationships.

Or, for a different angle on the Feynman Technique, you could place a rubber duck on your desk and try explaining the concept to it. Software engineers sometimes tackle debugging by explaining their code, line by line, to a rubber duck. The idea is that explaining something to a silly-looking inanimate object will force you to be as simple as possible.

It turns out that one of the ways we mask our lack of understanding is by using complicated vocabulary and jargon. The truth is, if you can’t define the words and terms you are using, you don’t really know what you’re talking about. If you look at a painting and describe it as “abstract” because that’s what you heard in art class, you aren’t displaying any comprehension of the painting. You’re just mimicking what you’ve heard. And you haven’t learned anything. You need to make sure your explanation isn’t above, say, a sixth-grade reading level by using easily accessible words and phrases.

When you write out an idea from start to finish in simple language that a child can understand, you force yourself to understand the concept at a deeper level and simplify relationships and connections between ideas. You can better explain the why behind your description of the what.

Looking at that same painting again, you will be able to say that the painting doesn’t display buildings like the ones we look at every day. Instead, it uses certain shapes and colors to depict a city landscape. You will be able to point out what these are. You will be able to engage in speculation about why the artist chose those shapes and those colors. You will be able to explain why artists sometimes do this, and you will be able to communicate what you think of the piece considering all of this. Chances are, after capturing a full explanation of the painting in the simplest possible terms that would be easily understood by a sixth-grader, you will have learned a lot about that painting and abstract art in general.

Some of capturing what you would teach will be easy. These are the places where you have a clear understanding of the subject. But you will find many places where things are much foggier.

Step 2: Identify gaps in your explanation

Areas, where you struggle in Step 1, are the points where you have some gaps in your understanding.
Identifying gaps in your knowledge—where you forget something important, aren’t able to explain it, or simply have trouble thinking of how variables interact—is a critical part of the learning process. Filling those gaps is when you really make the learning stick.

Now that you know where you have gaps in your understanding, go back to the source material. Augment it with other sources. Look up definitions. Keep going until you can explain everything you need to in basic terms.

Only when you can explain your understanding without jargon and in simple terms can you demonstrate your understanding. Think about it this way. If you require complicated terminology to explain what you know, you have no flexibility. When someone asks you a question, you can only repeat what you’ve already said.

Simple terms can be rearranged and easily combined with other words to communicate your point. When you can say something in multiple ways using different words, you understand it really well.
Being able to explain something in a simple, accessible way shows you’ve done the work required to learn. Skipping it leads to the illusion of knowledge—an illusion that can be quickly shattered when challenged.

Identifying the boundaries of your understanding is also a way of defining your circle of competence. When you know what you know (and are honest about what you don’t know), you limit the mistakes you’re liable to make and increase your chance of success when applying knowledge.

Step 3. Organize and simplify

Now you have a set of hand-crafted notes containing a simple explanation. Organize them into a narrative that you can tell from beginning to end. Read it out loud. If the explanation sounds confusing at any point, go back to Step 2. Keep iterating until you have a story that you can tell to anyone who will listen.

If you follow this approach over and over, you will end up with a binder full of pages on different subjects. If you take some time twice a year to go through this binder, you will find just how much you retain.

Step 4: Transmit (optional)

This part is optional, but it’s the logical result of everything you’ve just done. If you really want to be sure of your understanding, run it past someone (ideally someone who knows little of the subject). The ultimate test of your knowledge is your capacity to convey it to another. You can read out directly what you’ve written. You can present the material like a lecture. You can ask your friends for a few minutes of their time while you’re buying them dinner. You can volunteer as a guest speaker in your child’s classroom or your parents’ retirement residence. All that really matters is that you attempt to transmit the material to at least one person who isn’t that familiar with it.

The questions you get and the feedback you receive are invaluable for further developing your understanding. Hearing what your audience is curious about will likely pique your own curiosity and set you on a path for further learning. After all, it’s only when you begin to learn a few things really well do you appreciate how much there is to know.

“We curate our lives around this perceived sense of perfection because we get rewarded in these short term signals: hearts, likes, thumbs up and we conflate that with value and we conflate it with truth. And instead, what it is is fake brittle popularity that’s short term and that leaves you even more, and admit it, vacant and empty before you did it. Because that enforces you into a vicious cycle where you’re like what’s the next thing that I need to do now, because I need it back. Think about that compounded by two billion people and then think about how then people react to then to the perceptions of others.”

As digital technologies become deeply integrated into everyday life, consumers have become increasingly connected to the digital sphere,’ and businesses have sought ways in which to capitalize upon this growing trend. This work aims to bring Belk’s seminal theory of self-development into present day by connecting its concepts with those of customer loyalty formation, highlighting how a modernization of this theory explains the means by which present-day customers are forming attachments to digital goods and the brands and companies associated with them. 

Through analysis of both historical and current literature regarding self-development, self-expression, and object attachment, we explore how consumers form connections to digital possessions, and how this process has evolved alongside the growing technological integration of daily life. Armed with this knowledge, we offer three propositions on how digital self development will affect the marketplace, electronic word-of-mouth and customer loyalty in the future, and the opportunities in marketing analytics research to develop more accurate, nuanced metrics that can better encompass relevant aspects of consumers’ digital selves. Our intent is to expand upon existing loyalty literature by explaining how attachment is formed with digital objects, and highlight both the challenges and opportunities this creates in loyalty marketing analytics. 

Electronic word-of-mouth Increasing customer loyalty has remained one of the primary goals of marketers, thanks to the proven effects of customer loyalty on a business’s bottom line. Acquiring a new customer to replace an old one is anywhere between 5 and 25 times more expensive than retaining an existing one—and increasing customer retention rates by a mere 5% can increase a company’s profits by 25% to 95%. A 2016 study found that members of customer loyalty programs generated between 12 and 18% more revenue for the respective business than those not enrolled. However, researchers have supported a variety of antecedents to customer loyalty such as customer satisfaction, trust, service quality, and perceived value, making it difficult to determine which factors provide the most opportunities for marketers to leverage. Despite this, there is a growing body of evidence that suggests psychological attachment is a key element in the development of loyalty towards a particular business or brand. The integration of one’s possessions into one’s sense of ‘self’ is not a new idea, but the increasingly interconnected world of the digital era and the growing popularity of social media technologies has changed how consumers create the psychological attachment to these possessions—in particular, because many of these possessions do not exist in the physical sense. As consumers in the digital sphere explore the ways in which they can create, customize, and share content with other users, groups, and businesses, the association and expression of these consumers’ ‘selves’ through brands, digitized symbols, and other non-physical products are becoming increasingly more prevalent. Due to the accessibility of social media for both users and businesses, this process of association has become much easier in the digital era, enhanced further by the customizability of content in the digital sphere. Rather than focusing solely on recent findings, we believe it is important to examine, in a historical context, the changes that have occurred in individual self-development, expression, and object attachment as a consequence of the nascence of digital technologies and social media. Our aim is to connect how the traditional paradigm of self-development has changed as a result of digital technologies, and how this knowledge applies to the formation of customer loyalty and encouragement of electronic word-of-mouth.

Through the historic lens of Belk’s (1988) seminal work on the concept of the ‘extended self,’ we examine how the extended self is developed and how it is shared with others. From here, the effects of digital and social media technologies on the process of self-development and self-expression are analyzed and discussed, with particular attention paid to the ways in which these traditional methods have changed as a result of the growing influence of the digital sphere. Motivations for socialization and generational differences are highlighted as drivers of these changes, enabling users to more easily fulfill the inherent psychological needs discussed in self-determination theory. 

With this knowledge as a foundation, we present three propositions as to how these changes in self-formation will affect marketing in the future and the possible opportunities for businesses and researchers to explore them. Finally, we offer suggestions on revisions to existing marketing analytics to account for the changes discussed prior, in order to better account for the effects of digital self-formation on inspiring positive eWOM and customer loyalty. From this review and synthesis of relevant literature on the self and social media, we aim to illustrate how self-development and expression have changed from the pre-digital era, how an understanding of these changes can be put into practice in the field of loyalty formation, and the future research avenues that can be explored in order to produce metrics that can account for these changes and their effects on eWOM and loyalty formation.

• Extended self
• Digital self
• Customer loyalty
• Object attachment
• Social media 

“Most distraction doesn’t originate outside of us. It’s not just the pings, dings, and rings. Most distraction starts from within.”

“The more I research this topic of distraction, I start to realize that technology is the proximal cause, not the root cause. We are using our devices as digital pacification devices. When we believe there’s nothing we can do about a problem, we don’t even try. We go to our digital pacifiers and run through our ongoing pathological experience using our phones and don’t know why it brings out the worst inner dialogue.

Every new technology has goods and bads, any technology of this scale. The question is, how do we keep the good aspects without succumbing to the bad aspects? The answer is quite simple, it’s what we’ve always done in history, we adapt and we adopt, we adapt our behaviors and we adopt new technology to fix the last generation of crappy technology. This is what we have always done.

What I discovered was that distraction, the leading cause of distraction, and research bears this out, the leading because of distraction is not what we call external triggers, it’s not the stuff outside of us, but rather distraction begins from within, what we call the internal triggers. That is the leading because of distraction: boredom, uncertainty, fatigue, anxiety. If you don’t understand this principle that I live by that time management requires pain management, time management requires pain management, you’ll always be distracted by something.

Neurologically speaking, this is not true that human motivation is not about carrots and sticks, it’s not about pain and pleasure, but rather it’s just about one thing; all human behavior is spurred by the desire to escape discomfort. Everything we do, we do for just one reason, the desire to escape discomfort, even the pursuit of pleasurable sensations.

If there was ever a group of homosapiens that was happy continuously, our ancestors would have killed and eaten them. That would not be a beneficial evolutionary trait. You want people to be perpetually perturbed. You want them to want more, that’s what gets us to hunt, to invent, to create. That discomfort, that wanting more can be rocket fuel to propel us forward.

If you plan to spend your time playing a video game or scrolling social media or watching a YouTube video, great, there’s nothing wrong with it. As long as it’s done on your schedule, not the tech companies’. So the time you plan to waste is not wasted time.

I know you’re a huge advocate of this, Shane, that if you want a competitive advantage over other people in your industry, if you want a competitive advantage over people in your workplace, make time to think because nobody’s doing it, nobody’s making that time to plan, to strategize, they’re just reacting all day long, as opposed to the person who makes 30 minutes, 45 minutes an hour and protects that time and keeps it sacred for time for reflective work.

When it comes to time, this one thing that no matter how rich you are, you still have the same 24 hours in a day, Jeff Bezos doesn’t have more time in his day, Bill Gates doesn’t have more than 24 hours, we all have the same amount no matter how rich you are, somehow, that we give away to everybody. And that’s so counterproductive.

There’s this wonderful quote from Paulo Coelho who said, “A mistake repeated more than once is a decision.” So if you keep getting distracted by the same stupid thing, day after day after day, you are deciding to be distractable, whereas an indistractable person says, “Look, there’s only three reasons. Either it’s an internal trigger, an external trigger or a planning problem.” Every distraction is only one of those three reasons, what can I do today to prevent getting distracted tomorrow?”

One of the defining traits of families that raise well-adjusted children is having meals together. Yeah. Without technology, it drives me crazy when I go into a restaurant and I see parents just giving their kids the iPads, like the iPad is some iNanny, please have moments in your child’s life with you where you have no phone zones. One of those no phones zones should be the family dining table.

All you can control is having your butt in the chair to do the work when you said you would. All you can control if you need enough sleep is to get to bed on time so that you can get proper rest for your body. What your body does with that is not always in your control, but control the things you do have agency over.

Mastering internal triggers 

• Write down the preceding emotion 
• When you find yourself getting distracted, boredom, fear, anxiety, recognize that sensation 
• Explore that sensation with curiosity, not with contempt 
• Nothing wrong with you – you are learning a new skill of how to recognize those uncomfortable emotional state 
• Emotions are like waves, crest, and subside 
• The 10 Minute rule – you can give in to that distraction not now but in 10 minutes
• Frequently occurring internal triggers – abs tenancy backfires – pulling on a rubber band – richochet across the room 
• The relief from the discomfort of telling yourself no is fine – okay I can smoke 
• A digital detox doesn’t work because there’s no way to deal with that discomfort 
• Explore the sensation with curiosity Esther than contempt 
• Just having a conversation with yourself 

• What are you doing?
• Who are you doing it with?
• Where are you living?
• How much money are you making?
• How much fun are you having?
• What do your senses pick up?
• What is your energy exuding?
• What do you feel in your body?
• What does this version of you value the most?
• What difference are you making in the world?
• What would that version of you tell you about how to show up right now?