Manual Therapy

It's not what happens to you, but how you react to it that matters. 

— Epictetus

Nothing separates the cowardly and strong like a good pandemic.

In a pinch like today's pinch, we all want to be pillars of strength—to embody Ernest Hemingway's famous formula, "courage is grace under pressure." 

But it takes a strong foundation.

While you're home—if you're home—you can work on your foundation by reading a manual by the first century Stoic Epictetus.

It's aptly titled Manual.

Manual is a short book that's had a long life among resilient people.

And deservedly so. 

Its author was a mensch.

The son of a slave, Epictetus understood suffering. His sadistic master once purposely broke his leg, leaving him crippled for the rest of his life. When he became a freedman in his late teens, he taught philosophy on street corners in Rome, but was banished for his troubles.

Undaunted, Epictetus moved to Greece, where he founded a school that would eventually attract students from all corners of the empire. 

One of those students took shorthand notes during Epictetus' lectures—notes that became Manual.

Epictetus welcomed adversity as training for moments like ours, when courage and resilience are tested. His philosophy gave students the wisdom to "keep calm and carry on" throughout plagues, wars, fires and earthquakes. 

It also taught them to remember we're all interconnected.

It's no coincidence that when the Chinese consumer electronics manufacturer Xiaomi shipped face masks to Italy last week, all the crates were stamped with a Stoic saying:

We are waves of the same sea, leaves of the same tree, flowers of the same garden.

Shad Bake

Hubris and overconfidence are always dangerous things.

— Erik Larson

It was baked in from the beginning: Trump's hubris could only cause the president to bungle his first "crisis."

History teems with popinjays like him.

One was the Confederate George Pickett, a man many contemporaries described as an "arrogant child."

During the Battle of Five Forks (April 1, 1865), Pickett—yes, the same general who led the futile charge at Gettysburg—was so confident he could repel a Federal attack, he accepted a fellow commander's invitation to attend a shad bake behind the lines, leaving his troops without their leader.

Shad were a fish local to Virginia's rivers, and shad bakes a tasty rite of spring for Virginia boys like Pickett.

Unfortunately, as it turned out, Pickett went off to the picnic without telling anyone he was leaving, where he could be found, or who should command in his absence.

A Federal attack indeed came, and Pickett's leaderless troops were overwhelmed.

His rout resulted in the surrender of the whole Confederate army at Appomattox eight days later.

NOTE: Remember to wash your hands!

Motivated Reasoning

Prejudice is a great time saver.
You can form opinions without having to get the facts. 

— E. B. White 

Beliefs we’d label “stupid” don’t necessarily result from stupidity.

More often than not they’re the products of a phenomenon research psychologists call “motivated reasoning.”

While authentic reasoning recruits and weighs evidence wisely and independently, motivated reasoning is slave to a goal (usually a selfish goal) and ignores and distorts evidence willy-nilly.

Through the process you end up producing a patently biased belief.

It’s not that we’re blind to evidence, believing whatever the hell we want to believe (we want, in fact, to think we are rational creatures); but we’re content to make do with scraps of evidence, which we patch together to create a convenient and comfortable interpretation of reality.

We're lazy in that way.

Research psychologists who have studied motivated reasoning have identified and named a variety of unconscious mechanisms underlying it.

The Big 3 mechanisms are:

• Biased information search—you seek and find only evidence that promotes your goal;

• Biased assimilation—you give credence only to evidence that promotes your goal; and

• Identity-protective cognition—you discredit evidence that causes you anxiety because it challenges your self-worth or contradicts the beliefs of your peer-group.

These three unconscious mechanisms explain why otherwise mindful people cherish biased beliefs—the kind of “uninformed” beliefs that propel them to smoke cigarettes; treat cancer with magnets or homeopathy; deny their kids the measles vaccine; donate to TV ministries; perpetuate vast-conspiracy theories; fear evil clowns—or vote one into high office.

But research psychologists have also found there’s a benevolent form of motivated reasoning: “accuracy-driven reasoning.”

When accuracy is made the goal of reasoning, we tend to expend more brain power on the gathering, sifting and weighing of evidence before forming any belief.

Unfortunately, we don’t reason in this manner spontaneously: we need to be prodded.

One of the most effective prods, researchers have shown, is to be told in advance of gathering, sifting and weighing evidence that you will have to justify your belief in front of a public audience.

Just imagine every Sandy Hook, Holocaust and climate-change denier having to face fifty people and justifying what they believe.

Good luck with that!

Event Shock

Brace yourself for Event Shock.

Working with event organizers, as my business partner and I do, I feel their anxiety.

They're constantly worried there's a glut of events. ("With so many events competing for audiences' time, will they pick ours?")

But we've entered uncharted territory.

Organizers once had to contend only with competing organizers.

Now they have to compete with every marketer.

This thought struck me when I received an email today from my neighborhood hardware store promoting an in-store educational event.

Marketers—even the one who works for my local hardware store—have learned that, if they want to seduce customers, sales pitches and discounts are no longer enough. 

They have to deliver educational content.

And their efforts are increasing the volume of events—exponentially.

You thought there was a surplus of events before?

That was nothing compared to the innumerable iterations we're going to experience at marketers' hands in the coming years.

Event marketing has become the new content marketing. 

The event-flood may not rise to the same water-level, because marketers can't outsource events to India, like they can content; but it will feel like it.

The sheer volume of events will be unprecedented.

And overwhelming.

Event Shock is here.

HAT TIP to Mark Schaefer, who coined Content Shock to describe the "tremor" felt when content supply overwhelms content demand.

Artificial Intelligence: Now It's Personal

As the result of a podcast by consultant Mark Scheafer, The New Marketing Career, I'm inspired to deep-dive into the subject of Artificial Intelligence.

You might consider doing so, too.

AI is marketing's next big thing.

Experts insist AI won't make every marketing professional obsolete—not soon, anyway.

But my brief look into AI has already persuaded me otherwise.

London startup Phrasee, for example, is harnessing AI "to write better email marketing language than humans."

If accurate, that's bad news for copywriters.

Phrasee uses algorithms to generate "human-sounding, machine-optimized email marketing language that gets you more opens, clicks and conversions," the company's website claims.

Phrasee's software outperforms human copywriters because it evaluates "hundreds of emotions, sentiments and phrases" before recommending a line.

Human copywriters, if they could wade through hundreds of emotions, sentiments and phrases without soon falling asleep, couldn't assess them—unless they were wizards at Bayesian statistics (the algorithms' secret sauce). 

I don't know any who are.

If Phrasee's algorithms indeed outperform the human copywriters—and I have no reason to doubt they do—it's due to a computer's capacity to scrutinize vast piles of data.

There's at least some consolation in that for an obsolete copywriter. 

Scrutinize stems from the Latin scrutor, meaning "to search through trash."

I'd rather practice old-fashioned wordsmithery and leave the trash-sorting to the computers.