What I'm Reading...

The People Who Don’t Buy From You

Seth Godin, in This is Marketing:

Here’s another difficult exercise, one that stretches the empathy muscle of a typical marketer: Those people who don’t buy from you, the ones who don’t take your calls, who sneer at your innovations, who happily buy from a competitor even if they know you exist . . . those people . . . Why are they right? Why are the people who don’t choose you correct in their decision to not choose you?

marketing Seth Godin cognitive empathy

Fall in Love With Boredom

From Atomic Habits, by James Clear:

The greatest threat to success is not failure but boredom. As habits become routine, they become less interesting and less satisfying. We get bored. Anyone can work hard when they feel motivated. It’s the ability to keep going when work isn’t exciting that makes the difference. Professionals stick to the schedule; amateurs let life get in the way.

The only way to become excellent is to be endlessly fascinated by doing the same thing over and over. You have to fall in love with boredom.

success great work routines habits professional amateur

Teaching vs. Learning

When we see things from the “supply side” instead of from the “demand side”.

The education system is caught up in the process of teaching and not the process of learning. They believe their job is to supply knowledge as opposed to helping people learn. Why? They’re not seeing the whole picture, and therefore they focus on the wrong things. They want students to learn—the effect—but what causes that to happen? They focus on making the teacher better but fail to understand how the student learns. If the teacher improves but the student still fails, is the system any more useful?

Innovators and entrepreneurs skilled at causal structures see the many layers to the problem—empathetic perspective—and they have a framework to see cause and effect which allows them to connect the dots between teachers, students, administrators, and parents. Causal structures are about seeing supply and demand, understanding the different perspectives, and connecting the dots into a causal framework.

— Bob Moesta, Learning to Build: The 5 Bedrock Skills of Innovators and Entrepreneurs, p. 109

teaching learning cause-effect Bob Moesta