The Connection Newsletter 39 - Respect

The Connection Newsletter 39 - R-E-S-P-E-C-T

January 21, 2019

Hello!

This is edition #39 of

The Connection

, the weekly email I send family, friends, and future friends (hello!) Thank you for reading

Last week I did a blitz trip into NYC where I hosted 

. Managed to squeeze in time to see old friends and meet a couple new ones.

The results are in on our

and ad campaign for Shogun. Spent $50 and gained 29 followers, a 500% week over week lift, and learned a lot. I’ll post a full write-up soon. Meanwhile, got some good tooling recommendations to create better content for Instagram which I’m excited to dig into (thanks

)!

Started reading Michael Ovitz’s new book,

Who Is Michael Ovitz?

I’m enjoying it so far. It’s a good (albeit one-sided) expansion on James Andrew Miller's excellent book,

Let’s jump into this week’s articles:

Make sure to hit "Display Images" above to see puppy pics. 

. Years ago in Los Angeles, Amy and I met a colleague and his spouse at a dinner. They had been married for 40 years and it genuinely seemed like they still enjoyed each other’s company. What was their secret?

“Never disrespect one another in public,” they said.  

That piece of advice stuck with us and continues to be a guiding principle. In this article about relationship advice by Mark Manson, he touches on this, along with 11 other keys to a successful relationship:

  1. Be Together For the Right Reasons

  2. Have Realistic Expectations About Relationships and Romance

  3. The Most Important Factor in a Relationship is Not Communication, But Respect (See above)

  4. Talk Openly About Everything, Especially the Stuff That Hurts

  5. A Healthy Relationship Means Two Healthy Individuals

  6. Give Each Other Space

  7. You and Your Partner Will Grow and Change in Unexpected Ways; Embrace It

  8. Get Good at Fighting

  9. Get Good at Forgiving

  10. The Little Things Add Up to Big Things

  11. Sex Matters… A Lot

  12. Be Practical, and Create Relationship Rules

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. This article by Hiten Shah originally billed itself as an analysis on Snapchat’s survival. I think it falls shy of that, but it’s a terrific analysis of how the product/company first grew and what changes in the market place (ahem, Instagram Stories) stymied that growth.

For a fuller picture of Snap’s history, I’d recommend:

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. The cynical view is that everything is for sale. The optimist’s view is that, well… everything is for sale. Ultimately, if these micropayments are a way for up-and-coming artists and entrepreneurs to sustain their art and businesses while they build, I think it’s a good thing.

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. I loved this explanation on the rise of “branding”:

“Branding emerged alongside consumer capitalism around the turn of the 20th century when, for the first time, humans’ ability to produce commodities outstripped our ability to consume them. As supermarkets and department stores gathered a baffling array of goods under one roof, branding offered a way for products to stand out in an increasingly crowded market. Brands were meant to build trust between consumers and increasingly distant producers, providing reassurance that a given commodity was safe to eat or use at a moment when government regulation was nearly non-existent. Brands, in a sense, took on the labor once performed by shopkeepers who had, up until that point, been expected to know and stand by all their wares.”

In summary, specifically buying “brandless” is buying into another brand. If the lack of brand is so important, consumers can already buy generic painkiller from Target (vs. Advil) or generic laundry sheets from ShopRite (vs. Bounce), so on and so forth. They don’t need to buy a different brand positioning itself as anti-brand.

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. This was a great case study on the dichotomy between data and creative teams in the Hollywood landscape. Basically, you can’t ignore the data… but it’s equally foolish to blindly follow it at all times.

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. I was 3 years old when this story developed and never heard of it until now. It would be interesting to compare this story today with how it was covered when Mrs. Smart was first accused of murder.

Thanks for reading!

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