A professional investor acts like a professional. She has a checklist to measure an investment against. She runs every consideration through the checklist before considering it further. The checklist means that a set of decisions are made up front. If a potential investment doesn’t pass through the list, no further consideration is required. This saves her on mental load to make hundreds of...
Act like an investor
Audience and Bounce Rates
Derren Brown is surveying his surroundings. He’s an in-house magician standing in the middle of a busy restaurant in Bristol. This is in the 90s before Derren became the famous illusionist. There’s a wide array of clientele in the restaurant. It’s mid-evening. For some, the drinks have been flowing for an hour or two. There are retired couples on a romantic night out. There are groups of rowdy...
Seeing your work as others see it
When you look at a picture or video of yourself taken moments ago, you’re overly self-critical. But, look at the same picture a few months after it’s taken, and that anguish has gone. You think, ‘it wasn’t as bad as I thought’. Why is that? Stephen Merchant, co-writer of The Office and Extras, was on the James Altucher Show recently. Breaking down the structure of his comedy, he discussed the...
The Anatomy of a Successful Marketing Campaign – Trivial Pursuit
In a previous post I wrote about a marketing campaign idea based on a launch campaign used by Trivial Pursuit in 1983. In this post, I want to dissect the Trivial Pursuit campaign to understand why it was so successful. Trivial Pursuit was due to launch at the 1983 Toy Fair in New York , an event attended by the key decision makers for all companies in the industry. The marketing team were...
Why we don’t always do what’s in our best interest
Food was in short supply in the US during the Second World War. Ships once importing food were either transporting troops or lying at the bottom of the ocean. Meat was particularly scarce and subsequently rationed. This was a huge blow to US citizens for whom meat was a staple to the diet. At this time, Public Health was a matter of national interest, so the Government formed Committee on Food...