This week: Happy New Year! We discuss resolutions, calls to action, and other things we can ignore. After that, we have a few interesting tools and some footnotes to close it out. Here we go.
Every good sales pitch ends with something called a "call to action." This is where the marketing campaign gets in your face and tells you to buy now! All you have to do is sign here! They are, in short, what advertisers want you to do and they are, in truth, why we all hate advertising. A call to action is a demand on your attention; every time you see a commercial, every time you interact with some kind of advertisement, you are being pressured to do something. And advertisers have gotten really good at finding exactly the right pressure to apply. Here's a relevant passage from Wikipedia:
Successful sales representatives have long recognised that specific words and phrases elicit desirable responses from prospects and soon learn to incorporate the best lines into effective sales scripts. Clever sales pitches often incorporate a series of small CTAs that lead to a final CTA. These smaller CTAs create a pattern of behaviour that makes it easier for the audience to follow-through with just one last CTA, completing a more demanding request, than had it been asked without context.
So, yeah, they work. And they are ubiquitous. I mean, there are even a few sprinkled throughout this newsletter1 in the form of the subscribe and share buttons. But especially during this season - Christmas, New Year's - not only do we see them and hear them everywhere, we create them for ourselves. We call them resolutions.
To really unpack what I mean, let's expand our definition to encompass more than just the marketing angle. Google's built-in dictionary gives this definition:
an exhortation or stimulus to do something in order to achieve an aim or deal with a problem.
So, when we make a call to action, we are persuading someone to do something, like, say, for example, start a new diet or exercise program. Or learn an instrument or a foreign language. Or maybe communicate better and more often. Or any of the other classic resolutions.
The key difference in why marketing calls to action work and that resolutions so often do not is in the length of the action. As we noted above, in marketing, calls to action are designed to get you, the customer, to take whatever small step is necessary to close the sale. So, we get Wikipedia's chain of small CTAs that lead to a large result. But, resolutions are often meant to be lifestyle changes, permanent, lasting changes. And we just don't get those from a call to action. No, we get those through careful thought, analysis, and goal setting2 and that's no fun to talk about at the water cooler on Monday.
So, where does that leave us? It leaves us with two thoughts: first, and I guess this is housekeeping, we're going to leave behind the morass of marketing that we have been wading through over the past few weeks and instead turn our attention to the other action-verbs we use to say that we are, in fact, speaking. Words like resolve, declare, and profess have an archaic formalness to them that makes them seem more important than they really are. And, besides, don't they all mean the same thing anyway? We'll discuss it over the next couple of weeks. Which just leaves the small issue of...my resolution for 2022.
I ain't got one.
When Learned first started, it wasn't about words as much as it was about learning. Every week, I picked out a new topic and did my best to be able to Feynmanize3 it in under a thousand words. This worked really well right up until it didn't. Eventually, I hit a point where I realized I was circling around the fact that I wasn't actually learning very much. I wrote about how to learn the piano and how to learn Korean, but I didn't actually make much progress with learning the piano or speaking Korean. So, I pivoted the blog and made it the words and linguistics nerdery you see today. At the same time, I didn't want to give up on learning new skills.
More importantly, and related to today's theme, I didn't want to make any more bold, declarative statements like "I will play the piano every day!" Instead, I decided to try a new technique - I made a small list of things I wanted to be better at. Every day, I looked at the list, made a hole in my schedule, and just...practiced. It's done pretty well so far. This year, I want to keep doing that. I've got my list and I'm thinking about what I want to be better at by this time next year. That's it. No resolution, no call to action, just a shortlist of things I want to be better at.
Here's to a better year.
Stay curious,
J
Linguistic Tools
As stated, I don't really make resolutions anymore. I do, however, like to spend a lot of time reflecting on the previous year and contemplating the coming year. To do that, I have grown to really like the following two tools:
Both booklets allow you to reflect on the past year while looking ahead to the coming year. Crucially, both are free and available in both digital and printable forms. Good luck!
I'd apologize, but that's a bit...hate the game, not the player? Believe me, if I can find a way to both make a living in a capitalist society without having to actually use the mechanisms of capitalism, I'll take it, but until then...
Which is why, obviously, that so many of the advice-giving articles about how to achieve your New Year's resolution tell us to start with small, achievable goals that will lead to a large result. Advertising works, y'all.
Feynmanize! It's a word! Okay, probably not yet, but, for those unfamiliar, the Feynman technique is a method for learning something deeply in a short time. Basically, you take what it is you're trying to learn and simplify it as though you were explaining to a child. The process of doing so will often make you consider difficult points in a variety of ways with the result that you will understand them better than if you had just memorized them.