[UP 002] Rats and Hope/ 3 star reviews/ Community not audience

Here’s your weekly dose of UP: Unrelenting Progress

Let’s get into it.

Personal Growth: How’s your belief?

This week I started getting into David Goggin’s second book ‘Never Finished’, (yeh I’m a little late) and this bit in the intro really hit hard.

“Belief is a gritty, potent, primordial force.

In the 1950s, a scientist named Dr. Curt Richter proved this when he gathered dozens of rats and dropped them in thirty-inch deep glass cylinders filled with water.

The first rat paddled on the surface for a short time, then swam to the bottom, where it looked for an escape hatch. It died within two minutes. Several others followed the same pattern. Some lasted as long as fifteen minutes, but they all gave up.

Richter was surprised because rats are damn good swimmers, yet in his lab, they drowned without much of a fight.

So, he tweaked the test.

After he placed the next batch in their jars, Richter watched them, and right before it looked like they were about to give up, he and his techs scooped up the rats, toweled them off, and held them long enough for their heart and respiratory rates to normalize. Long enough for them to register, on a physiological scale, that they had been saved.

They did this a few times before Richter placed a group of them back in those evil cylinders again to see how long they would last on their own.

This time, the rats didn’t give up.

They swam their natural asses off...

for an average of sixty hours without any food or rest.

One swam for eighty-one hours.”

How crazy is that?!

That one experience of success the rat experienced led to a 240x extension in its survival efforts!

This truly shows just how powerful belief is but more so that we have to dig deep to create that belief in ourselves. We have to remember our previous wins and go into that ‘cookie jar’ if you will that Goggins talks about, to keep us going in the dark moments.

Business Growth: Look down the middle

This week I began looking into the competition of a couple of the product categories I’m looking at launching.

Usually when examining the competition, I would usually look at Amazon listings and sort by reviews. I’d read both 5 star and 1 star reviews mostly to see what people are emotionally charged about, both good and bad. But this time round, I decided to take time to examine the middle-of-the-road reviews. And I wasn’t disappointed with what I found.

The reviews are full of people who are overall happy but feel there are things that can be improved and their requests, I was noticing most of the time were very specific and precise. They are not new to the category generally and have a nuanced view compared to first-time buyers who have no expectations prior to compare against.

Try it out for yourself. Study the 3 star reviews. It can be a real goldmine.

My challenges for the week ahead are to try and conduct some avatar reviews. I’ve not really focused on this in the past but I’m not cutting any corners this time!

Audience Growth: Think in terms of community

This week I’ve really been thinking about the differences between having an audience and having a community. The best (and most succinct) explanation on the topic I found was this video by Kyle Hagge, Lead community manager of Morning Brew.

The punchline is an audience is one-way communication, one to many.

A community is multi lines of communication, many to many.

So this newsletter is an audience but if we were to open this up into a private group for instance, now we’re moving into a community.

Something to ponder.

Ok that’s it for now, have a great week. Catch up with you next Saturday.