The Levels of Problem-solving:
Level 1 — You solve the problem.
Level 2 — You solve the problem that caused the problem.
Level 3 — You avoid the problem that caused the problem.
Level 3 is the most valuable but hardest to see.
Post Category → featured
Quality time vs garbage time
“I’m a believer in the ordinary and the mundane. These guys that talk about ‘quality time’ — I always find that a little sad when they say, ‘We have quality time.’ I don’t want quality time. I want the garbage time. That’s what I like. You just see them in their room reading a comic book and you get to kind of watch that for a minute, or [having] a bowl of Cheerios at 11 o’clock at night when they’re not even supposed to be up. The garbage, that’s what I love.”
When you realize there is no such thing as “quality time,” when you become okay with “garbage time,” you end up getting the best kind of time there is. You get the moment right in front of you.
https://forge.medium.com/theres-no-such-thing-as-quality-time-58db618c099d
New storefronts and restaurants were likewise optimized for the image. Considerations like comfort, accessibility, and acoustics were secondary to visual appeal. It was as if the landscape itself had dysmorphia, altering its physical appearance to fit an arbitrary standard that undermined its primary function. But maybe I had it backward. Maybe the point of a physical space was no longer to shelter physical people. Maybe a storefront was a marketing tool for a direct-to-consumer internet start-up, the way a website was once a marketing tool for a brick-and-mortar store. Glossier. Everlane. Warby Parker. The Sill. Walking into such places felt like walking into an app. They always looked smaller in person, like actors who are shorter in real life.
https://nplusonemag.com/issue-36/essays/my-instagram/
Quick way to get non-commercial search results
Problem: Oftentimes, when I’m using Google I’m searching for informational content that gives advice. What’s the best type of t-shirt to buy? How do I cook this steak? Why do lightbulbs flicker when they turn on? How much does a vanity cost?
Etc etc
The search results for a lot of these queries have been monetized to death. Instead of real recommendations, you get sponsored content from a shirt company, a cooking blog saturated with affiliate links, remarketed for lightbulbs, etc.
Soultion: The quick hack I’ve been using lately for queries like this is to add reddit to the end of the query. This restricts the results to anonymous posts on reddit that are far less likely to be monetized content. I’ve found you get better advice from real people this way. You hear from actual people who tried to find a substitute for cream cheese in a recipe, not from a content writer who is talking in hypotheticals.
Restricting to the search results to reposes by real people greatly improves signal to noise ratio for informational/advice queries.
The World’s Fastest Man
So what are the takeaways for a small business owner, middle manager or senior executive? C.C. is living proof that results can matter more than paradigms. You don’t need buzzwords to build. You don’t need inspirational posters to inspire. You need to work, and once you are known for that work, your personal brand, in turn, will bring even more work. It’s a virtuous cycle.
On the Cover: The World’s Fastest Man
The art of showing up
Not every day is created equal. Not every day will feel great. The energy & excitement won’t always be there. You won’t always feel optimistic about your results. The day’s outside stressors such as family, work, etc. oftentimes throw a wrench in your daily schedule. It’s NEVER all the way right. It usually falls somewhere in the middle between the two extremes.
Between the opposites you must learn to master the Art of Showing Up. No matter where you fall on the spectrum, showing up produces a consistent feeling and result of achievement.
Brands vs Ads
http://www.seobook.com/brands-vs-ads
My thesis was Google would need to increasingly promote some smaller niche sites to make general web search differentiated from other web channels & minimize the market power of vertical leading providers.
The reason my thesis was only half correct (and ultimately led to the absolutely wrong conclusion) is Google has the ability to provide the illusion of diversity while using sort of eye candy displacement efforts to shift an increasing share of searches from organic to paid results.
Aaron Wall
Wise words from the GOAT SEO.
In-SERP SEO
That linear SERP pattern still exists today, but it’s the exception rather than the rule. Today, we find that people’s attention is distributed on the page and that they process results more nonlinearly than before. We observed so much bouncing between various elements across the page that we can safely define a new SERP-processing gaze pattern — the pinball pattern.
https://www.nngroup.com/articles/pinball-pattern-search-behavior/
In a pinball pattern, the user scans a results page in a highly nonlinear path, bouncing around between results and SERP features.
A traditional pinball machine arcade game (left) is a glass-covered cabinet using an angled play field with various bumpers, obstacles, and targets. The player uses flippers to shoot and bounce a metal ball around the play field, receiving points for hitting different targets. In a pinball pattern (right), the user’s gaze similarly “bounces” around between visual elements and keywords in a SERP.
Would be interesting to study the efforts of optimizing for #1 in Google SERPs for medium difficulty keywords vs. optimizing for CTR/attention in SERPs using rich results for high difficulty keywords. It is easy to earn rich results with markup, rich media, etc.