Hi there.
Caught yourself doomscrolling again? Us too. As soon as we woke up, actually.
We think there’s a fix, though. When you feel the urge to pick up your phone, pick up the book you’re currently reading instead. A physical copy. A kindle, whatever. Give it 30 minutes.
In a few weeks you might notice your attention span wandering back from wherever it went. Probably somewhere deep in your feed. Let us know if it works!
What if doing nothing beat 90% of professional fund managers?
The investment industry sells complexity. Research. Timing. Alpha.
The data tells a different story. Over any 20-year period, a simple world index fund has outperformed more than 90% of professionals. Most investors who try to beat the market end up paying more in fees to underperform it.
The edge isn’t intelligence. It’s patience.
But patience is hard when your portfolio feels abstract. A passive fund is just a ticker on a screen. The thousands of companies inside it, the businesses you actually co-own, stay invisible.
90 Percent fixes that. Every week, it pulls one company at random from the world equity index and tells you what it actually does.
- The Brazilian company that makes the electric motors inside almost everything that spins.
- The Florida company that sells your airline its spare parts at half the price.
- The Japanese hardware company hiding inside every factory.
One company. Every week. Yours to discover.
Self-Determination Theory
You didn’t fail your 50-book reading challenge because you dislike books.
You failed because a progress bar started nagging and picking felt like homework.
That’s Self-Determination Theory. And it says motivation only lasts when three needs get fed: autonomy, competence, and relatedness.
Translated: we chose this, we’re getting better at it, and someone noticed. Remove one, and effort just dies over time.
Psychologists Deci and Ryan spent four decades showing internal motivation beats bribery.
Across 128 experiments, paying people for a task they already enjoyed made them less likely to keep doing it once the reward stopped. Praise did the opposite.
Incentives win on quantity. Anything needing care, loyalty, or effort over months needs the internal stuff.
It’s why the app you downloaded on a whim dies by Tuesday.
And why the running club you joined with two friends survives January.
Our take: most marketers answer flat motivation with a discount code. Sell ownership, progress, and belonging instead.
Three ways to leverage Self-Determination Theory
1) Hand over the steering wheel
Autonomy converts because a choice we made ourselves is harder to abandon than one we accepted.
Function of Beauty doesn’t really sell shampoo. It sells a hair quiz that assembles one.
Buyers pick hair type, goals, colour, and fragrance, then get a formula built around those answers.
The agency behind the rebuild reports the quiz-to-subscription flow supports roughly 80% of the business, at over a million quiz engagements per year.
Nothing about the formula screams innovation. The configuration does.
Steal the mechanic: replace “best seller” with “build yours”.
2) Make progress impossible to miss
Competence needs evidence. People stay where they can watch themselves improving.
Zwift turned indoor cycling, historically the dullest hour in sport, into a levelling system. Cycling levels run to 100, each unlocking jerseys, bikes, or accessories.
The workout didn’t change, yet the scoreboard did.
Apply it to onboarding: progress bars, streaks, skill tiers, milestone emails naming what the user can now do.
Churn usually starts the moment you can’t see progress.
3) Sell the room
Belonging never shows up in a weekly dashboard, so it’s easy to miss. But it’s often relatedness that makes the hard sale.
Rapha charges cyclists an annual subscription to join its club.
Members get weekly local rides with ride leaders, exclusive kit, global events, and early access to launches.
That’s a subscription to other people, sold alongside expensive jerseys.
Smaller version: member-only rides, a Discord, a private forum, an annual meet-up.
Make customers visible to each other, and retention stops depending on your discount calendar.
So. Much. AI news. How do you know what’s worth your attention?
There’s always something new with AI, but not everything deserves your attention.
Good thing The Deep View only focuses on AI developments that could actually impact your work and decisions.
It shares must-know updates into a fun, 5-minute read and has helped 500,000+ professionals stay informed without drowning in the constant flood of updates.
Even readers from Google, Meta, Microsoft, and a16z start their day with these insights.
CHATGPT: The money prints itself. OpenAI’s ad business just hit a $1B annualized run rate in about 200 days. Self-service access is rolling out across India, Europe, and MENA, with ads now available in 40+ countries.
GOOGLE: Say cheese. Google Pics, Google’s powerful new image creation and editing tool, is rolling out to AI Pro and Ultra subscribers. Plus most Workspace business customers. It works inside Docs and Slides now, with Drive coming. Seems like a fine addition.
INSTAGRAM: The AI creator label is now the AI-generated profile label, and skipping it can bite you. Unlabelled synthetic personas lose recommendation reach until they toggle it on or win an appeal. If you’re just using AI tools in your workflow? You’re fine, no label needed.
MOBILE: Over half of US adults think they spend too much time on their phone, per Pew. And that jumps to seven-in-ten under 30. Meanwhile, 45% tried cutting back this past year. Your always-on audience is actively trying to be less on. But it’s not looking like they’re succeeding.
YOUTUBE: Attest found Americans now give creator content 3 hours 54 minutes daily, beating the 3 hours 20 minutes going to live TV and streaming combined. Gen Z alone watches 2 hours 25 minutes. Worth checking the whole report to see where your audience spends more time.
ICYMI, last time we looked at the Regulatory Focus Theory.
The “Self-determined” Crew.
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