Reading Time: 2 min It’s easy to think that we control all of our own decisions, and to a large extent we do, but it can also be crazy to see how things like sea levels 100 million years ago have a direct impact on elections today. Take the 2020 election results in Alabama, that looked something like this: […]
What is the expected value of that?
Reading Time: 2 min When making any kind of financial decision, it can be interesting to look at the “expected value” of whatever you’re looking to buy. This can work particularly well for things like raffles and your sales. Raffles With a raffle it’s pretty simple. If you have a 1/100 chance of winning a $500 prize, the expected […]
Efficiency needs a purpose
Reading Time: < 1 min I write about productivity and efficiency quite a lot on here, with hundreds of posts that go back well over a decade. I believe that being efficient in your work can pay huge dividends. A fun example is when Google released the “Send & Archive” button in Gmail back in 2009, and I estimated that […]
Demographics vs Psychographics
Reading Time: < 1 min Finding a niche for your business is generally a major key to success. If you try to be all things to all people, you’ll likely end up being the top choice for no one. When working on that niche, people often look to demographics, or the statistical data about the population: age, race, marital status, […]
Cynic or Skeptic?
Reading Time: < 1 min I talk a lot on here about asking questions and looking beyond the obvious, but there is a fine line between being in inquisitive skeptic and simply being a cynic. Darren Hardy recently put out a video about this, and he defined the words this way: A cynic distrusts most of the information they hear. […]
Planning saves money
Reading Time: < 1 min When building a website, we always create at least a handful of wireframes so we can sort out what we’re doing before we really dig in. If you’re not familiar with the concept of a wireframe when it comes to websites, Brooke wrote an excellent post that explains them here. Beyond the great reasons that […]
Follow-up is crucial
Reading Time: 3 min A few years ago, we were all working in our office when a local company stopped by with a box of bagels and coffee for us. We didn’t know them, but they were reaching out to local marketing companies to let people know they exist (they were photographers, so potentially a good partner). They seemed […]
Should I keep using the microphone?
Reading Time: < 1 min Yes, you should. I see this come up from time to time. Someone is speaking to a group of perhaps 20 or 30 people, and wonder if they can avoid the internal awkwardness of using the mic, so they hold the mic to the side and ask “can you still hear me”? Not wanting to […]
Missive email
Reading Time: 3 min For the last few weeks, all of us at GreenMellen have been using the Missive email app and and it’s been great. Missive is an email program that works with your existing account (Gmail, Office 365, iCloud, etc) and adds some neat features. Here is a quick video that shows what it does: We aren’t […]
Whenever there is judgment, there is noise
Reading Time: 2 min I shared a bit from Daniel Kahneman last year when I talked about complex language vs credible intelligence. I was recently listening to Daniel on the Hidden Brain podcast with Shankar Vedantam when Daniel raised another great observation. His most recent book is titled “Noise: A Flaw in Human Judgment“, and digs into how “noise” […]