Strands of Genius: BK Turnaround, Cult of Enhanced Self, Decline of Deviance

Strands of Genius is a newsletter from the co-founders of Genius Steals, Faris & Rosie Yakob.

They are award-winning strategists, facilitators, creative directors, writers and public speakers who get excited about working with smart people on interesting challenges in and around creative businesses.

Hit reply so we can collaborate on something together :)

It’s hot and I can no longer take it.

Anyhoo, since then I seem to have become more sensitive to eXtreme heat. The effect is very specific and quite sudden - I feel a little confused and then super grumpy.

Turns out it’s not just me. Various studies indicate that performance on tests and at work all decline when we are too hot. Sleep becomes harder, which makes that worse, and our bodies seem to respond to it as a threat - it induces a “typical stress response”, which is likely we are all feeling slow and irritable.

“As the temperature goes up, the cognitive function goes down because heat affects our brain. Higher temperatures can stop nerve fibres from working properly. This means that sometimes messages cannot get to and from the brain which is why you may experience fatigue, weakness, or problems with balance or vision.

“The hypothalamus (the part of the brain that regulates our temperature) has to work very hard in the warmer weather. This part of the brain is also affected by hormonal changes, so combined with the heat this can slow brain messages from getting through which will affect our brain function, mood and cognition.”

Here’s how UK heat compares hemispherically:

So it’s hotter than Dubai and Pakistan and nearly as hot as Arizona, all of which are somewhat desert-y.

It’s not just heat of course, it’s also the humidity.

The top right quadrant here is the most brutal - bodies really begin to struggle. When there is more moisture in the air, sweating functions less well as a cooling mechanism so it ‘feels-like’ it is hotter. Here’s what that looks like:

So Baghdad has the highest temperature but feels cooler because ‘it’s a dry heat’ [IYKYK].

So, it is REALLY HOT in UK and FRANCE.

If you are here or at Cannes TAKE HYDRATION BREAKS and please be extra kind to each other. We love you and you know we worry.

Btw - Claude called this ‘calculating the misery indices’ while it was working that made me briefly chuckle and I suddenly realized something.

Claude is the apotheosis of ‘chatty packaging’. Unfortunately known at one point as ‘wackaging’ [UGH] it is the thing Innocent innocently started, where the bottle of juice talks to you, and then spread itself over everything, especially food and drink packages. Think Oatly et al.

Claude is chatty packaging for the Internet. lolz.

So it is entirely unsurprising that ‘conversational packaging’ was announced last year, where you scan a QR code to chat with an AI for the product. It’s called Cleo [of course it is] and “from now on, products don’t just sit on shelves. They live, they listen, they respond.” Does anyone really want that?

BURGER KING’S APOLOGY TOUR

• Speaking of Cannes, former darling of the Croisette Burger King has been struggling. It won Cannes Creative Marketer of the Year [2017], won 24 Lions in 2021, and was Creative Brand of the Year, and again in 2022 & 2023.

  However, somewhat contrapuntally, when US&Canada president Tom Curtis joined in 2012 he described the situation as ‘dire’ and that the brand was facing “an existential threat." He said a former boss showed him an article predicting the chain would disappear within a decade!

  Weird, right? So much awarded buzzy marketing and yet the brand was dying so they launched the ‘Reclaim the Flame’ initiative - a twenty year turnaround plan.

  To be fair, it is a shibboleth of advertising, or at least used to be, that nothing destroys a company faster than good advertising for bad products, and BK restaurants had gotten old and stale.

  So they fired the King and replaced him with YOU! It’s a very Dominos Turnaround thing, with President Tom in the ad, accepting that the food quality had declined and changing the Whopper and suchlike.

  And things are improving for them them since. But I still wanted to call attention to the Slate piece because it sums up succinctly the biggest problem in marketing today:

  “Our biggest businesses, as the A.I. boom has shown, are completely removed from providing anything people need or want. Happy shareholders and happy customers are often diametrically opposed parties.” [BI, CNBC, Slate]

CULT OF THE ENHANCED SELF

• I enjoy Derek Thompson’s thinking/writing and believe his observations about the loneliest most isolated generation to be one of the most important sociological insights of our time. This update looks at the impact of the quantified, enhanced self on society. “At the layer of sociology, the Enhanced Self is inseparable from the decline of socialization, which I have previously called the anti-social century —nightclubs are closing and parties are withering.” Health and fitness become status markers and so on. An interesting suggestion towards the end is that because young people are being ‘safer’ than ever, things have gotten less intersting. I think that deserves its own link - below. [Substack]

THE DECLINE OF DEVIANCE

• There has been a LOT of discourse about ‘blanding’ and the ‘age of average’ over the last few years. This recent take covers a lot of the same territory but expands much further and provides a lot of examples and studies you can steal and a psycho-sociological grounding.
  

  “People are less weird than they used to be. That might sound odd, but data from every sector of society is pointing strongly in the same direction: we’re in a recession of mischief, a crisis of conventionality, and an epidemic of the mundane. Deviance is on the decline.”
  

  It unfavorably compares the originally illegal Wall St Bull to the corporate creation Fearless Girl. Its primary thesis is that rule breaking and living dangerously and being social and so on, being allowed to be WEIRD, not in a corporate sponsored straitjacket, is crucial for ART to be interesting.
  [Experimental History]

Rosie here, sliding into the bottom of the email with some art for you ;) Last year I picked up The Artist’s Way thinking it would be a perfect project for last summer, but as an adamant atheist, I just really couldn’t get past the God talk.

I did a free association exercise with the word God and came up with: churches, the patriarchy, abuse, pedophiles, indoctrination, religion, ONE belief that surpasses the rest, famine, poverty, allowed of the bad, tithes, creator of destruction, rules, fancy clothes, prayers, restriction, worthiness only if you obey, lies, boring. It’s no wonder I struggled with the book, because none of that exactly inspires creativity. However, in the past year, I’ve been really working on not letting the G word be so triggering to me. (I live in the South for part of the year so, yeah, it comes up more often than you might expect.

One of my AlAnon friends urged me to figure out my own articulation of God. She’s been in the program for 30+ years and said she felt like her own recovery was impaired because she couldn’t get around the language. And so, after 3 months of pondering, I came up with this idea of ‘the unfolding.’ The free association exercise with that word played out differently. I think of unfolding, and I think: the universe, nature, tides, flowers, the sun and the moon, the belief that you’re exactly where you should be, no outside influence is required on your path, paying attention to what’s around you, gratitude for what is, worthiness just from existing.

The Artist’s Way came back around to me this summer, and while I’m still not comfortable saying ‘I believe in God’ (because I don’t think I do?), I do believe there are forces out there bigger than me. I also believe we can take what works for us and leave the rest.

A big part of The Artist’s Way is an exercise called morning pages. In fact, you might be familiar with the concept or idea even if you’re not familiar with Julia Cameron’s book. Each morning, you write three pages, long hand, stream of consciousness style. The output isn’t designed to be art, it’s designed to release you from the internal, mental blocks. I’m on day 19 of morning pages, and while it’s certainly uncomfortable (I hate routine, she says, pouting), I’m realizing that there is growth coming from the discomfort.

Another big piece of the program is taking yourself on artist dates, where you nurture your inner artist. I am having the time of my life. Before this book, I had maybe done 5-7 water color paintings EVER. In fact, I was convinced that I didn't like water colors. But my best friend in Chattanooga loves them. (And sometimes we have to see someone else loving something for us to love it too.) In the last week, I’ve probably done 30. There’s something to the practice of ‘get everything out of your brain and then give yourself something creative to try.’

Here are two watercolor styles I’ve been playing around with. I’m sharing this to encourage you to make something of your own. Because art doesn’t have to have go in a gallery to make you feel good. I’m not over here trying to become a water color artist or looking to sell my work, I’m just enjoying the creative act of trying something new, the flow state that comes when I let myself enjoy nurturing my inner artist.

Thank you Mars, for showing me your ways, and for your endless encouragement. Thank you to Julia Cameron and The Artist’s Way for encouraging me to try something new, to be playful. Thank you to me for giving myself the time and space, for leaning in, and for having fun throughout it all.

This week, we’re writing to you from Chattanooga. We’re especially thankful for:

our Dads, forest e-bikes, M&S chocolates, the paddling pool, our soda stream, Polly&Greg&Oscar&Casper for hosting us, Andy&Tania&Kitty&Elsa, Dave&Frances&Willow&Elliot, Sam&Lizzie, Lucy&Rich, Matt, Katies T&B, Clare, Antonia&Ronan&Leo, Ludwig [BBC], Waitrose, walks & YOU!

Know someone who could use some inspiration in their inbox? Forward this email to them! We appreciate you spreading the word.

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It's called Genius Steals because we believe ideas are new combinations and that nothing can come from nothing [“Ex nihilo nihil fit”]. But copying is lazy. We believe the best way to innovate is to look at the best of that which came before and combine those elements into new solutions.

Co-Founders Faris & Rosie are award-winning strategists and creative directors, writers, consultants and public speakers who have been living on the road/runway since March 2013, working with companies all over the world. We have a distributed team ourselves, an accounting team is based in Tennessee where our company is registered, our admin extraordinaire is based in Playa del Carmen, and our collaborators are all over the world. Being nomadic allows us to go wherever clients need us to be, and to be inspired by the world in between.

Hit reply and let’s talk about how we might be able to work together :)