Hi friends,

Greetings from Austin!

I'm in the best writing groove I've had in years. Something about my recent trip to France injected me with a creative spirit that'd been missing from my work. In the next few weeks, I'll be publishing essays about Paris, Austin, Personal Monopolies, and also, an updated version of my Ultimate Guide to Writing Online.

Here's what I want to share this week:

1. ​How Learning Happens: The educational establishment undervalues the importance of inspiration because teachers are, almost by definition, interested in the subjects they teach. Thus, they forget to make students excited about the subject matter. In this essay, I pull from some of history's best teachers (such as Richard Feynman), to show how they kept students so engaged. ​
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2. Write of Passage Newsletter: We're hitting stride with our weekly newsletter on the craft of online writing. To begin, we've focused on how to build a Personal Monopoly. This week's newsletter will be about how to "Imitate, then Innovate". Sign up here to read the upcoming edition. ​
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3. How to Build a Personal Monopoly: Speaking of Personal Monopolies, I recorded a YouTube workshop about how writing online can help you build one.

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Coolest Things I Learned This Week

Celebrity advertisements are everywhere, but it wasn't always this way. To understand why things changed, let's look at the philosophy of René Girard.

Advertisements used to be product-driven:

For example, this old ad for Lipton focuses on the quality of their tea. It advertises the product's convenience and popularity. Instead of focusing on celebrities like modern ads, the image focuses on convenience, quality, and happy customers.

Today's ads are increasingly personality-driven:

Gatorade was a pioneer here. The "Be Like Mike" advertisements didn't promote tangible factors like hydration or electrolytes. Instead, the drink flew off supermarket shelves because it was associated with Michael Jordan.

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Changing Ads

Why have advertisements changed so much?

Marketing is the creation of desire at scale. Girard says that people don't have logical justifications for their desires. They don't know what they desire. Instead, they look at what others desire and adopt those desires as their own.

Celebrity ads shape our desires without our awareness. The combination of fame and status is tinder for viral products. In my own life, I remember walking into a store and seeing a T-shirt that looked ugly and uncomfortable. Yuck! Then I walked up to it, realized it was Kanye West's brand, and immediately wanted one.

Girard would say Kanye and Gatorade's brands promise prestige. We care less about the intrinsic value of an object than the people it's associated with, and what owning the object says about us.

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We are Imitative Animals

Advertisers exploit our imitative programming.

Thomas Jefferson knew this, and wrote: "Man is an imitative animal. This quality is the germ of all education in him. From his cradle to his grave he is learning to do what he sees others do."

Did ads change because marketers read Girard?

I don't think so. Influencer marketing is downstream from the invention of mass media which increased the reach of celebrities, and high-quality printers which made faces more vivid on the page. But if Girard's right, we should expect marketers to discover his principles.

Influencer marketing works because people don't want to be weird. It's a little paradoxical, but good ads simultaneously tell us two things: (1) you won't be a total weirdo if you buy this product because others are using it too, and (2) this product will make you stand out from everybody else.

Ultimately, Girard's philosophy inverts our understanding of psychology.

He challenges the notion that we're rational, utility-maximizing creatures with an authentic core of desires. Instead, he says that we learn what to value by imitating our peers. Though ideas like homo economicus can be useful, they don't take ideas like pride, envy, status, and Mimetic rivalry into account. But these traits should underpin the intellectual life of any modern advertiser.

Oh, and one more thing: If you'd like to learn more about Girard's philosophy, check out this lecture I hosted with Johnathan Bi about his ideas. In less than two hours, we provide an accessible (yet comprehensive!) summary of his ideas and show how they apply to the world of advertising.

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Photo of the Week

Reflecting on my trip to France, its cultural pride shows up the most in their food.

Every morning in Paris was highlighted by a trip to a Boulangerie (the French word for bakery). Each croissant was the most delicious one I’d ever tasted. Often, I’d cave and order a pastry too. With all the bakeries in town (and a lack of gyms), it’s a mystery how Parisians are so skinny. I have some theories.

First, the laws. There are steep soda taxes and it’s illegal to sell unlimited soda refills in France. Second, you don’t see giant shelves of corn-based snacks (Pringles, Fritos, and Doritos) like you do in America. Third, high-quality food is hard to binge, even when it’s filled with sugar. Though chocolate mousse was my go-to pastry, it was so rich that I was satiated after just a few bites. I couldn’t have binged it, no matter how hard I tried (unlike most American desserts!).

Also, you can tell a lot about a culture by where they zoom into language. For example, the Eskimos have an unusually high number of words for snow because they are such a snow surrounded culture. They have extremely precise words for snow, such as aput (for snow on the ground), qana (for falling snow), piqsirpoq (for drifting snow), and qimuqsuq (for a snowdrift).

The French zoom into names of restaurants — they have bistros and bouchons and boulangeries and brasseries and cafés and crêperies and patisseries.