Steve Davis
The Ghost in the Bottle: Why Your Best Prospects Might Be Hitting a Dead End
We often say you can’t read the label from inside the bottle. Today, I had to take my own advice. While interrogating our own analytics, I found something startling. Our most “engaging” content, the piece people were spending minutes reading,…
Why You Can’t Read the Label from Inside the Bottle
There’s an old saying in marketing: “It’s impossible to read the label when you’re sitting inside the bottle.” As a business owner, you are too close to your own work. You know the nuances, the history, and the effort. But…
What’s It Like to Be One of Your Customers? The Theory of Mind That Changes Everything
Here’s what my electrician never wondered: What’s it like to be one of my customers? He never imagined the anxiety of trusting someone with three thousand dollars. The frustration of rearranging schedules around his promises. The cascading disruption when he…
If You Wouldn’t Drink Recycled Sewage, Why Would You Use Bad AI Online? The Water Fountain Problem
Picture this scene. Office workers gather around the water fountain. Filling their cups. Drinking deeply. Walking to the bathroom. Everything they consume and expel cycles back through the same closed system. Filtered. Recycled. Round and round. Nothing fresh enters. That’s…
S07E09 – Emergence: Why You Do The Things You Do
Your mind works like water flowing through channels in a stream, which explains why sometimes the hardest marketing challenges need the simplest solutions. Paul Taylor shows us why hardiness beats resilience every time, through four characteristics that separate the business…
S07E08 – May The Life Forces Be With You
From minimum chips and onstage kisses to the biological drivers that make us click buy, we explore why fond memories boost productivity while rage baiting destroys it, and why Drew Eric Whitman’s eight life forces might be the marketing framework…
S07E07 – Do You Solve Problems Fast Or Slow?
From mathematician David Bessis’s meditation on mathematical intuition to Edward de Bono’s 1982 promise of simple computing, we explore why your business problems might need slower thinking than your instincts allow. Mathematician David Bessis claims we need system three thinking,…
S07E06 – Functioning With Less Effort
The path to greater mental bandwidth isn’t doing more with multitasking magic but achieving unconscious competence that frees your mind for what truly matters. From Christopher Hitchens’ reflections on truth-telling to the paramedic’s competency cycle, discover why mastering basics creates…
S07E05 – Avoiding The Echo Of Emptiness
From Tim Ferriss’s revelation that systems beat willpower to ChatGPT’s excruciating conversation with itself, we discover why the most disciplined approach involves building structures that remove the need for heroic daily effort. Tim Ferriss explains why he’s become less disciplined…
S07E04 – What Do You Know, What Don’t You Know, And What Do You Think?
From Hunter S. Thompson’s scathing Nixon obituary to an intelligence officer’s clarity framework, we explore how separating facts from opinions might save us from both political contortions and peanut butter cowboys. Steve opens with a morbid but revealing question about…