This week I had a quick work trip to Hong Kong, the first time I’ve been to the city since 2013. It was great to be back in the bustling hub and meet a lot of interesting prospects and customers. The first time I went I was looking at it through the lens of having been living in China, and it seemed so cosmopolitan and Western. Now after 10 years of living in Singapore, it seemed much more Chinese, perhaps it’s really changed as well. But in any case, I love the character Hong Kong has and wish I spent more time there. On to this week’s list!
Marketing lesson I learned in Hong Kong this week
I was concerned about this event because our sponsorship didn’t include a speaking slot. The reasoning was sound, it was a new market and event for us, so we didn’t want to overinvest. But I have always believed that if an event is worth sponsoring, it is worth paying more to speak at. Kind of like the old adage in poker that if it is worth calling, it’s worth raising. That allows you to establish thought leadership, drive traffic to the booth, and raise awareness even with people we don’t end up talking to on the day. We won’t know the final results for a while, but I was pleasantly surprised at the engagement at the booth, even without a speaking slot. I have a feeling that we will end up with fewer meetings booked, but a higher percentage of those meetings converting into opportunities. The people who came to our booth were more likely to have high intent with a real need for our solution.
What I learned from Jiujitsu this week
I dropped into my gym’s affiliation while I was in Hong Kong, the head coach there oversees our promotion and is the professor who gave me my blue belt officially. After I started training BJJ in 2018 I started making a point of training when I travel. It’s always a great way to meet locals and experience a different style of coaching and rolling. I haven’t had a chance to do so on my last few trips due to other priorities and obligations, so even though this was a short trip and the drop-in fee was high I made sure to train one evening. Once again I was reminded that grappling is a universal language, it took me a year or more of training. But once you get to a certain point, it doesn’t matter where you go, once you start learning a move or rolling with someone you can speak to someone through jiujitsu no matter what. This is one of the things I love about jiujitsu and keeps me training, even when it gets tough and I don’t see myself improving.
Best thing I watched this weekend
If you’ve seen his content (he’s everywhere so I’m guessing most people in business have), Gary Vaynerchuck can be a polarizing figure. Some people might say he’s a loudmouth charlatan who built his career on saying controversial or obvious stuff really loudly, other people might say he is a guru who is telling it like it is and the naysayers are just jealous. I fall somewhere in the middle. He’s a great speaker, he practices what he preaches, and he’s built a huge empire that can’t be denied. In this video, he is speaking at ITC Vegas, a conference for the insurance industry, and touting the potential of LinkedIn. In a room full of salespeople he talks about how important marketing is and how good branding trumps sales (marketing – customers come to you, sales – you go to them). Personal branding is going to continue to grow in importance for the success of sales teams and startups of all kinds, people buy from people, not companies. I.e. salespeople should be marketing themselves, and the marketing team should be helping them.
What I read this weekend
I’ve read most of Robert Greene’s books, including “The 48 Laws of Power” and “Seduction”. While I enjoyed those books and took some lessons from them, they felt too grand, as if everyone could or would want to be the next Napolean or Cassanova. I finally got around to reading “Mastery” and it struck me much closer to home because we are all on a journey and we all have crafts that we are working on improving. The way he writes with anecdotes of historical figures is very powerful and easy to read and the theme of mastery is easier and more universally desirable to put into practice. We’ve all heard of the 10,000-hour rule by now, and this book gives strategies and examples to put that rule into practice even when there are obstacles in the way, or someone doesn’t even know what they want to master yet.
Most important study about Singapore I saw this weekend
A recent study found that 36 percent of workers in Singapore have a high mental health risk. Major contributors to this mark include a lack of personal relationships at work, biased rewards and recognition from their company, and high expectations at their jobs. For example, 42% of workers rated expectations of them at work to be a bit too demanding or worse. Overall Singapore’s mental health index is in the “strained” zone, and although it has very slightly improved since last year, it is still behind countries such as the US, Canada, Australia, and the UK. Although there’s still a long way to go, the awareness of mental health and work-life balance is growing in Singapore and I hope that trend continues.
Best podcast I listened to this weekend
The Stanford Graduate School of Business podcast “Think Fast, Talk Smart” had an interesting episode on optimal LLM usage. They performed a blind study on an ideation exercise with one set of participants utilizing AI and another set just using their brains. They found that the ideas that were supplemented with AI usage were rated higher quality, but the participants thought the ideas weren’t as good. The other interesting point in the podcast makes is that to get high-quality, productive results using LLMs, we need to take a conversational, iterative approach rather than treating it as a one-and-done magic 8-ball. The best example they gave was telling the AI to ask you a series of questions to better understand your goals and help define the prompt. This produces better results, allowing you to not only get answers from the AI, but also dig deeper into your own knowledge and creativity to get the best work done.
Have a great week everyone!
Note: My goal is to eventually move this newsletter to email format which will land in your inbox every Sunday evening (Singapore time). Subscribe here if you want to receive this by email after I make the change.