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The Monday Morning Memo

“There are things in life where the value is precisely in the inefficiency, in the time spent, in the pain endured, in the effort you have to invest.

Most of you, if you were students, wrote essays or something like that as undergraduates, right? Fairly confident to say that nobody’s actually kept them? Nobody re-reads them. In fact, the essays you wrote are totally worthless.

But the value wasn’t in the essay. What’s valuable is the effort you had to put in to produce the essay. Now, what AI essays do is they shortcut from the request to the delivery of the finished good and bypass the very part of the journey which is actually valuable—the time and effort you invest in constructing the essay in the first place.

Similarly, the valuable part of advertising is, to some extent, the process of producing it, not the advertising itself. Because it forces you to ask questions about a business which people mostly never get around to asking: What do we stand for? What’s our function? Who do we appeal to? Who’s our target audience? How do we present ourselves? How do we differentiate ourselves? How do we make ourselves look different and feel valuable to the people who encounter us?”

– Rory Sutherland,
Behavioral Scientist

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Random Quote:

“The world is a book, and those who do not travel read only one page.”

- Attributed to St. Augustine in Select Proverbs of All Nations (1824) p. 216, and later as, “The World is a book, and those who do not travel read only a page”, as quoted in 20,000 Quips & Quotes (1995) by Evan Esar, p. 822. This quote has not been located in Augustine’s writings, and may be a variant translation of an expression found in Le Cosmopolite (1753) by Fougeret de Monbron: “The universe is a sort of book, whose first page one has read when one has seen only one’s own country.” Father Horton found the quote suspect for two reasons: (1.) St. Augustine was not terribly well-travelled himself. (2.) It doesn’t sound like him. He didn’t use metaphors much. This entire investigation was triggered by Larry Durrell's use of the quote and attributing it to Saint Augustine while writing a letter written in Paris in Season 4, Episode 3 of the television series, "The Durrells in Corfu." A long explanation for such a short quote, huh?

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