Gennaro Cuofano's Blog, page 270
August 10, 2017
Possibilianism: A new system of beliefs to make you resilient in life and business!
Be a Possibilian! What’s that?
With the increasing scientific discoveries, we’re all aware of Quantum theory although you might never be able to understand the mathematics behind it, you join those scientific theories blindly. There is one thing to keep in mind when it comes to life and business. Through knowledge, we can understand what we should not be doing. Rather than what we should be doing. In other words, adding on Leo Tolstoy quote,
all successful cases are alike; each failing case is failing in its own way!
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What does that mean? From failure, we should learn. That’s for sure. But also we should learn not to learn from success. Success is often resulting from external forces way beyond in control of the person or company that eventually turned out to be successful. In other words, there is no doubt that the person and company that is doing things right has more chances of becoming successful. But there’s not guarantee.
Based on that I want you to think like a Possibilian. Use what we learned from the past only negatively. In other words, you can learn only what not to do, rather than what to do. From there a universe of possibilities will open up, and you’ll be ready to see and take advantage of any business opportunity!
August 8, 2017
Will Voice Search Bring an End to SEO?
Short answer: It probably won’t. SEO like any other phenomenon is evolving. Yet evolution often isn’t necessarily disruptive but rather constructive. The new web that is sprouting up with voice search got built upon the traditional web, which backbone is represented by backlinks and keywords. Those things still matter. Other factors are coming into play. In this scenario, SEO is evolving into PASO
Long answer: Back in the 1990s Larry Page and Sergey Brin stumbled upon Google. Indeed, they noticed that references, which were used a lot in academic papers were a simple yet powerful way to rank those studies. In fact, references worked as peer reviews among academics. The most quoted papers were also the most relevant ones.
The quality and quantity of references determined the ranking of each paper. They figured if we manage to index the whole web and apply the same logic we can rank web pages rather than academic papers.
That is how PageRank was born. Yet instead of references, they used backlinks as a sort of “peer review.”
Backlinks were and still are the backbone of the web. On the other hand, the information ranked by search engines was supposed to get retrieved in some way. How? A set of words, called keywords were typed into Google’s search box to retrieve the relevant information. The web page with enough quality and quality of backlinks and with the right match of keywords could show to the users.
With voice search, things are quickly changing. How?
SEO is evolving. Into what? That is evolving into PASO. What’s that? I’ll let the Vocal Assistant reply,
Handpicked related articles and resources:
The PageRank Citation Ranking: Bringing Order to the Web
How AI Is Disrupting Content Marketing
5 Handy Tips on Google Assistant to Future Proof your SEO Strategy
Image by: openclipart.org/user-detail/hatalar205
August 7, 2017
Experiencing Self vs. Remembering Self | Why you often take weird decisions!
Imagine there are two brothers, John and Jack. Although brothers they are extremely different from each other. John lives in the present. He likes to taste things and enjoy them without worrying about past and future. Jack, instead is very anxious. He daydreams most of the time. Jack is either thinking about the past or anxious about the future.
Since John is very peaceful, he makes Jack decide about anything. The consequence though is that John ends up in the most awkward situations because of Jack. Nonetheless, John is always in charge!
John and Jack are not fictional characters but rather the two selves that live in your skull. John is the experiencing self. While Jack is the remembering self.
by Gennaro Cuofano
Now imagine you went on vacation on a beautiful island. You spent there two weeks of your life and each day you experienced there it was unbelievable. You felt increasingly tied to that place. Until unfortunately you have to leave! The coming year you have to reserve a vacation at the same location. Although when experiencing the vacation the longer, the better. When you remember it, you don’t feel the same. It is almost like your second week there was not as good. You end up reserving a shorter vacation. Yet once you get there, you realize how wrong you were. What’s going on?
Daniel Kahneman, author of Thinking, Fast and Slow (which also influenced the works of Nassim Nicholas Taleb) explains how we have two selves. We have an experiencing self and a remembering self. The experiencing self lives in the present. The remembering self is the one who makes decisions about the future. The problem is this remembering self only remembers things that are truly memorable. Thus, neglecting the rest. This principle is pretty important. Particularly in the business world. Imagine you have an important pitch. Investors are ready. All is great. The presentation goes pretty well if it wasn’t for the last minute technical issue, which made you stop for a couple of minutes. All of a sudden when investors think about your presentation their recollection is not as good as your pitch really was! All fault of the remembering self!
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August 2, 2017
Synthetic Happiness | Why failure won’t make you miserable!
Often we fear failure because we think we’ll be miserable when it hits us. There is one glitch to this belief. We happen to have a “psychological immune system” which creates a narrative for you even when things don’t work out as they were supposed to. In other words, imagine you want to become the wealthiest person in the world. Even though that won’t happen and you might end up being an average person, with a below average income. Your psychological immune system will create a narrative that will make your life look good. Thus, you’ll be happy anyway.
Psychologist Daniel Gilbert, also the author of Stumbling on happiness, explains that extremely well in this talk:
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Stoicism: A Recipe to Survive Through Hard-times in Business and Life
When for the first time I met Brunello Cucinelli. I asked him what book I should have read if I wanted to become more resilient in life and business. Guess what? He suggested Marcus Aurelius‘ Meditations!
Emperor Marcus Aurelius was a Roman Emperor which governed the empire during a time of significant uncertainty. Populations threatened the borders of the empire at the northern part of the empire. Emperor Marcus Aurelius wrote those thoughts as something he was doing for himself. To keep going and to release the struggle from years and years of perpetual war. From there this amazing literary work came out!
One of the quotes I like the most:
Everything we hear is an opinion, not a fact. Everything we see is a perspective, not the truth.
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Check out how to use Stoicism in life and business by author Timothy Ferris in this inspiring
July 26, 2017
Will AI replace writers?
In the last months, I joined WordLift. A SaaS company that created a tool that uses AI to automate part of the activities related to SEO. Within the activities that an online business does content creation is crucial. In fact, when you create content around a topic you’re also allowing search engines to understand and “interpret” the context on which your website sits.
Writing is still perceived as a human activity. Yet many business people pushed by profit maximization are actively looking for ways to improve the output of content creation while reducing the expenses connected to human resources.
Imagine a tool that can produce content 24/7. You won’t have to pay medical insurance, time off and better yet you will not have to deal with editorial teams to have that output!
So the question is “Will AI replace writers?”
The debate about AI and how it’ll take away our jobs is a widespread issue. Away from the buzz and hype what predictions can we make (if any) about the future of writing?
With the team at WordLift, we recently spoke with Samur Isma, the visionary behind freeyork.com, an online design magazine, which integrated AI in its workflow to produce relevant content for its audience.
As Samur confirmed in the interview:
writers that use a lot of statistics and numerical data have a bigger chance to be replaced by A.I.
and he continues
but nothing ever will substitute a well-written writer’s opinion on a subject.
Of course, there is much more in the interview. I extracted only part of what he said (you can find the whole article in the notes).
But Samur raised a crucial point. There’s no prediction we can make about writing in the next fifty years. But we can try to understand what’s the trend in the next decade.
There are certain activities in which machines are undoubtedly better than humans. One of those is data collection. Therefore, we can assume that in the next decade news financial journalist which only do the commentary of the stock exchange closing will eventually disappear. What are those people be doing?
Difficult to say. Yet one thing for sure. If you’re not adding value to the content based on your opinion, creativity, and perspective, then what you’re writing most probably will be prone to be automated in the next decade!
AI in the next decade might not be meant to replace humans. Instead, AI might serve as a replacement for dehumanizing activities.
Interview to Samur: How AI is Disrupting Web Writing
Article’s picture from www.stockunlimited.com/
