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“Strategic Insights for Digital Entrepreneurs Who Think Differently.”
This is not a photo of the human brain, but it might as well be.
What it actually is, is a black polypore mushroom. A massive, three-foot-wide specimen I stumbled on here our farm this week.
This remarkable find should’ve been enough for me.
But I found myself wishing I had stumbled upon maitake instead (aka “hen-of-the-woods”), a much more desirable polypore lookalike.
For our screwed-up human brain, reality is seemingly never enough.
We’re always thinking beyond.
In fact…
According to a study out of Harvard run by two psychologists named Matthew Killingsworth and Daniel Gilbert, we spend roughly 47% of our waking lives thinking about something other than what we’re actually doing.1
And when it comes to designing what you sell and how you market to the world, understanding this quirk about the human brain has massive real-world implications.
Let me explain…
1 | Windows Into Other Worlds
We have always sought windows into other worlds.
Earlier this week, I was having a conversation with David Sax, author of The Revenge of Analog about this very phenomenon.
(We were connecting because David’s work and research are cited in my upcoming book, Return to Real.)
As human beings, we are simply not satisfied with the volume of reality we can experience in the physical, analog world around us.
And as a result, we are constantly seeking the novelty of worlds beyond.
For hundreds of years, we satisfied that craving through books. Then radio. Then television. And today through endless short-form content across the internet.
But here’s what I find fascinating about all this:
2 | Novelty Seekers vs. Energy Misers
For thousands of years, from the first oral story told around a fire all the way to radio, our window into other worlds was capped at roughly 39 bits per second.2
(That is the rate at which information is conveyed through human speech.)
But then we got TV and everything changed.
All at once, we had sound and color and motion pouring in together, and the rate of information transfer exploded to over 1 million bits per second.
And today?
The internet that feeds this insatiable appetite runs at over 100x that, at 100 million bits per second.
Reading requires work. And it’s slow. But the endless scroll of short-form video content across the internet is the equivalent of the people-mover at the airport.
Biologically speaking, we are both relentless novelty seekers and shameless energy misers.
Our brains are wired so that anything new hands us a small hit of reward all on its own, just for being new. We are literally built to go chasing the new and novel.
(e.g. Hey, have you tried that new restaurant??)
At the same time, we also evolved in a world where food was scarce and every last calorie mattered. So we’re also wired to get what we want using the least amount of effort we can get away with.
(e.g. Do you want to go out or should we just order takeout??)
And this creates a uniquely interesting dilemma…
3 | Feature, Flaw, Or Both?
It would be easy to look at all this — (yes I used an em-dash, deal with it) — at the wandering mind and restlessness and constant low-grade wishing for something else and simply call it a flaw. A bug in human design.
But it’s not a bug at all.
Because this very same mental machinery that makes our mind wander is the very thing that gives us the urge to plan, create, invent, and dream.
It just happens to come at an emotional cost.
The very same wiring that leaves us forever dissatisfied is the same wiring that built the entire world we’re living in, both digital and analog.
If the internet feeds us a digital reality at 100 million bits per second…
What’s the “bit rate” of analog reality around us?
Scientists at Caltech in a study titled “The Unbearable Slowness of Being” estimate that our sensory systems take in physical reality around us at roughly 1 billion bits per second.3
Yes, that’s a billion bits per second (with a “b”).
And yet somehow that’s still not enough.
4 | So Here’s What We’re All Really Craving.
What we’re all actually after is a “real”, but real that’s… elsewhere.
At only 1/10th the bitrate of analog reality, the digital world is a proxy for what we’re really after. The methadone equivalent to our addiction to anywhere but here.
And where this shows up most…
Is in our modern obsession with travel.
Think about how often travel is the very first thing we reach for in polite conversation:
“Got any trips coming up?”
“Traveling anywhere fun this summer?”
“Going away for the holidays this year?”
We want to see the REAL world, and maybe even more than that, we want to show the world to the people we love.
(But if we’re honest, most of all, we want to tell the world where we’ve been…)
Travel has quietly become both the highest-status way we spend our money and, for a great many households, the single largest line item in their annual budget.
And the numbers bear this out:
Globally, travel is now an $11.7 Trillion industry, responsible for 10.3% of global GDP.4
And despite access to 4K video giving us a window into virtually any place on the planet for free…
People are willing to pay handsomely to (say they got to) experience the REAL thing.
So, what’s the marketing lesson in all of this??
Well, there are many…
But I’ll focus on this one here:
5 | The Novelty-Predictability Paradox
Regardless of how AI plays out…
Whether we see the jobpocalypse / robot overlord takeover that some are predicting, or it’s all just a giant Y2K-style head fake (or one of a million shades of gray in between…)
Human demand for the new and novel isn’t going anywhere. The itch is one that will never get fully scratched.
Meaning, there is always going to be opportunity.
The challenge you’re up against isn’t demand (which is bottomless), it’s supply. There is just so much slop (and more is coming), that it’s never been harder for you to stand out with what you sell.
But here’s one thing to remind yourself of today:
As marketers, we crave predictability. We want to run the same webinar, to the same funnel, behind the same ads, every week, forever.
But the market does not respond to predictability. It responds to novelty. It rewards you when you show up in a way it has not already been seen a thousand times.
AND…
When you’re using the same AI models everyone else is using to do your writing / editing / thought-partnering / thinking / marketing strategy / vibecoded webdesign …
Yeah, YOUR stuff is going to look and sound like everybody else’s, and it sure as heck ain’t gonna get the job done.
So what that means is this:
6 | You’ve Got Two Options.
If you used to be a circle in a sea of squares, AI has officially copied that circle a million times over, and now you are drowning in a sea of circles.
You need to EVOLVE.
Your options are…
A. Zig when they Zag. In other words, go back to being a square. Maybe what’s old becomes new again, and that’s enough to stand out (for now).
Or…
B. Become a Category of One. Leave the water entirely and build a blue ocean, a category nobody else is swimming in that you and you alone own.
Which brings me to…
7 | A New Opportunity on the Horizon.
I know some people are wondering, Ryan, when the heck is your darn book coming out already??
The answer is very soon.
In fact, pre-orders will be opening within the next couple weeks.
And as part of that pre-order launch…
I’m putting together something really special for anyone who would like my personal help nailing down your Category of One positioning.
A very limited bonus that I’ll be making available to a limited number of readers who pre-order a certain number of books.
I *will* have to limit this (after all, there is only one of me.)
And I have a feeling this opportunity is going to go fast.
So if you want to make sure you get notified as soon as this opens up, you want to be sure to add your name to the priority notification list at ReturnToRealBook.com.
Make sense?
Okay, great.
* * *
I’m going to leave you with that for today.
After all, as an aspiring mycologist, I’ve got some mushrooms to be huntin’ for.
Remember: Novelty vs. Predictability.
You want one thing. Your market wants the other.
Ignore at your peril.
Have a great rest of your weekend…
Remember to hug the ones you love…
And until next week,
Ryan :-)
Killingsworth, M. A., & Gilbert, D. T. (2010). A Wandering Mind Is an Unhappy Mind. Science, 330(6006), 932.
Coupé, C., Oh, Y. M., Dediu, D., & Pellegrino, F. (2019). Different languages, similar encoding efficiency: Comparable information rates across the human communicative niche. Science Advances, 5(9), eaaw2594.
Zheng, J., & Meister, M. (2024). The Unbearable Slowness of Being: Why do we live at 10 bits/s? Neuron, 112(24), 3954–3968.
World Travel & Tourism Council, Travel & Tourism Economic Impact 2025 (WTTC, 2025).
I find that the more unpleasant an environment is, the more people are in their phones escaping. Ie on a commuter train in NYC vs in nature.
Or in smog filled Manila Philippines traffic where everyone is in TikTok versus Kyoto where people enjoy the streets. Likewise, oppressively societally atomizing Chinese cities versus rural China
"The methadone equivalent to our addiction to anywhere but here."
BARS.