‘That one crazy trick that actually works’ or ‘the greatest kept secret that no one is talking about’….This world of HACKS is absolutely killing us.
These headlines should sound scary familiar and most likely triggering for some.
Hacks are nothing but shortcuts that have been rebranded.
Shortcuts got a bad reputation (and for good reason), they generally dont produce the meaningful or long-lasting results we are desiring when we choose to try a shortcut.
Shortcuts got the 2010’s Queer Eye makeover and are now new and improved and have reemerged rebranded as ‘Hacks’. Hacks are sexy and sleek sounding. They are the Telsa of laziness and the Splenda of success.
The question that we should be asking ourselves is whether its called a shortcut or a hack, why we keep falling for it?
The reason is most likely because evolutionarily we are hard-wired to want to do the least amount of work as possible to get the greatest reward.
Evolution didn't always favor the hardest working members of our species, it favored the most effective, which many times could mean shortcuts and luck.
This explains why our brain's pleasure centers go off like fireworks when we eat something sugary and fatty. Our mouths and brains are collectively celebrating getting a massive dose of life-sustaining calories, which are very valuable when food was scarce and we hadn't mastered modern farming and food processing. Fast forward to 2020, where our brain's pleasure centers are being pressed like a meth-head with OCD by every potential source in our lives.
We’ve known this about fast food, soft drinks for a long time. Yet, many people are still shocked and surprised when it is exposed that unnatural food items like Doritos have been specifically engineered and targeted at our brain's pleasure centers for maximum addiction. Your brain is being used against you, you’re being hacked.
Its not just food, every interaction with your smartphone is artfully crafted for this purpose to keep you coming back more and more. We are spending more time than ever on our smartphones with a large amount of that time on social media and games and they are exploiting us in new and different ways that ever before.
Largely social media plays on our dopamine responses to positive and successful social interactions. An evolutionary feature of our brain to build close social ties amongst tribes of people for safety and security, but is now being exposed to a global audience of trolls and advertisers.
For example, Facebook (who also owns Instagram) builds its algorithm to withhold notifications of likes and comments, so that you receive them in large doses, rather than spread out. This produces the most amount of dopamine possible and gets the most enjoyment out of their product. It's no coincidence that it’s also what makes it the most addictive.
Not all of this is bad, it can be used for good as well. Apps like Luminosity and Calm are both healthful ways of creating these pleasurable responses, but…you are still being sucked into your phone. So, IMHO, its sort of a wash.
This ‘blame gun’ isn’t just pointed at the consumers goods and experiences, but also goes for business applications as well.
The business of ‘hacking’ takes on the same shortcut mentality to try and produce the largest result.
If you google ‘Marketing Hacks’ you’ll receive 74 MILLION results.
If you google “Sales Hacks” you’ll receive 73 Million results.
If you google “Productivity Hacks” you’ll receive 19 Million results.
If you ever want to waste a lot of time and be overwhelmed with mediocre advice, this is a great place to start. Even if these do work, like a drug dealer giving away the first hit for free, you’re hooked and keep coming back for more.
When you buy into someone else’s ‘hacks’ or the concept of hacks as an idea, you're outsourcing your own learnings and ability to discover new things. Discovery is a process, and just googling “marketing hacks” does not count.
Hacking only serves to give a quick hit of satisfaction, followed by an immediate desperate need for another.
When you give in to these, its not your fault. You’re hard-wired to try and maximize your time and effort. Our brains are being used against us. We just need to be smarter and more aware that smart work is more valuable than hard work and hacks are neither.
When you buy into hacks, you’re no longer the hacker, You’re the one being hacked.
