Ad Guys & Co by Ulysses Wang

02/10/2026

A researcher once asked university students to wear a deliberately embarrassing t-shirt into a room full of strangers, then guess what percentage of people in that room would remember it.
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Students estimated around fifty percent. The actual number was closer to twenty percent, and most of those people had already forgotten the detail within minutes. 👕
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This is the spotlight effect, and it explains a huge amount of unnecessary anxiety in working life.
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We consistently overestimate how much other people notice, judge, and remember our mistakes, our appearance, and our small missteps, because we're the only person experiencing our own moment from the inside.
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Think about the last time you fumbled a word in a presentation, sent an email with a typo to a client, or wore something slightly wrong for the occasion.
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In the moment it can feel like the single most memorable thing that happened all day.
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Everyone else in that room, however, was busy running their own internal monologue about their own perceived mistakes, their own to do list, their own worries about what they said five minutes earlier. Nobody had the spare attention to fully register yours. 🧠
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This matters enormously for anyone who avoids visibility because of imagined judgement.
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✳️ The person who won't post on LinkedIn because they're convinced everyone will scrutinise every word.
✳️ The presenter who over rehearses out of fear that one stumble will define how the whole room remembers them.
✳️ The founder who delays launching because they're picturing an audience paying far closer attention than any audience actually does.
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None of this means nobody notices anything, obviously feedback and impressions do matter.
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It simply means the intensity of scrutiny we imagine is almost always inflated compared to reality, because we're the only one carrying the full weight of our own self consciousness into the room.
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What's something you've been holding back because you're overestimating how closely people are watching? 🤔
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̇ng

30/09/2026

A client once asked why none of their five blog posts about the exact same topic were ranking well, even though each one was genuinely well written.
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The answer wasn't quality. It was that all five pages were quietly fighting each other for the same search result, and Google couldn't decide which one deserved to win. 🥊
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This is content cannibalisation, and it's more common than most businesses realise, especially ones that have been publishing consistently for years without ever auditing what already exists.
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Someone writes a guide on a topic in year one. A different team member, unaware it exists, writes a very similar guide in year three because it seemed like a good idea and nobody checked first. Now two pages on the same domain are competing for the identical search intent. 🔍
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Google's algorithm doesn't reward you for having more pages about a topic.
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It tries to work out which single page best answers a given query, and when several pages on your own site look equally relevant, it often ends up splitting authority between them rather than concentrating it behind one strong result.
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The end result is frequently that none of the pages rank as well as one consolidated page would have.
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The signs are usually visible once you know to look.
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🔅 Search Console showing two or three of your own URLs appearing for the same query on different days.
🔅 Rankings for a topic that seem to fluctuate wildly between pages rather than settling.
🔅 Internal links scattered across old and new content pointing to different versions of essentially the same answer.
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The fix isn't always deleting content, though sometimes that's exactly right.
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Often it's consolidating the strongest ideas from multiple pages into one authoritative version, then redirecting the weaker pages towards it so the accumulated backlinks and relevance transfer across rather than staying split.
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Doing this quietly turns three mediocre rankings into one genuinely strong one.
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Before publishing your next piece, it's worth checking whether you're actually filling a gap or just about to compete with yourself. 🎯
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29/09/2026

If you are thinking of buying reviews to boost your business profile, then don't. If you have already bought reviews, then contact the person you bought from to remove them. Fake reviews hurt your business more than real negative reviews.

CNA found six businesses that have commissioned two suppliers to solicit fake reviews to improve their online presence, including a law firm, funeral home and a private investigator.

28/09/2026

Two colleagues sit in the same meeting.
One walks out convinced a decision has been quietly reversed behind their back.
The other walks out thinking everything went smoothly and nothing unusual happened at all. Same room, same words spoken, wildly different conclusions. 🪜
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This gap has a name in organisational psychology.
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The ladder of inference, first described by Chris Argyris.
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The idea is that between an actual observable event and the belief we form about it, our minds climb through several invisible rungs, usually in a fraction of a second, without ever noticing we've climbed at all.
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It starts with the raw data available, which is already filtered by whatever we happen to be paying attention to in that moment. From there we add meaning based on our own cultural and personal assumptions.
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Then we make further assumptions based on that meaning. Then we draw a conclusion, form a belief about the situation, and finally take action based on that belief.
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The colleague who noticed the manager glance at their phone during someone else's point interpreted that as dismissiveness, built a belief about being sidelined, and left the meeting already drafting a defensive email. 📊
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The dangerous part is that once we're standing at the top of the ladder, the belief feels like plain fact rather than one possible interpretation among several.
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We rarely climb back down to check which rung we actually built our conclusion on, because by the time we notice we're upset or certain, the climbing already happened automatically.
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The practical fix is learning to name your own rung out loud before reacting to it.
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Instead of saying "You clearly don't rate my work," try "I noticed you moved on quickly from my point, and I found myself assuming that meant something. Is that fair?"
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This single sentence separates the observable data from the story built on top of it, and gives the other person a chance to correct a conclusion before it hardens into resentment.
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What's a belief you're currently holding about someone that you've never actually checked against the facts? 🤔
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26/09/2026

Researchers once had two groups build the exact same Ikea storage box.
One group assembled it themselves, the other received it fully built.
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Both groups were then asked how much they'd pay for it.
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The group who built it themselves valued it nearly twice as highly as the group who didn't, even though the finished product was identical. 🔧
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This is the Ikea effect, and it reveals something slightly uncomfortable about how we assign value to things.
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We don't just value outcomes. We value the effort we personally invested to reach them, often disproportionately to what that effort actually improved.
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This shows up well beyond flat pack furniture.
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Meal kit companies thrive on this exact principle, selling pre measured ingredients that customers then cook themselves, even though a fully prepared meal would take less effort to eat.
The cooking itself becomes part of what makes the meal feel worth the price.
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Software onboarding flows that ask users to build their own dashboard from scratch, rather than handing over a finished template, create stronger attachment precisely because the user made choices along the way.
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Even a customised coffee order, built up option by option, tends to feel more personally satisfying than the identical drink handed over as a fixed menu item. ☕
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The mechanism behind this isn't really about the final product at all. It's about identity and ownership.
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Once you've invested effort into something, admitting it wasn't worth much would mean admitting your own effort wasn't worth much either. So the mind quietly inflates the value to protect that investment.
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For anyone building products, courses, or services, this suggests something worth testing.
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A small amount of guided customisation, even something as simple as letting a customer choose their own bundle or name their own plan, can build more perceived value than simply handing over the polished, finished version.
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People don't just want the result. They want to feel like they had a hand in creating it. 🧠
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24/09/2026

A founder once proudly told me they'd switched off Google Ads on their own brand name because it felt like paying for clicks they'd get for free anyway.
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Their organic listing ranked first, so why hand money to Google for something already theirs. Two months later their branded traffic had dropped, and a competitor's ad was sitting right above their organic result. 📉
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This is one of the most persistent myths in paid search.
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Ranking first organically for your own brand name feels like proof you don't need to bid on it too. In practice, that gap is exactly where competitors love to sit, bidding on your brand name so their ad appears above your organic listing the moment someone searches for you by name. 🎯
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The economics make this an easy decision more often than people assume.
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Bidding on your own brand keyword is usually the cheapest click you'll ever buy in that account, because Google rewards highly relevant ads with low cost per click. You're not competing against yourself for the same eyeballs, you're occupying more of the page.
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An ad plus an organic listing plus a sitelinks extension takes up serious visual real estate that a single organic result never could. 👀
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There's also a defensive layer worth naming honestly. If a competitor, an affiliate, or even a reseller starts bidding on your brand, the absence of your own ad leaves that top slot completely open for them to claim.
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Watching someone else's message be the first thing a person sees when searching for your own company name is a genuinely expensive mistake to discover late, often after weeks of quietly leaking enquiries to someone else's business.
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None of this means brand bidding deserves the biggest slice of a budget. It usually needs very little spend to dominate the position, precisely because the relevance score is so high.
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The mistake isn't spending too much here, it's assuming this space doesn't need defending at all.
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Have you actually checked who shows up when someone searches your brand name right now? 🔍
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22/09/2026

Ask anyone how long a project will take and they'll give you a number that feels reasonable.
Ask them how long the last three similar projects actually took and the answer is always longer than planned.
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Somehow this pattern never quite updates the next estimate. 📆
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This is the planning fallacy, first named by researchers studying why people consistently underestimate how long tasks will take, even when they have direct evidence from their own past experience showing otherwise.
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It's not a lack of intelligence or effort. It's a very specific blind spot in how we think about the future.
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When we estimate a task, we tend to imagine the best case version of it unfolding smoothly. No interruptions, no unexpected feedback rounds, no software update breaking something at the worst moment, no client going quiet for a week right when you need a decision.
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The mental model is the plan working exactly as intended, because that's simply easier to picture than the specific ways it might not. 🧩
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Past failures don't fix this because we tend to explain them away as unusual circumstances rather than the normal pattern.
That client delay was a one off.
That technical issue won't happen again.
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Each project gets treated as a fresh case, disconnected from the messy history of every project before it, so the same optimism resets and the same gap between plan and reality quietly reappears. 🔁
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The most reliable fix isn't trying harder to estimate accurately in the moment. It's building in a buffer based on actual historical data rather than gut feeling, and deliberately asking what's gone wrong on similar projects before, rather than just how long the ideal version would take.
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Some teams find it useful to have someone outside the project give the estimate, since they're not caught up in the optimism of finally seeing it done. Comparing the new task to the closest real example from the past tends to produce far more honest numbers.
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Deadlines built on hope instead of history tend to break in exactly the same predictable ways every time. 🎯
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20/09/2026

Someone asked me recently how long it takes to write one of these posts, assuming the answer would be something like twenty minutes with a coffee.
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The honest answer is closer to an hour, sometimes more, and most of that time isn't spent writing at all. It's spent deciding what's actually worth saying. ✍️
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The process usually starts with a concept I've been turning over for a while, something I've noticed in a client conversation, a training session, or occasionally an argument I've had with myself about whether an idea holds up.
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Then comes the part nobody sees, which is checking whether the concept is genuinely useful or just sounds clever.
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Plenty of ideas get cut at this stage because they're interesting in theory but don't actually change how someone would act on a Monday morning. 🔍
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After that it's structure. Where does the hook sit, what's the one thing someone should walk away remembering, and does the ending earn its place rather than just wrapping things up for the sake of it.
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Only once that skeleton feels solid does the actual writing happen, and even then it usually gets rewritten two or three times because the first version tends to sound like I'm explaining something rather than genuinely sharing it.
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What I've learned doing this consistently is that the posts people respond to most aren't the ones with the cleverest hook or the most polished language.
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They're the ones where I clearly cared about whether the idea was true and useful, not just whether it performed well. Readers can tell the difference even if they couldn't explain how. 🌱
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There's a temptation in content creation to make the process look effortless, as if ideas simply arrive fully formed. They don't. Most of what ends up published is the result of discarding several less interesting versions first.
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Consistency isn't really about discipline in the way people imagine. It's about building a process you trust enough to lean on when the good ideas aren't showing up on demand, and shipping the work anyway. 🎯
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18/09/2026

A researcher once ran a simple experiment.
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One group tapped out the rhythm of a well known song on a table, then guessed how many listeners would recognise it.
They predicted around fifty percent. The actual number was closer to three percent.
The tappers could hear the melody perfectly in their heads. The listeners just heard tapping. 🥁
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This gap has a name. The curse of knowledge. Once you know something, it becomes almost impossible to imagine not knowing it, and that makes explaining it to someone else far harder than it should be.
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It shows up everywhere in working life, especially anywhere teaching or explaining is involved.
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🔅 The senior colleague who gives a three sentence brief because the steps feel obvious to them, forgetting the newer team member has none of the surrounding context.
🔅 The founder pitching their product using internal jargon that took months to become second nature, wondering why investors look confused.
🔅 The teacher who skips a foundational step because it's been automatic for so long they've forgotten it was ever difficult. 📚
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The tricky part is this bias is invisible from the inside.
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You can't simply try harder to notice your own blind spots, because the whole problem is that the missing context doesn't feel missing to you. It feels complete.
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A few things genuinely help.
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🔅 Explain concepts using the language a beginner would use, not the shorthand experts default to once something becomes automatic.
🔅 Ask someone unfamiliar with the topic to read your explanation before it goes out, and watch exactly where their face changes.
🔅 Build in the step you're tempted to skip because it feels too obvious to mention, since that's usually the exact step someone else needed. 🎯
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This matters enormously for anyone creating content, training a team, or writing a pitch deck. The version that feels painfully basic to you is often the version your audience actually needed.
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What's something in your own field that feels obvious to you now but genuinely wasn't when you started? 🤔
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̇ng

16/09/2026

Think about the last time you were halfway through a Netflix series, a half finished crossword, or a course with three modules left.
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There's a specific kind of itch that comes from stopping partway through something. You didn't just want to finish it. You almost couldn't stop thinking about it. 🧠
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This is the Zeigarnik effect, named after psychologist Bluma Zeigarnik, who noticed that waiters remembered unpaid orders in vivid detail but forgot them almost instantly once the bill was settled.
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Our brains hang onto unfinished tasks far more tightly than completed ones. Once something is done, the mind files it away and moves on. Left incomplete, it keeps quietly demanding attention in the background. 🔍
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Marketers and product teams lean on this constantly, often without naming it.
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Progress bars on onboarding flows exist specifically to trigger this discomfort.
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✳️ LinkedIn's profile completeness meter isn't decoration, it's designed to make an unfinished profile feel like an open loop your brain wants closed.
✳️ Online courses that show percentage completed use the same principle.
✳️ Even email subject lines that say "you're almost there" are quietly poking the same nerve. 📊
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The interesting nuance is that this only works when the goal feels achievable and the next step is visible.
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A progress bar stuck at three percent with no clear next action doesn't create motivation, it creates frustration and often outright abandonment. The Zeigarnik effect thrives on small, visible increments rather than vague, distant finish lines.
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There's a content angle here too. A social post or newsletter that opens a question and answers it fully in one go is satisfying but forgettable.
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One that deliberately leaves a thread dangling, promising the answer in a follow up, keeps people mentally returning to check for it. Cliffhangers aren't just a storytelling trick, they're applied psychology.
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The lesson for anyone building a product, a course, or a content series is simple. Show people exactly how close they are to done, and their brain will do a surprising amount of the motivating for you. 🎯
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