I recently met with a former close colleague to catch up and celebrate the birth of his first child. During a wide-ranging 4-hour (!) conversation, my friend dropped an intriguing nugget:

First born girls look more like their fathers than their mothers so their fathers are more likely to accept them, as historically men have preferred to have boys.

While my first reaction was to discard this idea entirely, I quickly found that some evolutionary psychologists have proposed that if babies looked like their fathers, it could boost the father’s confidence in paternity and increase his investment in the child, helping the baby survive and be more successful. In fact, there is some scientific evidence that when fathers perceive a child as looking like them (whether or not that’s objectively true), they report more emotional and financial investment. However, resemblance is ultimately subjective when children are young; people tend to see whichever parent they expect or want to see. Mothers are especially more likely to say the baby looks like the father, even when outside judges do not agree, but fathers are not particularly objective either.

Research that breaks down resemblance by child sex and age finds more complex patterns than first born girls looking like their fathers. For newborns, boys and girls resemble their mothers more than their fathers. Between 2 and 3 years of age, boys tend to resemble their fathers more while girls continue to resemble their mothers. However, this impact is no stronger for first born children than it is for all children.

Said another way, despite repeated claims in the popular press, there is no strong peer‑reviewed evidence that first born girls resemble fathers but later born girls do not. Instead, a form of confirmation bias is likely happening: humans are good at spotting family resemblance, fathers care about resemblance as a cue to paternity, and people notice and talk about cases where firstborns resemble fathers.

All of this combines to keep the story alive that first born girls look like their fathers – but they are no more likely to do so than any other kid.   

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Does spelling matter?

A young colleague recently asked me that after the two of us wondered whether to spell the word ‘collectable’ or ‘collectible’. To my eye, collectable seemed correct – able to be collected. As a counterpoint, my colleague pointed out that spellcheck accepted collectible.

So, which is it? Most online sources suggest either spelling can be used but some grammar sites insist they are actually two different words. The confusion led my colleague to throw up his hands and ask “Does spelling it right really matter?”

Even to a person whose motto is words matter, I found the question reasonable – partly since there are so many English words with more than one spelling. I often have to pause when writing cancelled or canceled, likable or likeable, gray or grey, adviser or advisor, and ax or axe. Usually, one is more common in British English and the other in American English. Not surprisingly, Americans usually prefer the version with fewer letters.

To make things even more confusing, occasionally spelling changes over time based on how a word sounds. My favorite example is the word barbecue. You may think I spelled that incorrectly, and that the ‘c’ should be replaced by a ‘q’. Over the years, barbeque has become accepted spelling because the last syllable sounds like the letter q and the word is often abbreviated BBQ.

The words “there,” “their,” and “they’re” are often misused/misspelled, likely due to the fact they are homophones (sound the same). On social media, it’s a common meme for responders to undermine a post by pointing out one of these words was misspelled. In fact, research has shown misusing ‘there’ in social media reduced perceived intelligence by ~10% while misusing it in a work email reduced perceived intelligence by ~23%.

Research also shows strong links between spelling, writing, and reading skills. Misspelled words can can make it harder for others to understand what you wrote, and improving your spelling is correlated with better reading skills. While there is some evidence that improving spelling modestly improves writing skills, the overall impact is not well established.

So, does spelling matter?

From my perspective, how you choose to spell (and write, in general) is part of your overall identity – both personal and professional. At work, I am consciously informal in how I speak, dress, and interact with co workers. But informal doesn’t mean sloppy or unprofessional.

If you aren’t paying attention to spelling and misusing “there,” “their,” and “they’re”, you’re sending a message to others. And it may not be the message you want.

Both words and spelling matter.  

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As my mantra is “Words Matter,” I’m fascinated by the etymology of words, how different cultures use language, and when people misuse English. I’ve covered spelling bees, written about mondegreens and eggcorns, and advocated for the banishing of overused words.

So, it’s probably not surprising I’m fascinated with jokes that contain a play on words. Here’s one I heard recently:

A woman was holding a funeral for her husband when a man she didn’t recognize sat in the row directly behind her. Near the end of the service, the man leaned forward, gently tapped her on the shoulder, and asked the widow, “Would you mind if I said a word to everyone?”

She replied, “Please do.”

The man stood up, cleared his throat, and said “Plethora.” Afterwards, the man sat back down.

The widow smiled through her tears turned to him and said “Thank you. That means a lot.”

A minute or two later, the man leaned forward again and asked “Would you mind if I added another word?”

“No, go right ahead,” she encouraged.

The man stood up, said “Bargain,” and sat down.

The widow dabbed her eyes turned again and said “That means a great deal.”

A moment later, another man approached the widow and asked “May I also say two words?”

Surprised, the widow nodded yes. The second man nervously approach the microphone and tentatively said “Water pit.”

After he sat back down, the widow walked over to him, smiled kindly, and whispered “Thank you for the words. I know you meant well.”

Words matter. Even when you’re telling a joke.

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According to neuroscientist Lisa Feldman Barrett, author of How Emotions Are Made, emotions aren’t hardwired in your brain but are instead “made in the moment.“

Historically, scientists believed your brain triggers an evolutionary response to external factors, causing your body to act in a predetermined way. For example, if you saw a bear in the woods, you didn’t have a choice of how you would react. The ‘fear circuit’ in your brain would cause your heart to race, your blood pressure to soar, and your face to form the universal expression of fear. Other emotions were thought to have similarly hardwired blueprints.

Furthermore, scientists believed the fear circuit was a region in the brain called the amygdala. They designed lots of pseudo-experiments showing new circuits could be created tied to specific emotions. For example, once you’ve been involved in a car accident, the sound of screeching tires might cause a fear response – even if you’re not truly in danger.

However, this prevailing view of the amygdala as the fear circuit has been disproved. For one, people who don’t have an amygdala can still feel fear. In addition, the amygdala has been shown to be involved in many of processes such as thinking, memory, empathy (and all other emotions). For these two reasons, the amygdala can’t be a hard-wired fear circuit.

Instead, Feldman Barrett claims “feelings are the result of three things: your body, your past, and your environment.” Your brain form emotions as guesses in response to these three context clues. If one of the three contexts tells a different story, the emotional is less likely to be triggered. For example, the screeching tires might not cause fear if you’re on your couch watching a movie rather than if you’re in your car on the freeway.

Knowing these three factors are involved provides a tool to potentially control your emotions. As Feldman Barrett encourages, when you feel a powerful emotion like fear, ask yourself if it’s coming from either your physical body or your environment. If it’s not (and in most cases it’s not), recognize the emotion is based on the memory of a past event rather than something current. Then, acknowledge the past event triggers the emotion but try to re-focus your mind on what’s going on at the moment. If you do this several times, “your brain may override the past association and re-align the experience to a different emotion.”

In summary, we should neither ignore nor fixate on our emotions. Instead, we should recognize that they are clues as to what is happening in our brains and embrace the fact that responses to our emotions aren’t hardwired. By short circuiting our normal responses, we can learn new responses and even control our emotions.

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Since 1976, Lake Superior State University (LSSU) has compiled an annual list of words that should be banned with the goal to…

uphold, protect, and support excellence in language by encouraging avoidance of words and terms that are overworked, redundant, oxymoronic, clichéd, illogical, nonsensical—and otherwise ineffective, baffling, or irritating.

Over the last 50 years, LSSU has received tens of thousands of nominations from the public and have recommended nearly 500 words that should be banished. As a words matter guy, I believe it’s a noble pursuit but ultimately, at the end of the day, it has little impact. In fact, ‘at the end of the day’ has been banished three times by LSSU; in 1999, 2022, and 2024.

The ten winners losers banished words for 2026 are as follows:

• 6-7
• Demure
• Cooked
• Massive
• Incentivize
• Full stop
• Perfect
• Gift/gifted (as a verb)
• My bad
• Reach out

From my point of view, this list isn’t perfect because a couple of them aren’t words and it doesn’t include the phrase ‘game changer.’ Tech bros seem to be incentivized by the number of times they call their fledgling offering a game changer when it actually massively disappoints and they should demure instead. Don’t ever use that phrase – full stop.

I’ve now blogged about this annual list 10 different times since 2011. That’s simply too many and the topic is cooked. My bad.

Reach out if you have a new idea for an annual blog topic.

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A few weeks ago, I got an SMS message from a former colleague saying “Did you know that disguising brands is the new flex in marketing?” He linked to this nameless billboard with a red swirling background and the words ‘It Has To Be Fries.’

Color me confused. After a closer look, I realized the red was ketchup. But is this a Heinz or Hunt’s ad?  Heck it could be any of these 13 popular ketchups. Insiders might be able to figure out it was Heinz from the Est 1869 or that ‘It Has To Be’ is their new slogan but the general public… no way.

Apparently, Heinz isn’t alone.

British Airways and Tesco did something similar earlier this year. (Maybe this is a British trend?) Kellogg’s ran a campaign focused on its rooster mascot and highlighting the letters ‘OG’ from its brand name.

As a former CMO, I have mixed emotions about this trend of disguising your brand.

For starters, a brand is more than just a logo and colors. A brand is the unique identity, perception, and emotional connection people have with a company, product, or service. A strong brand differentiates an organization from competitors, building loyalty and recognition in the customer’s mind. You definitely don’t want to bland the brand.

In that vein, these marketing campaigns aren’t really disguising their brands. Instead, they are really dropping the traditional logo and focusing on other elements of the brand promise. This alone can be startling because traditionalists have focused on plastering their logos everywhere and making it as big as possible.

From that point of view, these campaigns are a bit of a flex because only strong brands can pull this off. Done correctly, this allows the brand to focus on its value proposition or experience rather than its name and colors. In a world cluttered with ads, stripping away logos feels less like traditional advertising and can create intrigue leading to interaction. I suspect it might especially appeal to the younger generation who dislike over marketing.

Why don’t more brands try this?

Simply said, it wouldn’t work. Without a brand identity, messaging, and market position which are well designed and well understood, customers won’t understand the campaign. It takes time, money, and consistency to build this understanding – sadly most organizations (and marketers) are impulsive and don’t stick with a brand identity for long enough.

In short, disguising a brand is an interesting trend and one that marketers are likely to gush over for a short time. But it’s not a phenomenon most companies need to think about.

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Ever heard of the buttered cat paradox?

The buttered cat paradox is a humorous thought experiment which combines two common adages:

1. cats always land on their feet, and
2. buttered toast always lands buttered side down.

While you may think it’s an urban legend, experiments have shown 81% of the time buttered toast lands on the floor butter side down. Also, a phenomenon known as the cat righting reflex has shown cats almost always land on their feet if they fall from a sufficient height.

The paradox imagines what would happen if a cat is dropped with toast strapped to its back butter side up. Since the toast has to land butter side down and the cat has to land on its feet, hypothetically the combination would hover mid-air spinning in place while it tried to resolve these conflicting conditions.

The paradox was likely inspired by a joke made by San Franciscan comedian/musician/juggler Michael Davis in an 1988 appearance on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson. You can watch it here at the 3 minute 40 second mark. The paradox joke has been used many different ways since then, including this award-winning commercial from Brazilian energy drink Flying Horse.

What would happen if someone tried this in real life? Physics tells us the rotational force of the cat would more than counteract the rotational force of the lighter toast so the cat would land on its feet. Once the cat landed, friction between its paws and the ground would keep it from spinning and the toast would remain butter side up.

In my experience, there is a loose parallel between the buttered cat paradox and how large companies approach innovation – otherwise known as the innovation paradox. Large public companies become risk averse because they are severely penalized by financial markets if they miss sales or earnings targets. Predictability is rewarded; the cat must always land on its feet. Innovation is inherently risky; by definition and design, more often than not it fails – the toast lands butter side down. Companies strap buttered toast onto the back of the cat hoping they get the benefit of innovation while keeping the cat on its feet. It rarely works.

The buttered cat paradox is fun to think about but not a great way to run a business.

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Whatever happened to the mantra: Work Smarter, Not Harder?

Silicon Valley is flush with stories about tech companies adopting the 996 work schedule which refers to working 9am to 9pm, 6 days per week; a 72-hour work week. The 996 phenomenon originated in China a few years ago but has resulted in mass protests, with critics even blaming the schedule for worker deaths.

Except for the catchy name, I don’t think the 70+ hour work week is a new phenomenon. 30 years ago (!) at the start of my career, 6-day work weeks were common in technology startups. Before the days of food delivery and remote work, I remember us 20-somethings grabbing a quick dinner and then returning to the office for a few more hours of coding.

Despite the popularity of hustle culture, I’ve always worried it prioritizes activity over outcomes. As I once wrote, don’t confuse me with the size of irrigation pipes or types of fescue grass, I just want a yard that’s not embarassing. When I was young, the overarching advice was to work smarter, rather than harder.

Of course, the work smarter not harder phrase was used so often it turned into a popular meme.

Like many aphorisms, the problem is no one ever really explained how to work smarter. Enter the book “Great at Work: How Top Performers Do Less, Work Better, and Achieve More.” Author Morten Hansen examined 200 academic papers, interviewed 120 experts, ran a pilot study on 300 subjects, and then built a framework which he tested on more than 5000 participants from various industries and backgrounds.

Hansen found seven “work smarter practices” which explained the majority of how people performed. Perhaps surprisingly, education, age, and hours worked were only responsible for 10% of the effect – combined!

The most important practice could be described as “Do Less, Then Obsess.” Top performers did a better job of prioritization and focused on fewer objectives but, just as importantly, they avoided distractions and intensely obsessed over them. In Hansen’s words,

Once they had focused on a few priorities, they obsessed over those tasks to produce quality work. That extreme dedication to their priorities created extraordinary results. Top performers did less and more: less volume of activities, more concentrated effort. […] Choice is only half of the equation— you also need to obsess.

Experiments found that using this practice by itself improved an average 50^th percentile performer into a 75th percentile performer.

In these days of glorifying 996 work schedules, remember you really can work smarter.

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Growing up in Virginia, I often heard stories about verbal jousting between Sir Winston Churchill and Lady Astor, who was also born in Virginia. One of the most memorable is the following:

Lady Astor: “If you were my husband, I’d give you poison.”
Sir Winston: “If you were my wife, I’d drink it.”

Amusing, but not likely true. Of course, that hasn’t kept me from repeating the story over the years. After using it yet again at a recent get-together, I thought it might be fun to catalog other insults with class.

Here’s the best of what I found…

“He has all the virtues I dislike and none of the vices I admire.”
– Winston Churchill (source)

“I have never killed a man, but I have read many obituaries with great pleasure.”
– Clarence Darrow (source)

“I would challenge you to a battle of wits, but I see you are unarmed.”
– Abby Buchanan Longstreet (source)

“He has no enemies, but is intensely disliked by his friends.”
– Oscar Wilde (source)

“His mother should have thrown him away and kept the stork.”
– popularized by Mae West (source)

“I’ve had a perfectly wonderful evening. But this wasn’t it.”
– attributed incorrectly to Groucho Marx (source)

“He is not only dull himself; he is the cause of dullness in others.”
– attributed to Samuel Johnson (unverified)

“I never forgot the first time we met, but I’ll keep trying.”
– Origin unknown

I don’t think I’d ever have the gumption to use any of these in real life but there are certainly times I’ve been tempted. If you ever find yourself in need a classy insult in a work situation, here’s my favorite:

“He uses statistics as a drunken man uses lampposts… for support rather than illumination.”
– Andrew Lang (source)

I’m not recommending you use any of these but they certainly are insults with class.

What classy insult did I forget to include?

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The Zeigarnik effect describes the fact that people tend to remember unfinished tasks better than completed ones. It happens because “unfinished tasks create a cognitive burden, weigh more heavily on the mind, and are more easily recalled than completed tasks.”

The effect was first described in the 1920s by Soviet psychologist Bluma Zeigarnik after observing that waiters remembered the details of restaurant orders which had not yet been paid but forgot them soon after customers paid their bills. (Note: Some sources credit the idea to Zeigarnik’s professor, Kurt Lewin.) Zeigarnik designed a series of experiments which assigned tasks to participants, some of which were interrupted during the tasks and others were allowed to complete them undisturbed. After an hour, the participants who had been interrupted had significantly better recall of the details of their tasks.

You can use the Zeigarnik effect to help memorize a series of facts, a speech, or other items in which repetition is useful. Every 30 minutes or so, take 15-minute breaks to spend time on something else and then return to the item you’re trying to learn. You can even break up the learning session over multiple days; this is the spacing effect.

The Zeigarnik effect might also help with procrastination. Organizational psychologist Maria-Teresa Daher-Cusack suggests you only have to commit to working on something for five minutes. “Most of the time, you’ll keep going because your brain won’t want to leave it unfinished. Especially if you get into a ‘flow state,’ where you get deeply immersed into a task.”

If the task is too large and feels overwhelming, the key is to break it down into smaller parts which seemingly could be tackled with a commitment of only five minutes. It doesn’t matter if you start with a non-critical portion of the task; getting started and leaving it unfinished will trigger the Zeigarnik effect and increase the probability you come back to work on it later. Personally, I find that writing down the unfinished portions of the task makes it more effective.

The Zeigarnik effect suggests multitasking isn’t very efficient. Each unfinished task lingers in our memories, creating additional cognitive burden to finishing the current one. We are much more likely to be successful – and efficient – if we tackle the tasks one at a time.

For what it’s worth, I hope you stopped reading this article in the middle and returned to it later on. The Zeigarnik effect suggests you’re much more likely to remember it.

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