The IKEA Effect

Why we like things more when we build them ourselves

November 01, 2021

Hey there —

Picture the scene: your EKET cabinet or POANG armchair has arrived.

You’re pumped to assemble it. But one missing piece, two crushed toes, and thirteen hours later, your “furniture” is still a pile of particle board and your sanity is slipping.

Yet, something weird happens when you finally finish building that coffee table.After you tighten that last screw, the frustration fades and you think, “Look at this thing I made.” Suddenly, it’s not a crappy coffee table anymore. It’s craftsmanship.

Having to assemble your own furniture like adult LEGOS should be a drawback. But thanks to a weird phenomenon aptly called the “IKEA Effect," putting a little elbow grease into your furniture purchase actually makes people like IKEA more.

Coined by behavioral economist Dan Ariely, the “IKEA Effect” is a form of cognitive dissonance where we value something more if we put effort into it. Go figure.

And once you notice it, you start to see the IKEA effect everywhere. The IKEA Effect is why...

🎂 Kids freak out if someone else blows out their birthday candles for them
🌯 Letting customers “build” their own $5 foot-longs made Subway a household name
🍎 ...and why some people think it’s "fun" to pay $40 to go apple picking when you can get a bushel of apples for that price at the store.

IKEA furniture is practically sawdust, yet the satisfaction we feel from building that FRUG with our own hands makes us value that cheap table more than something we could buy from a craftsman.

Or in the words of Joseph Barbera (from the Hanna Barbera cartoons):

"Happiness is the real sense of fulfillment that comes from hard work."

The IKEA effect teaches us that the easy way out is usually not the road to happiness. So go grab your camera, or laptop, or that weird little Allen wrench and make something today. Because odds are, you'll love what you end up with.

Even if it looks like a FRUG.

Best Story Wins

Article | by Morgan Housel

Sir David Attenborough could read the corporate tax code and we’d be moved to tears. His storytelling ability is just that good. And in life, it turns out that a lot of success boils down to how well you tell a story.

🦖 Charles Darwin didn’t discover evolution. He just wrote a great book about it.

🏈 The Civil War is one of the most written about events in American history. But it wasn’t until Ken Burns' documentary that it became a cultural phenomenon. (40M people watched it when it premiered). That's the same number of people who watched Game 7 of the World Series in 2016. 🤯

🐌 Snail Mail is not the first newsletter to hit your inbox. But we’re going strong because we like to think we can tell a pretty good story.

Morgan Housel’s article is all about leveraging storytelling to your advantage. In a world of instant gratification, minuscule attention spans, and insatiable appetites for dopamine hits, it’s the good stories that make us stop and (finally) sit down to listen.

The Inner Ring of the Internet

Article | by Ali Montag

Before diving into her writing flow, Ali Montag decided to hop on Twitter for a hot second. And almost instantly, her newsfeed was filled with the outrageous success of her friends and peers:

  • One of their newsletters had made $175K in annual revenue

  • Another turned their newsletter into a multi-million dollar business

  • Someone else had just hit 1M email subscribers!

Meanwhile, Ali’s cursor was blinking back at her from an empty page.

We’ve all had moments where our work feels pathetic compared to the successes of others. In this article, Ali breaks down the price we pay for when we flatten our creative flair to appeal to the masses or try to recreate the success of other creators in the “Inner Ring.”

Learn how to avoid using popularity as your guide, and what it means to embrace your creative idiosyncrasies instead.

1,000 True Fans

Article | by Kevin Kelly

You only need 1,000 true fans to be a successful creator. No, really. Kevin Kelly has done the math.

In his 2008 article “1,000 True Fans” Kevin encourages people to find their “true fans” — AKA “someone who will buy anything you produce” — because it’s actually easier to make a living as a creator from a small but dedicated fan base than mass marketing to millions thanks to “The Long Tail” effect and the power of the internet:

“Everything made, or thought of, can interest at least one person in a million — it’s a low bar. Yet if even only one out of million people were interested, that’s potentially 7,000 people on the planet. That means that any 1-in-a-million appeal can find 1,000 true fans.”

  • 🪀 Into Yo-Yo tricks? So are these people

  • 🧑‍🌾 Love farmers? You know where to go

  • 🦆 Can't get enough of paintings with Nicolas Cage’s face on a duck body? Um, yeah, there’s a place for that, too

Kevin’s article reminds us that becoming a successful creator isn't about becoming the biggest name on the planet. It's about building relationships with a small group of dedicated fans who share interests in the same weird stuff you do.

And thanks to the internet, finding your true fans isn’t as hard as you think.

Written by Alice Lemée