No Mercy / No Malice Turns 10

Scott Galloway started writing No Mercy No Malice ten years ago as a Friday newsletter for his firm L2, which had been built around an annual subscription model tracking client engagement touchpoints. The acquiring company, Gartner, found the newsletter too salty to keep under their brand but let Galloway keep the intellectual property. A decade later, it has 430,000 subscribers and sits at the center of the flywheel for Prof G Media. The oldest surviving post, from November 2016, runs just 288 words—roughly 20% of a typical post today—and was about Snap's Spectacles. Galloway notes that CEO Evan Spiegel continues to pursue that wearable white whale despite erasing 95% of the company's market cap over five years.

Writing as cognitive workout and competitive advantage

Galloway's central argument is that storytelling is the most valuable skill—"a superpower you'd grant your children, if possible"—and that it begins with writing. He cites composition scholar Janet Emig's 1977 paper concluding that writing involves the fullest possible functioning of the brain, simultaneously engaging three cognitive processing styles: active (learning by doing the physical act), iconic (scanning and depicting text with the eyes), and symbolic (restating thoughts into structured words). "Translation," Galloway says: "Writing is a full body cognitive workout."