I soaked in a lot of interesting and exciting things over the year end break. Today’s lineup, and the next few posts, will draw heavily from that stash.
Over the past week, I have also been going deep into the world of content marketing. I am looking for a passionate content creator and marketer to join me at work. If you know someone who has built and scaled something meaningful in the content space, please connect us. I would really appreciate it.
Without further ado, here’s a quick lineup for you.
Let’s get started…
🪻 Social Dandelions
Community and the spread of ideas is a theme that has always excited me. You do not even need to focus on a specific group or a single idea. The lessons run deeper, into how humans behave, learn, and come together to achieve anything meaningful.
Isn’t that the core of what we do?
Scott Belsky’s recent Action Digest post explores this beautifully. He pulls examples from Pinterest, Harry Potter, and the GameStop squeeze. The dandelion metaphor is especially powerful and easy to remember.
The post tries to answer four critical questions about community building:
What type of community is best for launching a new idea?
How do you find the right community to introduce your idea to?
Which members of a community should you talk to first?
How can you maximize the odds that a community will embrace your idea?
Action Digest and Scott Belsky consistently share thoughtful stories on creativity, culture, and execution. Well worth a subscription.
👥 What’s going on here, with this human
This is a Graham Duncan essay, and it tackles one of the hardest problems in work and life: how to choose the most important people around you. Your executives. Your business partners. Even your life partner.
Here is how Duncan frames it.
My goal in this essay is to help others make better decisions on a potential hire, business partner, or even life partner as quickly and as accurately as possible. It’s made up of suggested action steps and some of the ruminations that underlie them. At the end I include my own assessment of different personality assessments and some of my go-to interview and reference questions.
The piece is dense and turns philosophical at times. But it is packed with practical signals and sharp guidance on how to do this kind of hiring better. I have already read it more than once, and I know I will need a few more passes to fully absorb it.
This is the story of how Swiss watches survived. Japanese manufacturing and quartz technology almost wiped out the Swiss watch industry. It came close to becoming irrelevant. Until Jacques Piguet and Jean Claude Biver did something bold and unexpected. They changed the game. This is the story of how they pulled an entire industry back from the edge.
This is a Works in Progress piece, which means you get rich storytelling that blends history, science, culture, politics, and business. All focused on an idea or object we often take for granted.
Source: Works in Progress
I am in awe of the consistency with which this team publishes work worth reading. The themes they pick. The depth they go into. The care in presentation. All of it shows what real craftsmanship looks like.
🧹 Dyson’s Hair Care Play
Most people know the story of James Dyson’s obsession with improving the vacuum cleaner until it became a gold standard of product design. This time, James and the team at Dyson have taken the same mindset into a very different space. Beauty, specifically hair care.
Some parts of the puzzle stay familiar. Air flow. Heat. Mechanics. But many new ones show up. The anatomy of human hair. Natural and synthetic chemicals. And the challenge of designing technology that works safely on the human body.
It is a fascinating journey. One that shows the long term thinking and grit needed to build something truly extraordinary. Today, the beauty category contributes close to 30 percent of Dyson’s business and is the largest part of their portfolio. That alone tells you they are clearly onto something.
We have all heard the “in our times” stories from elders. Things were better. Cheaper. Built to last. Or the version where resources were scarce, effort was high, and yet great things still came out of it.
Not all of that is nostalgia. Some ideas and products truly were built to endure. They survived change, weathered hard times, and lasted longer than most things do today.
Travers Nisbet reflects on this in his piece about building for permanence in an age of obsolescence. One snippet in particular stayed with me and gave me a lot to think about.
Stewart Brand has this framework called pace layers. In a healthy civilization, different layers move at different speeds: fashion moves fast, then commerce, then infrastructure, then governance, then culture, then nature. Fast learns, slow remembers. Fast proposes, slow disposes. The slow layers provide stability while the fast layers innovate. Problems arise when one layer tries to move at another’s pace.
I usually avoid covering trending news. But sometimes, the conversation around it is worth paying attention to. The Sita Gita incident around the Digi Yatra “bug” is one such case.
For those who missed it, the incident involved identical twins facing an issue at the Mumbai airport gates. The system flagged it, manual checks followed, and the media reaction spiraled quickly.
Siddharth Sharma, the CIO of the Digi Yatra Foundation, wrote a thoughtful response sharing their side of the story. It is a well crafted piece that balances the philosophy behind Digi Yatra, the realities of the technology, and the lived experience of everyone involved.
The Bottom Line: We are building this plane while flying it. The “Sita-Gita” moment wasn’t just a meme; it was a stress test for our philosophy. We could fix the “Twin Problem” tomorrow by building a central database or training AI on your photos. But we won’t. We will fix it by building smarter, privacy-preserving workflows instead.
I am saving this as a strong example of how to communicate during a crisis. There is a lot to learn from it.
When was the last time you saw an assembly line in action? Not the modern kind like McDonald’s. I mean the heavy ones. Machines humming. Conveyor belts rolling. Workers pressing buttons and pulling levers. It has been ages since I experienced that in person.
I have watched plenty of videos and now reels of such factories. Even on a screen, they feel like magic.
James Coleman takes us on one such tour and explains why these visits matter. They play a unique role in helping us understand, and truly appreciate, how things are made.
Though factories are less associated with modernity and the cutting edge than they once were, I think this is a perception that is ripe for change. A modern plant is not the dark, dank, and dangerous place of the past. They are often full of creative engineering and automation, the type of imagery many associate with the future. The popularity of shows like How It’s Made (which had 416 episodes over 32 seasons) also reveals that there might be an enduring interest in how we come to have the objects around us.
100 Things that made Austin Kleon’s 2025 is filled with tiny moments of joy. That is exactly why I love Austin’s work. He notices the small stuff and makes it matter.
Inside La Martinière; the beautifully restored palace turned school in Lucknow, was another delight. I remember the name from my Bournvita Quiz Contest days. I had no idea it carried such a rich history, or that it looked this stunning.
I’m going to leave you with Core Memories with the Swiftie Dads. In 2023, Paul Scheer spent time talking to fathers who went with their daughters to Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour in LA, sometimes as fans, sometimes just as chauffeurs. I watched it with my two daughters, both full time Swifties, with a lump in my throat. I hope I get to live that moment someday.
A couple of years ago, Taylor Swift was in Singapore. I paid through my nose to secure two tickets for my husband and daughter. They wore matching t-shirts and sang their heart out.
Definitely a core memory for my Swiftie and her Swiftie dad.
I loved the Sita-Gita situation and the very thoughtful response by DigiYatra’s Siddharth Sharma. Will get to the other articles over the course of the week. Keep them coming Pritesh 👍
Great curation, Pritesh (As always).
A couple of years ago, Taylor Swift was in Singapore. I paid through my nose to secure two tickets for my husband and daughter. They wore matching t-shirts and sang their heart out.
Definitely a core memory for my Swiftie and her Swiftie dad.
I am going to make them watch the video.
I loved the Sita-Gita situation and the very thoughtful response by DigiYatra’s Siddharth Sharma. Will get to the other articles over the course of the week. Keep them coming Pritesh 👍