📚 How Figma grows, Intellectual seat-belt, Riding waves, Early history of counting

Magical world of perfumes + a lot more for the curious YOU

Hi and welcome to the post #151.

Happy Holi to those who are celebrating. We’re experiencing severe water shortage in Bangalore, so this time everyone is going to be overdosing on Gulal and Abeer in the most Holi parties here. 

Today’s mix spans technology trends to the world of perfume. I am as excited as ever to share it with you. Here’s a quick view of the lineup:

And now, onto today's finds…

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🖌️ How Figma Grows

Jaryd Hermann’s “How Figma grows” tells us Figma’s story covering a larger arc of “What got you here, won’t get you there.”

Jaryd talks about how Figma has focused on thinking of design beyond designers as a key lever for their future growth opportunities. This is not a tale of 0-1 journey, but the path from 1-n, and Jaryd has some good inputs (some of these directly from his conversation with Kris Rasmussen (Figma CTO). 

My favorite bit, though, is about the way Kris defines what makes a great PM at Figma. 

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🦺 Intellectual Seat Belt

Kyle Harrison starts “Intellectual seat belts” with Peter Thiel’s quote:  

"I oscillate on the seat-belt question. The pro-seat-belt argument is that it’s safer, and the anti-seat-belt argument is that if you know that it’s not as safe you’ll be a more careful driver.”

He picks this up and expands to how groups and team often work:

People use establishment or in-group thinking as their "intellectual seat-belt," which makes them feel safe enough to just believe something without evaluating it themselves, leaving them to think less carefully.

He suggests how ‘being wrong’ can be a virtue and one can embrace it. It’s a peculiar theme, and may leave many questions or confusion than where you start. But Kyle’s example and quotes make reading this piece worth the risk.

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🧸 Perseverance: Stubborn Visionaries & Pigheaded Fools

How do you know when to stop, versus when to push through? You don’t, not even in hindsight. A Smart Bear suggests that there is very little difference between stubborn visionaries & pigheaded fools. You could be pushing hard and achieve “success through perseverance”. Or you could be pushing hard and reach “failure through obstinance.”

But not trying is guaranteed failure to reach any possible success, so you should try. All you can do is minimize a better decision in the fork in time when you could quit or sustain.

When you realize you cannot know which scenario you’re in, you realize that the job is to find out which one it is as quickly as possible, which means to cease your dithering, make a strong decision, keep your eyes open, try to measure what’s happening as objectively as possible, hope for S1, but allow for S2, to not feel guilty if you guessed wrong, and not feel cocky if you guessed right.

He offers a few techniques & tactical questions that can help knowing which path you’re on. A few of them sound really helpful and worth noting down.

• Are you still enjoying the project and learning something from it?

• If the team has run out of ideas and conviction, consider pivoting. If the team has run out of ideas and conviction for pivoting, it’s time for a full reset or quit. Do you see yourself doing this in 12 months? If not, you might as well stop now.

• Is the product noticeably better than alternatives in the market or will be there soon? If the answer is no to both, consider stopping.

• Penny in the air: Go for a long walk and listen deep inside. Often I already know deep inside, but just don’t want to admit it to myself. (@awoodsnet)

• Go back to “The Why” that set you off on your journey to begin with. If you now have more information to assess the credibility of that why, re-assess. If you still have the same information available and still believe in the why, press on.

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🌊 Surf’s Up: Rising Waves

Rex Woodbury posits: startups are like surfing.

You have three components: you have the surfer, you have the surfboard, and you have the wave. The surfer is the founder, probably the most important element; if you don’t have a good surfer, good luck catching a wave. The board is the product. It matters, of course, though a savvy surfer can fine-tune her board over time. (A good surfer can also probably overcome a bad board, but not vice versa.) The more challenging element to control is the wave. What kind of wave are you gonna get?

From the early-stage venture perspective, the wave is the toughest variable; there are a lot of exogenous factors. Where are we in the cycle? How big will this market be? Is there a “why now” for this product? The wave is full of “known unknowns.”

He goes on to explore the biggest “waves” in key segments of life and the economy. Here is his take on five important categories and the most important wave in each.

1. Productivity = Augmentation

2. Jobs (and Finances) = Autonomy

3. Shopping = Circularity

4. Health = Tracking

5. Social = Latent Awareness

The ensuing explanation helps to observe the trends and provides a possible framework to define the direction. Some good food for thought in this one!

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🧮 Early History of Counting

Check out “The early history of counting” even if you’re not a history or anthropology nerd. It shares super interesting excerpts from Keith Houston’s book - Empire of the Sum: The Rise and Reign of the Pocket Calculator.

I loved it the way it makes even a boring topic fun! A couple of bits to give you a glimpse (italics mine):

On the face of it, the numerical instrument known as the tally stick is exceedingly mundane. Used since before recorded history—​still used, in fact, by some cultures—​to mark the passing days, or to account for goods or monies given or received, most tally sticks are no more than wooden rods incised with notches along their length. They help their users to count, to remember, and to transfer ownership. All of which is reminiscent of writing, except that writing did not arrive until a scant 5,000 years ago—​and so, when the Lebombo bone was determined to be some 42,000 years old, it instantly became one of the most intriguing archaeological artifacts ever found. Not only does it put a date on when Homo sapiens started counting, it also marks the point at which we began to delegate our memories to external devices, thereby unburdening our minds so that they might be used for something else instead.

Counting, fundamentally, is the act of assigning distinct labels to each member of a group of similar things to convey either the size of that group or the position of individual items within it. The first type of counting yields cardinal numbers such as “one,” “two,” and “three”; the second gives ordinals such as “first,” “second,” and “third.”

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🧴 Magical World of Perfumes 

Molly Young’s profile piece - “Hilde Soliani, Perfumer and ‘Madwoman’ of Parma” - amazed me at multiple levels:

1. Hilde Soliani’s personality is peculiar and her passion extraordinary.

2. The city of Parma and its life is super intriguing. Mind you, it’s not even the mecca of perfumes.

3. Perfume business is an art meets science meets magic.

4. Molly Young seems mesmerized by her discovery and creates magic with her words.

It feels like we’ve left a curious child in a chocolate factory. A couple of her musings:

Until I encountered the Covid perfumiverse — and became a member myself — it never occurred to me that a person might treat fragrance as an accessory, changing it from day to day according to mood, season or whim. I thought a fragrance was more like a sofa: a careful purchase acquired after a period of deliberation and for the purpose of occupying a designated location somewhat interminably, perhaps even for decades.

If you want to reproduce something exactly, you can use one ingredient. If you want to recreate an atmosphere, an emotion, a situation, you always need to use a minimum of three ingredients. Otherwise you can’t call it a fragrance.”

The final bottle of perfume went around the table. This one, called Avatar, mimicked the experience of entering a gelateria. It was the most unnervingly evocative of the three lunch scents. At first spritz, it smelled like cold marble, polished glass, wiped surfaces. Ten minutes later, the scent was that of gelato: cream, egg yolks, white sugar. Later that evening, long after lunch was over, I sniffed my left wrist and nearly shrieked. The cold marble and sugared cream had vanished. In their place was a smell that didn’t exist earlier, that seemed to arise from nothing. It was the smell of freshly baked ice cream cones. What sorcery was this?

I highly encourage reading this one, you will find your own reasons to enjoy this one! 

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🙂 Now I Know: Stories to Bring a Smile

Every weekday Dan Lewis shares a brief yet well-researched story in his “Now I know” newsletter. These are not pieces from current affairs, nor any framework for life. These are examples of things that have something about them that makes it fun & worthwhile to know about them. 

Try these stories from the last couple of weeks:

1. The blind man and the armless man who planted 10,000 trees 

2. Good mousekeeping 🐁

I’ve been reading his newsletter for the last couple of years, and have always found something interesting every week.

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✨ Everything else

1. Australian Silo Art Trail - The Silo Art movement has encouraged towns & artists to paint giant Silos and Water Tanks all around Australia to bring them together. Visiting these has become a thing of experience and expression - now considered Australia's Ultimate Road Trip. Over 100s of giant paintings to discover and cherish the unique Australian spirit.

2. Counter-Print - @counterprintbooks - offers beautifully curated design books. Their Insta feed is such eye candy!

3. Check out The Paperclip @Paperclip_In for super intriguing stories from forgotten corners of history - Love bombs and curry, Mysore Sandal Soap and Parle-G

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That's all for this week, folks! 

I hope I've earned the privilege of your time.

If you liked this post, please hit the ❤️ below to help spread the word!  Leave a comment or send a message with your feedback. It’s highly helpful & encouraging. 

Pritesh