📚 How to be more agentic, Observability, Customer expectations, Talking about deadlines

History has no lessons for you + a lot more for the curious YOU

Hi and welcome to the post #146.

I’m experimenting with moving my reading time to early morning. If I find something super interesting in this session, it makes the start of the day super awesome. I can feel the energy carry forward to a large part of the day.

Last week’s post had unusually low open rates. In case you missed it and want to read it, here’s the link - #145 Channeling curiosity, Sign posting, Dory / Pulse, Winner's game vs. Loser's game

Today, we will delve into ideas ranging from how to be more agentic to lessons from “Curb your enthusiasm”. For those looking to learn from history, there is a highly persuasive piece arguing against doing that. 

I love when I discover such a diverse set of ideas and I am able to curate them in one post. I hope you like them as well.

Let’s get started.

---

💯 How to be More Agentic

I came across the word “agency” in Shreyas Doshi’s writing. And I got the gist of what it means. However, this piece by Cate Hall “How to be more agentic” has to be the best explainer on how to think about it in more actionable terms. 

This is how she introduces the topic:

In my way of thinking, radical agency is about finding real edges: things you are willing to do that others aren’t, often because they’re annoying or unpleasant. These don’t always surface in awareness to the point one is actually choosing -- often they live in a cloud of aversion that strategically obscures the tradeoff.

She has a bunch of advice based on her experience. What’s her experience? Let’s hear in her words - I’ve done a bunch of cool stuff in different domains: I was a Supreme Court advocate and the number one female poker player in the world; started art and perfume companies; and led operations at Alvea, a pandemic medicine company I co-founded, when it set the record for the fastest startup to take a drug to clinical trials. All of these things I did in my 30s.

So her advice is indeed worth paying attention to. And I did that. I loved the point about “Learn to love the moat of low status”. Here’s how she expands it:

The moat of low status is one of my favorite concepts, courtesy of my husband Sasha. The idea is that making changes in your life, especially when learning new skill sets, requires you to cross a moat of low status, a period of time where you are actually bad at the thing or fail to know things that are obvious to other people.

It’s called a moat both because you can’t just leap to the other side and because it gives anyone who can cross it a real advantage. It’s possible to cross the moat quietly, by not asking questions and not collaborating, but those tradeoffs really nerf learning. “Learn by doing” is standard advice, but you can’t do that unless you splash around in the moat for a bit.

---

📺 What is Observability?

Sometimes an engineering mindset helps build more clarity & structure in your task at hand. Best engineers I’ve worked with show a remarkable ability to simplify things & teach at a basic level. This section covers one such item in hand.

Justin wrote “What is observability?” as a part of a series simplifying technical concepts. Here’s how he defines the term: Observability is a complicated word for a pretty simple thing: companies want to know what’s going on with their systems and their business.

He explains 4 types of observability and some typical tools that are used in each type. Below I list them:

1. Application observability

2. Infrastructure observability

3. Data observability

4. Business observability

Once you get past these details, you will realize that the core idea is fairly applicable in the world outside engineering and product as well. 

---

🎪 What does the customer expect?

3 years back, Esha Savla & Pritesh Jain (yes that’s me) wrote “Customer Experience from a cure.fit Lens” outlining our approach of building Customer Experience (CE) at cure.fit (cult.fit now). 

We evolved our thought process while answering this core question - “What is our customer expecting from us?”

If you know these expectations, you can deliver an experience that can fulfill them appropriately. As we learnt with our interaction with users, feedback on our product & interactions, we compiled these expectations in six levels to help structure the experience design efforts.

1. Delivery of promise - Did I get what I was promised?

2. Make it simple - Can I get what I want in the simplest, most efficient way possible?

3. Keep it defect free - Do I get exactly what i was promised and without any faults?

4. Ensure trust & safety - Can I trust them with my life and safety?

5. Effortless support - Will they be there for me when I need them most and actually solve my problem?

6. Do the unexpected - Wow! They took me by (a pleasant) surprise.

The blogpost outlined the details. Building these and delivering them to our customers has been one of the most satisfying experiences of that stint.

Thankyou Purva for reminding me of this blog post. 

---

📅 Talking about Deadlines at Work

Wes Kao’s newsletter is on fire right now. She is churning out amazing pieces one after another. “How to talk about deadlines at work” provides some suggestions for solving a universal problem.

We’re all swamped with priorities & the new ones keep coming our way. At that moment, saying no or pushing a deadline becomes a challenge we don’t want to handle. We struggle on most counts, and make our life more miserable.

Wes Kao explains: Given how often we set, agree to, and update timelines every week, for tasks big and small, I don’t think we talk enough about how to have conversations about it. These conversations can be friendly and fast, and both parties are on the same team, but they’re a negotiation nonetheless.

One part that stood out to me: Temporarily “over-correct” to convince your teams it’s safe. It’s not very intuitive but can be a big change managers can bring in their interaction around deadline. 

---

🎧 Wherever you get your podcasts

Anil Dash’s “Wherever you get your podcasts” has a simple proclamation:

But here's the thing: being able to say, "wherever you get your podcasts" is a radical statement. Because what it represents is the triumph of exactly the kind of technology that's supposed to be impossible: open, empowering tech that's not owned by any one company, that can't be controlled by any one company, and that allows people to have ownership over their work and their relationship with their audience.

Now that you’ve read this bit, you will find that it’s so obvious. And yet, it did not strike earlier. That’s the feeling I got. Anil explains this more in very simple terms and gives some good perspective around how to think about how technology shapes our lives.

---

🎭 Curb Your Enthusiasm

I’ve not seen this classic, but now I am tempted to watch it after reading Trungphan2’s “8 Lessons from "Curb Your Enthusiasm”

Trung covers Larry David’s journey from early years to finally making this classic and creating a new genre of comedy. He has a lot of anecdotes to share making this a really fun post.

On to the lessons, there are 8 of those (as the post titles suggests). Below two stood out for me:

Non-Obvious Ideas Take a Long Time to Win

Structure and Constraints Breed Creativity

His stories include Paul Graham to Rick Rubin, and you will surely pick up one or two for future conversations.

---

🏯 History Has No Lessons for You

This one runs counter to some of the ideas that I had shared in the past. Joseph Stieb emphatically warns that history has no lessons for you. He admits though - “As a historian working in professional military education, I find myself in the awkward position of warning strategists and students alike against drawing too many lessons from history.”

Why does he say so? He says context and contingencies make the lesson-learning from history very challenging. Here’s how he defines both:

Context refers to the complex swirl of social, political, economic, intellectual, environmental, and other factors that shape the environment in which people live and act at any given time. All historical contexts are different; the world in 2050 will not be like today’s world, which is unlike the world of 1989, much less that of 1648, and so on. These differences make generalizing across contexts innately difficult. Nevertheless, understanding any decision or policy requires looking at context. 

In John Lewis Gaddis’ definition, contingencies are “phenomena that do not form patterns.” They are the branching points of history at which things could have easily been different because of unpredictable, unusual, and often small occurrences whose importance is sometimes clear only in hindsight. Contingency accounts for the importance of human agency and the fact that people may react differently to similar circumstances.

He goes onto expand the role these play and various effects that they cause. These are some novel ideas backed with examples that make them worth considering.

But Joseph is not saying that we should not study history. He just sees a different utility of doing that:

One major benefit for a strategist is to understand how the present came to be. History shows how we got to the present day in any domain: society, economics, politics, military affairs, ideas, and so on. It gives the strategic thinker a stronger sense of the landscape in which he or she will operate and a better understanding of the people, institutions, and nations that surround them.

I got intrigued by this idea, and happened to come across another piece on the same theme by Cedric Chin in his commoncog blog. You can find that here. It takes the story of Morris Chang (TSMC founder)  to put across the same point around ‘lessons from history’.

---

✨ Everything else

1. David Nott creates beautiful tapestry with colourful, geometric shapes. His Insta feed is a delight to watch. (via Dense Discovery)

2. The Cultural Tutor on Medieval gargoyles.

3. Rats selfie: A photographer trained two rats to take photographs of themselves. They didn’t want to stop. So cute!

---

Before you leave, I would like to check one quick thing with you.

That's all for this week, folks! 

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

Please leave a comment or send a message with your feedback. It’s highly helpful & encouraging. If that’s too much of an effort (or not required), at least hit the ❤️ at the start or end of the post to show your love. 

Pritesh