📚 Interview Techniques, Excellent Advices, Anatomy of Narrative Change, Repair Manual
Beginner’s Guide to Drawing + a lot more for the curious YOU
Hi, this is post #155.
A huge welcome to new folks who joined last week. I admire your curiosity and promise to make this together a lot of fun.
Also, a big thank you to Ranga, Nidhi and Gaurav. Your kind recommendations have helped expand this group and bring new curious folks in this group.
Here’s a quick view of the lineup today:
And now, onto today's finds…
🎙️ Interview Techniques
studies the best of the best to find the non-obvious, more nuanced techniques that lead to an exceptional (in-person) interview. Her research spans interviews taken by Tim Ferris, Larry King, Brandon Stanton, Joe Rogan, Chris Voss, David Letterman, Oprah Winfrey, Howard Stern and more. So you can be assured that there is something worth learning here. She shared 10 things, here is the one I find most insightful. I can see it playing out well in some of my best interactions / interviews from recent times.
1. They know the first question sets the tone for the entire interview
The first question matters because it’s the question that builds rapport between the interviewer and the interviewee. It’s also the question that sets the tone for the entire interview. [...]
So King often starts an interview to understand his guests’ perception of themselves — no matter how evil we may perceive them to be. So what would be the first question he asks Osama bin Laden?
King says:
“The first question would not have been, ‘Why did you bomb 3,000 people on 9/11?’ My first question would’ve been, ‘You grew up in one of the richest families in Saudi Arabia. Why’d you leave?’
“He probably hasn’t thought about it in years. It makes him think about things. It also puts him a little on my side. He’s expecting this [King puts up his fists as though ready to fight] and I’m going with, ‘Why’d you leave?’ And I’m sincere because I have no idea. I wouldn’t have left.”
During the course of the interview, of course King would’ve asked about the events of Sept. 11, but that’s not where he would’ve started. He would’ve began by trying to understand how bin Laden sees himself, in hopes of gaining some insight into the mind of a person capable of committing such acts.
🫂 101 Excellent Advices
expands his list of excellent advice for living. There are 101 new additions to his list this year, and they are all worth paying attention to. Below, I share my top 6 picks.
• Every now and then throw a memorable party. The price will be steep, but long afterwards you will remember the party, whereas you won’t remember how much is in your checking account.
• Changing your mind about important things is not a consequence of stupidity, but a sign of intelligence.
• To tell a good story, you must reveal a surprise; otherwise it is just a report.
• The most common mistake we make is to do a great job on an unimportant task.
• When you try to accomplish something difficult, surround yourself with friends.
• Discover people whom you love doing “nothing” with, and do nothing with them on a regular basis. The longer you can maintain those relationships, the longer you will live.
🗒️ Tips for Progress Updates
posits: If you work on anything worthwhile, sooner or later people will care about it and will want you to send progress updates. These could be quarterly investor updates, weekly updates to your boss, emails to adjacent teams, etc. And then he goes on to share some tips on how to do this well.
Three noteworthy ideas:
Understand your role, and with each update add to the body of evidence that you’re a good steward in that role. If people want your updates, they’ve entrusted you with something– a successful delivery of a product or feature, investment capital, company budget, their reputation, something. Convey that you value their trust and take stewardship seriously.
Acknowledge changes explicitly. If you said a the last time and b this time, and b conflicts with a, you need to explain the inconsistency. People perceive acknowledged inconsistencies as cost of doing business, but unacknowledged inconsistencies as broken promises.
Know the top three questions your audience wants answered, and state the answers as clearly as possible.
🚗 Anatomy of Narrative Change
’s “the anatomy of narrative change” starts on the following warning:I believe that we are living in a crisis of imagination!
We’re stuck in old mental models, narratives, and ways of thinking, so even when we attempt to think differently or creatively, the results are…modest and average. And that’s because all of our thinking remains stuck inside the box of the old narrative.
And he takes up the challenge of showing the amazing things that are possible when we break free from the old way of thinking and doing. And he does this using the example of car-centricity.
I liked this as it opened up my mind around the ‘car-centric world’ thinking. It’s happening around us, yet we hardly notice it. So this short post is a good eye opener to that end.
Also, the way he has expanded the journey from a narrative to imagination space is a good way to understand how cultural norms get formed.
Worth a read!
🔧 Repair Manual
What is a repair manual?
“A political ecology of the repair manual” answers this in the following manner:
The manual is a reference book that one keeps ready to hand. While it ostensibly has a functional role, guiding the reader through manual tasks, it also frames that handiwork as synecdoche for the entire agent to whom the hand is connected. It imagines its readers variously as users of a tool, as stewards of an object, as owners of a fetishized commodity, as liabilities to the manufacturer, as authorized embodiments of specialized skill, or as conduits for common material knowledge. It structures our relations with technology and techniques and labor. It affects how we identify failure and assign responsibility, and what we do next. It frames repair as a conservative or progressive act. Usually, the manual walks us through repairs — as the phrase goes, step by step. Less often, it enables a more improvisatory, embodied exploration. Most important, the manual establishes what can and should be fixed in the first place.
That’s a fairly expanded world view on something that most of us find fairly transactional (and mundane).
The beauty of this essay starts with this definition. And it becomes better as Shannon Mattern takes us through the past, technicalities, ethics, cultural and societal norms & much more about the humble repair manual.
Shannon’s approach is philosophical, yet highly engaging. Bookmark this one for your long read sessions.
✏️ Beginner’s Guide to Drawing
starts his “quick beginner’s guide to drawing” with a simple truth: The basic craft of drawing is about two things: you learn to control your hand and to see.He offers 6 exercises to get started on this. I am not sharing those, they are better experienced on his interactive post.
Here’s one snippet that’s useful irrespective of your interest in learning to draw.
If you liked this one, post #83 had another excellent post from Ralph talking about how to draw your ideas.
🔤 How To Choose Typefaces
For most of us, choosing a font may never be the most important task at hand. We have our defaults for docs and presentations. They are typically prescribed by our organization and brand guidelines. Some of us build preferences, albeit without any solid reasoning. Or we live OK with the default that the world chose for us.
So why am I sharing Dan Mall’s “How I choose typefaces” here?
Two reasons:
First, It is a good starters guide on the process. You will learn a bit or two on the topic & take somewhat meaningful and logical choices when selecting the typeface next time.
Second, It shows how a craftsman thinks about his craft. It's a show & tell of a special kind. We’re surrounded by experts of many fields - chefs, artists, designers, creators, musicians and more. They have something in them that makes them the ‘expert’. I call it their ‘Taste’. They are ‘expert’ because they have this taste and they can identify, create & curate this more often than others.
Now, this taste is a subjective, almost squishy thing that is very difficult to define. But you can show it in action. Through acts such as this post, you can hear the inner conversation a craftsman has while doing his craft. Readers need to pick the vocab and create the mental mapping of the process as well as outcome.
I am excited about the second part above, and so I keep exploring things that can show a craftsman in action and sharing their inner conversation.
Onto Dan Mall’s post, here’s one quick snippet:
The strategy for non-designers and amateurs isn’t to pick a great typeface; it’s to avoid picking a bad one. Vanilla ice cream never tastes bad and a plain black t-shirt will never go out of style.
But a bold flavor or fashion-forward respectively they are not. You won’t attract any attention with this approach, which is part of the important job of a great typeface choice.
🤗 Little Moments of Joy
Some light reads, offering warmth & comfort of living. For a quick dose of joy and a smile (or two).
Farewell, and thanks, to a man who kept kids safe. A heart touching story piece from the NY TImes.
I left Bengaluru to live in the Himalayas. Anand Sankar describes what life is like in Kotgaon, a remote village in Uttarakhand
Summer vacations. The charm of the 80s school vacation and the endless triumph of imagination over possession.
✨ Everything else
This is a teenager. An interactive visual story by the Pudding. Watch hundreds of teenagers grow up into adults and see how their childhood experiences affect their life outcomes
Goran Konjevod (@foldsome) creates magic combining mathematics & origami. For someone whose origami skills extend only to a frog and flower, this is level god work.
Client feedback on the creation of the earth. Who else but McSweeney can publish such a thing!
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. Leave a comment to start a conversation or share your feedback. I look forward to your inputs. It’s highly helpful & encouraging.
Thanks Pritesh for penning this one ! really good finds in this one !