📚 Letter to Builders, DaVinci’s To-Learn List, Starbucks' Digital Dilemma, Actually Useful Generalist, Congestion Tax

EV's Sound, Restoration, Garden Path Sentence and more

Aug 26, 2024

Hi, this is post #173.

Thank you for staying curious and taking time out to read this. You’re awesome!

Today’s spread is a bit larger than usual. I debated about curtailing a portion or two, but then decided against it. Here’s a quick snapshot:

You know what’re looking for, let’s jump straight to it…

🧑‍🎨 Letter To Those Chasing Their Passion

Sari Azout wrote a letter to a friend who is thinking of starting something new. If you’re a founder/artist/creator/builder, this letter is for you too.

Here’re the six questions that she used to frame her advice:

As you let the possibility of merging your career and your passion live in your mind, I’ve tried to distill the patterns that I’ve observed into a series of questions:
Will you use this opportunity to grow and evolve or will you use it to beat yourself up?
How will you avoid insecurity work?
Can you learn to enjoy the process as the end in itself, not the means?
Will you default to the norms of your industry, or will you be an original?
What tools will you use to quiet your ego and see reality clearly?
Do you have clarity on what kind of financial value you aim to create?

These are real challenges, and you may not get a handy playbook as an answer. Sari’s letter has some useful guiding thoughts.

Sari is the founder of this tool called Sublime - a simple way to collect ideas from your online adventures, organize & present them in a visually beautiful way. I’ve been using it for almost a year now and found it useful. If you want to give it a try, I’ve got some invites here.

I love her writing for its humility. It feels authentic. She gets creative with her format. If you liked today’s snippet, you should check out “What does Sublime actually do?” too. It is a good example of the “Show, don’t tell” approach of product marketing.

🔎 DaVinci’s To Learn List

Every now and then, I get questioned about what is the purpose of “Stay Curious”.

For me, all my efforts of reading, curating and sharing these interesting ideas is my way of ‘collecting the dots’. These dots are tidbits of knowledge, some useful lessons, and memorable stories that capture my interest. They are not from any particular subject, theme or source. Maybe one day they will connect somehow and help me become a better thinker.

This Action Digest post reminded me that my reason is not just good but a great strategy used by many, including Da Vinci. His to-learn list (instead of the usual to-do lists) are a remarkable example of what it could mean to chase your curiosity. Here’s a sample from his diaries:

[Discover] the measurement of Corte Vecchio (the courtyard in the duke's palace)
Get the master of arithmetic to show you how to square a triangle
Get Messer Fazio (a professor of medicine and law in Pavia) to show you about proportion
[Talk to] Giannino, the Bombardier, re. the means by which the tower of Ferrara is walled without loopholes
Ask Benedetto Potinari (A Florentine Merchant) by what means they go on ice in Flanders
Find a master of hydraulics and get him to tell you how to repair a lock, canal, and mill in the Lombard manner
[Ask about] the measurement of the sun promised me by Maestro Giovanni Francese
Ask Maestro Antonio how mortars are positioned on bastions by day or night

What a diverse set for exploration! Da Vinci was focused and his exploration seems more deliberate than most folks out there. Maybe that was his magic trick! Or maybe we have just seen a part of his process.

In any case, his days would have been interesting for sure.

☕ Starbucks' Digital Dilemma

Starbucks is in the news for many reasons. But, we don’t do news here. Instead, let me share a post that Trung Phan had done sometime back. It talked of Starbucks' digital dilemma.

From “Starbucks is a bank dressed up as a coffee shop” to the concept of “third place” to new products like “Lavender Latte” - there are lots of ingredients to Starbucks’ story and present challenges. And, Trung has done a fair job making it an interesting read.

For me, Starbucks’ story raises some interesting questions for business discussions:

Starbucks' success has often been credited to their focus on premium coffee, creating a unique “third place” experience, and strong customer service. Despite this, they’ve faced cycles of decline and recovery. Why does this keep happening?
Is the share price a true measure of the company's current situation? The post mentions same-store sales growth, which might be a better indicator. What other metrics should be considered?
In India, the situation seems different. Premium coffee chains offer a social space but coffee is still a minor player. Specialty coffee shops are emerging but are not yet a major market force. How will the market evolve from here?

🧑‍🏫 How To Be An Actually Useful Generalist

I pride myself as a generalist. My career trajectory is filled with assignments in different functions & categories. I’ve been dispatched as a problem solver to unknown territories, and I’ve done a fair job in delivering on it. I love what I do (and also I do only what I love), and this journey of being a generalist has a strong role to play in this.

Tara Seshan’s 10 things about being an actually useful "generalist" has some great resources, in case you are interested in becoming a generalist (or are working with one). Here’s how she describes great generalists:

Great generalists are creative, understand the world from first principles, and aren’t afraid of exploring the world with fresh eyes. They effectively translate skills from one domain to another. They see connections between siloed pockets of specialization.

The post curates 10 great pieces, covering lessons from Tom Kalil (from Obama Administration), Molly Graham, Tyler Cowen and more. Each piece is worth a click and learning from. Here’s one quick snapshot from one of those:

Bookmark it, forward to those who might be interested. This is a really good piece.

🏙️ Congestion Tax In New York

Last year, Bangalore planned to introduce congestion tax on some of its busiest roads. I did not know what it meant and did not bother to know about it. From the news and memes it was clear that it was too radical an idea to get any actual traction anytime soon.

However, the need for such a solution and the doubts around its efficacy is a global phenomenon. While it has been successfully implemented in some cities - London, Singapore, Stockholm to name a few.

New York is another city that has debated over this topic for over 50 years now. This piece by Ben Adler takes us through New York’s historical attempts to introduce congestion tax and challenges it faced.

The idea of congestion pricing for New York City dates back to 1952, when it was first proposed by William Vickrey, a young academic at Columbia University who would go on to win the Nobel Prize in economics. It was an idea ahead of its time that would take decades to gain traction.

What has changed this time to bring this proposal to life?

New York’s long, winding road to congestion pricing contains lessons for other cities around the world that may want to follow suit. You can’t take the politics out of policy, you need to offer the communities that will be paying more something in return, and that something must involve a cut of the revenue rather than merely easing traffic.

The post shares historical context and details about the steps taken in the last 50 years, challenges and subsequent problem solvings. Those pitches over the years tried best to bring out the benefits and find possible common ground with the detractors of this idea. These bits make it a good read.

As we speak, New York has passed relevant legislation to implement it later this year. Will it really happen finally? That is to be seen.

🚗 What Should An EV Sound Like?

For over a century, the internal combustion engine powered vehicles with an intricate combination of moving parts and tiny explosions. That combustion process inevitably made noise, and that noise came to define the background soundscape of our roads, cities, and day-to-day life. But as hybrids and EVs became increasingly mainstream — and more of their near-silent electric motors filled the streets — it became clear that silent vehicles didn’t fit in the ecosystem we’d built around cars.

Today car makers are working with sound experts to solve this. A couple of interesting sources to read on this.

From Kottke: What should an electric car sound like?

The different kinds of sounds that carmakers have had to come up with to make EVs audible to pedestrians, bikers, and other drivers are wild: orchestras, pitch-shifted didgeridoos, gas car noises.

From New Yorker: What should a nine-thousand-pound electric vehicle sound like? (archived version here)

Hans Zimmer, the film composer, was involved in scoring branded sounds for BMW’s Vision M Next car. The Volkswagen ID.3’s sound was created by Leslie Mándoki, a German-Hungarian prog-rock/jazz-adjacent producer. The Atlanta-based electronic musician Richard Devine was brought in to help in making the Jaguar I-Pace’s voltaic purr.

🎞️ Restoration

Restoring old objects is a technical challenge, but passion is the key factor. The most inspiring restoration stories come from people who decided to save something and figured out how to do it along the way. It’s motivating to read about their determination and commitment as they go to great lengths to restore valuable items.

Here are some new and some old stories on this topic that are worth knowing.

Shivendra Dungarpur begins a new Manthan. This piece covers the journey of Shivendra Dungarpur to restoring Manthan and his plans ahead. For those who are not aware, Manthan was India’s first-ever crowd-funded film. This 1976 movie told us the story of Amul and was made with the tiny contribution of 5,00,000 farmers.

What he discovered was disappointing and shocking. After spending lots of time and money sorting through goods and storage boxes, Dungarpur found movies tattered, torn and dried up in dustbins. In one of his posts on X, he narrates the degrading state of film heritage. Madhubala’s negatives were found dumped in cartons. “Most valuable films have been found in the worst conditions.”

Weird and Wonderful Filmstrips. Mark O’Brien restores old filmstrip presentations that were used in schools in the last century. For the uninitiated (like me), firmstrips were rolls of 35mm film projected one frame at a time onto a screen, accompanied by audio played on a record or cassette. When you heard a beep, some student who was picked to run the projector turned a knob that advanced it to the next frame while the teacher got to take a little break. This post has links to some of the restored items and they are quite fun to watch. Those classes would have been a lot of fun, I must say!

From “Stay Curious” Archives:

Letterlocking - how a few clever folds, adhesive, and a lot of ingenuity enabled secure communication hundreds of years ago.
Story of Goa’s last typewriter repair shop
Documentary on the restoration of a defaced Rothko painting.
Sophia Bogle restores century-old books.
This documentary about “the last repair shop” and its 4 devoted craftspeople who maintain more than 80,000 student musical instruments, bringing so much more than music to the schoolchildren of LA.
“The Violin Doctor - John Becker” who repairs the world’s most fabled and expensive instruments.

✨ Everything else

If you care about tiny little interactions, UX Bites offers a good collection of bite-sized interactions. It’s for those little moments of joy!
Brighton Denevan’s Insta profile reads “Land Artist” and “Drone Pilot”. When I saw his feed, I described him as a magician. He works with a large canvas - really big canvas. Check it out at @brightondenevan. (via Dense Discovery)
Time flies like an arrow; fruit flies like a banana. This is an example of a garden path sentence. Nir Zicherman’s post has many more really fun examples to tell us how these ‘garden path trails’ are everywhere!

⏰ In case you missed last week’s post, you can find it here.