📚 Love letter framework, Three type of thinkers, To the right, hold on tight, How to live an asymmetric life, Vacation planning with an AI agent

Mini-research, Bottle Claus, One million checkboxes & more goodness from the last 200 weeks

Mar 03, 2025

Hello, this is post #200 🎉

This weekly email has been my constant companion for 200 weeks. Almost four years. Whoa! So much has changed, and what better way to see that than by looking back at past posts? Revisiting what sparked my curiosity then has been eye-opening. I’ve changed. If you've been here a while, you know what I mean.

For newer readers, I’ve done something different today - curating bits from past posts (the 1st, 25th, and so on). Each one reflects what fascinated me at that moment. While my interest in functional themes has shifted, my love for storytelling and human connection has stayed the same. That’s how we evolve, right? Priorities change, but some things remain.

I’m thrilled to be here, curating this 200th post. I would have started this journey no matter what, but staying on it? That’s thanks to the support and energy so many of you have shared. From the bottom of my heart - thank you.

You’re a rockstar.

Stay curious always!

Here’s a quick lineup for today’s curation.

And now, let’s go back in time and see how my curiosity & I evolved over the last 200 weeks.

⚱️ Empathetic Communication

Empathy is a strong trait in building long-lasting relationships. In the service industry, it differentiates good experiences from great ones. This article talks of 4 actionable insights leveraged by the content team helping co-op funeral directors in the UK.

This was part of Stay Curious #1

💌 Love Letter Framework

Storytelling is more than getting the word out, it’s about getting through and being felt. Kat Cole described some nuance of this art in this insightful post in her newsletter. She calls her approach - The ‘Love Letter’ Framework. She recommends:

Write a love letter to each of these groups.
Customers & Community: a love letter to your key stakeholders, what they go through, and the impact they have on your company and the world at large
Founder and Origin Story: a love letter to your roots and beginning
Brand, Business, Product: a love letter about what you make and what you stand for

I got to work on each of these areas in the last few years. From employee onboarding to change management - I tried to rely on telling the 'why' and from the core of my heart. I guess I have started on the love letter framework already, and have to keep mastering this now.

This was part of Stay Curious #25

🤔 Three Type of Thinkers

Alan Jacobs claims in his short essay that useful thinkers come in three varieties. Below is an excerpt from his post (some formatting are mine to increase readability):

1. The Explainer knows stuff I don’t know and can present it clearly and vividly. This does not require great creativity or originality, though Explainers of the highest order will possess those traits too.
2. The Illuminator is definitionally original: someone who shines a clear strong light on some element of history or human experience that I never knew existed. (Though sometimes after reading something by an Illuminator I will think, Why didn’t I realize that before?)
3. The Provoker is original perhaps to a fault: Ambitious, wide-ranging, risk-taking, Provokers claim to know a lot more than they actually do but can be exceptionally useful in forcing readers to think about new things or think in new ways.

Be aware of what role the person in front of you is playing! That's the trick in extracting the best from any conversation or advice.

This was part of Stay Curious #50

🎮 To the Right, Hold on Tight

Have you ever played Super Mario Bros? If not, I highly recommend playing it for a bit. This essay from Anna Anthropy explores the way this game used its first two screens to support the player learning. Here’s a brief snippet from the post:

The first question of level design is how to communicate these interactions to the player. As a teacher, I often see students rely solely on an instructions screen to explain their game, and not consider how level design can support the player’s learning.
The first two screens of Super Mario Bros., designed by Takashi Tezuka and Shigeru Miyamoto, are designed to communicate the most critical rules of the game to new players. Consider that Mario is the game that popularized the “platformer” as a genre, and most of its players at the time of its release would be encountering these ideas for the first time. That requires thoughtful design!

The problem space sounds familiar for most product creators. And we’ve all toyed up with tutorials, coach marks and what not to solve for the onboarding. Mario did it without all of that jazz, and did it beautifully. The post does a superb job decoding it for us laymen. A great lesson. No wonder this post has been used as a reference in teaching level design in many gaming courses.

I found this in David Cole’s personal canon. Check it out as well, a lot of timeless classics in one place.

This was part of Stay Curious #75 and shaped my thinking about games and user interaction in general.

🧗 High Variance Management

Andy Grove’s “High Output Management” has been a guiding light for a lot of my managerial practices. It works well for highly structured & operational projects.

Sebastian Bensusan’s “High Variance Management” is a refreshing new take, especially for a world where the activities are beyond assembly lines. He describes the new world beautifully with his example of Broadway vs Movies. This is one of the best introductions I’ve read to any topic. Once there, he does a fantastic job breaking down his recipe to encourage high variance work.

Here’s a snippet to get you intrigued, if you’re not yet so.

Brilliant post, I highly recommend it.

This was part of Stay Curious #100

💯 How to Live an Asymmetric Life

This is from the Last Lecture by Graham Weaver at Stanford GSB 2023. A professional investor and lecturer Graham talks about how to live an asymmetric life. His formulae has four key ingredients:

Do hard things.
Do your thing.
Do it for decades.
Write your story.

Each one of them has the power to create a massive impact in your life. Together, they are a force to be reckoned with.

He also warns about how ‘Fear’ can hold you back and how these four principles can prepare you to overcome that.

One of the biggest things that will hold you back in life is fear. Fear is a master manipulator. It will disguise itself as helping you, as being practical, as keeping you safe. And ultimately, fear will disguise itself as “not me” and “not now.” It might already be creeping in as you read this.

Check the complete lecture here, or you can read a quick post that’s based on this lecture here.

James Clear had written about something very similar in “Lessons on Success and Deliberate Practice from Mozart, Picasso, and Kobe Bryant,” in case you are intrigued to explore more.

Finally, if you’ve not seen the Last Lecture by Randy Pausch, please do that. This is one of those things you should revisit every once in a while to recharge your batteries.

This was part of Stay Curious #125

🔎 Mini Research

We live in an imperfect world and so expecting to do a perfect product research is kind of an illusion. Maret Kruve recommends doing mini research and shares 25 mini-research ideas for inspiration.

Here’s her definition of mini-research:

Mini-research is about
Looking for actionable insights
with minimal effort
using any combination of methods necessary.
It involves conducting a condensed version of a full research study, focusing on one key inquiry, and gathering just enough information to make an informed decision or recommendation.
It is not about cutting corners or sacrificing quality, but rather being extremely efficient and targeted with the research scope and methods.

She shares the most commonly used tactics. You can refer to the post as a reference list. Here’s my key takeaway while taking the mini-research methodology. :

Aim for sufficient accuracy. Assess the level of detail and accuracy needed for your project, and aim to collect just enough data to meet these requirements. If a few confirming examples are sufficient to support your conclusions, do not seek exhaustive, statistically significant data. It is important to recognise when additional data does not significantly improve your understanding or decision-making and find the balance between data sufficiency and efficiency.

This was part of Stay Curious #150

🧳 Vacation Planning with an AI Agent

Can artificial intelligence devise a bucket-list vacation that checks all the boxes: culture, nature, hotels and transportation?

Ceylan Yeğinsu (of NYTimes) attempts to find out. She used three virtual assistants (Vacay, MindTrip and ChatGPT) to design a 4 day itinerary for her dream vacation and shared her experience in “My first trip to Norway, with a.i. as a guide”.

She does her best to cross off things from her bucket list - travel, sightseeing, food, experience. And, there are odd discoveries and random surprises as she is going through her plan.

Read this post for two things:

Learn from Ceylan on trip planning, using AI bots and all things howtos. She has a fair amount of practical tips in a short post.
Experience Norway. Oslo, Fjord, Flam Railways, Gudvangen, Bergen - she takes us through the best of Norway. I had been to these places 15 years back, it was great to relive some of those memories.

A snippet..

I ended my trip in Bergen, which, despite being Norway’s second-largest city, maintains a small-town charm with its colorful wooden houses and cobblestone streets. With only half a day to explore, I followed Mindtrip’s short itinerary, starting with a hearty lunch of fish and chips at the bustling waterfront fish market and ending with a funicular ride up Mount Floyen for panoramic views of the city and fjords. The A.I. dinner suggestion at the Colonialen was perfect: cozy vibe, live jazz and locally sourced dishes.

This was part of Stay Curious #175

✨ Everything else

The Strange, True Story of John Williams and Charles Pennock. In the early 1900s it wasn't unusual for men to suddenly go missing. Among them were two accomplished bird experts whose lives turned out to be surprisingly intertwined. This is Netflix documentary stuff.
For the Hobbit & LOTR fans, here’s a collection of maps that Tolkien drew as he created his new world. And while you’re there, don’t forget to check out his illustrations and calligraphy work too.
"And per se, and" eventually evolved into ampersand, the word we know and love today. & the rest is history.
YouTube influencers enter Chandni Chowk; magic has just begun. Traditional advertising and distribution is changing rapidly.
Claus-Henning Schulke is an accomplished triathlete, having finished 6x Ironman events. But this one is a beautiful story about why he is also known as “Bottle Claus”.
Nooks and crannies of Amsterdam are a Canvas for Frankey’s street art. If you like Frankey’s work, here is a NYT piece to know more about it.
The story of One Million Checkboxes got even more exciting. The secret inside One Million Checkboxes shows how creativity can flourish even in constraints, if the people involved are passionate about what they do. I love such stories of massive online collaboration that may look nerdy at first sight, but are actually a giant social experiment of human behavior.

ICYMI…

In case you’re looking for a book recommendation, I’ve got you covered in last week’s post. For those interested in art & beauty, The Wild Robot, Use art to turn the world inside out are going to be great fun.

📚 To park or not to park? A history of the world in 6 glasses, GenZ slang cheat sheet, 50 Years of travel tips, How to ask the right questions

Pritesh

February 24, 2025

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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 and leave a comment to tell me more. Forward it to a friend who will find it useful, there is no better way to make this world more curious!

Pritesh