📚 MrBeast’s Onboarding Playbook, Optics in Performance Reviews, Rory Sutherland’s Psycho-logic, Moleskine Mania, Tiny Tricks for a Sorted Life

Google Maps in India, Lab Grown Diamonds, Lego Contraptions, Mountain Bike Flips on a Moving Train & more

Hello, this is post #177.

I had a fairly exciting last week, and it is showing up in today’s lineup. I don’t want to keep you waiting, so let’s take a quick look at the lineup and jump straight to the good stuff! 

Are you excited? I loved all these and so they found a place here. Let’s not wait and get started.

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📑 MrBeast’s Onboarding Playbook

MrBeast’s How-To-Succeed-At-MrBeast-Production.pdf has become the hottest topic of discussion since it got leaked. And it should be. However, I am not getting into the rights or wrongs of what he does and how.

I loved it (and therefore sharing it with you here) because I found it a good example of how ‘org playbooks’ should be. Once you ignore the language and a few comments, you have a great articulation of how one can provide context & clarity to any newcomer.

1. There is a good section on key metrics, why they matter and how to internalize them in your thinking. The inputs around ‘what minute of the video’ is remarkable to see.

2. The emphasis on ownership & accountability is laid out in abundance. Those examples set the bar for anyone new.

3. He has spent a lot of time on communication in all forms, including taking videos. Again, his examples and why it matters make it useful and effective.

4. His emphasis on youtube videos as against any other form of media, and need to use it extensively is what any customer obsessed team will expect from their team members. He has some great references on why and how.

Overall, I find it a highly useful manual to understand their world. Any newcomer should benefit immensely from this. 

Imagine a world where this is not coded, and one has to discover it on their own. It would be such a disaster (a lot of us go through this journey, by the way).

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🗂️ Optics in Performance Reviews 

Shreyas Doshi shares a rough model to help think about how you are perceived during your performance reviews. He says that your work is generally observed and perceived by others along the following 3 dimensions: Content, Confidence & Context. 

Shreyas has provided simple explanations of these, and you can easily map these to your world. Here’s my read on these.

• Content: What you bring to table.

• Confidence: How well you bring it to the table.

• Context: how do you ensure you’re at the right table.

As you can guess, these are not the true measure of your impact. But, these influence (and thus work at optics level) how others perceive your performance. Each employee projects on one or many of these, and together they define how others will see his contribution.

Give it a read to improve your influence on how other people perceive your performance.

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🛣️ Google Maps in India

Every week, some trending news or meme reminds us that India is not for beginners. They are often done in good spirit, and generate a laugh or two.

Once in a while, you come across cases where somebody - a person, a business, anyone - puts in effort to understand why we are like this. And, they use these insights to offer some ways to make our lives better.

This case study of Google Maps UX: The India conundrum is one such example for me. It talks about how Google Maps first failed and then creatively adapted to flourish in India.

If you’re familiar with India, you will know instantly that we’re talking about challenges posed by India’s heterogeneous address system. This case study shows how the cultural nuance of how we ‘navigate’ and ‘describe routes’ made the problem worse.

It further covers how the Google team solved this problem to a fairly good extent. I use Google navigation everyday, and can vouch for the efficacy of their claims.

One bit that stood out to me around how they understood our current approach to ‘navigating’.

When I think about doing customer conversations, I often get stuck at how to get the customer to explain their world and challenges better. This snippet above shows how we can get around in such situations.

A recent feature release in Google Maps has finally solved one more big issue that we faced often around taking the flyover or not! Now it explicitly tells us to ‘take flyover’. 

The Google blog shares more context about this & a few more recent India specific changes rolled out in the last few months.

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🧠 Rory Sutherland’s Psycho-logic

Last week, I binged on Rory Sutherland’s talks. He is a storyteller. He can bring examples from any field, connect the dots to make a fairly persuasive argument all the while telling a joke or two about British culture.

I’m sharing two talks from recent times. There is a small overlap on some of the ideas, but trust me both the talks are still worth a listen.

1. Are we now too impatient to be intelligent? A recent talk nudging us to question the need for fast versus a deliberate and thoughtful action. 

The great thing about the human brain is it can process the same thing in two different ways. [...]

I owe this insight to my colleague Colin Nimick, a brilliant copywriter at Ogilvy who said, “In New York, people speak fast. In the American South, they speak slowly. Both of them are a form of politeness, understood in a different way. In New York, you speak quickly because you respect the value of the other person’s time and you don’t want to take up too much of it. In the South, you speak slowly because you want to respect the person by showing how much of your own time you are prepared to give to them.”

These are two behaviors, which, depending on cultural context, are intended to attain the same end while being completely opposite. And I think human psychology is absolutely packed full of these things. A union of opposites.

2. How advertising works Rory uses case studies from the world’s biggest brands to show how advertising makes us act against reason. Here’re some of the topics that he touches - London housing market, antelopes, Uber ratings, grand bank building, video conferencing, pension, how economist get many things wrong, transportation, coke and much more.

I am amazed by his energ and command on the audience. That, his storytelling style and vast experience makes up a deadly combination for great learning sessions.

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💎 Lab Grown Diamonds

How are Lab-grown diamonds made? Javid Lakha’s essay for ‘Work In Progress’ offers a fascinating look at the history, chemistry, and technology behind the industry. From big corporations and government regulations to US-Russia power struggles and monopolies, the story covers unexpected ground.

The diamonds that Hall’s process produced were tiny, measuring a few thousandths of a millimeter in diameter: just enough to glint. Diamonds of this size are too small for jewelry, but extremely useful in industry – at the time, they were (and still are) used for sawing, grinding, and polishing metal, drawing wire, and stamping precision components. General Electric’s industrial diamonds initially cost more than mined diamonds, but they quickly proved to be superior. Unlike in nature, the diamonds’ growth was precisely managed, and their shape and regularity could be made to order.

Hall, meanwhile, was forbidden from disclosing details about the belt press he invented, or using it to pursue further research into high-pressure chemistry, because of a secrecy order imposed by the United States Department of Commerce. During the Second World War, the supply of diamonds had been a source of anxiety for both the Allied and Axis powers. The United States, which did not have a domestic supply of diamonds, was dependent on the De Beers cartel for the diamonds necessary for its industrial production, and the business model of De Beers was to drive up prices by artificially restricting the world’s supply.

It’s a super fascinating read, fairly detailed but may feel nerdy. See if this is your flavor. 

I recently did a deep dive into the lab-grown diamond category as a quick exercise to sharpen my research skills, and I was surprised by how little I understood about the business and user behavior.

Here are my two key takeaways:

1. While lab-grown diamonds are more affordable, they risk diminishing the prestige of owning a diamond, which could impact short-term growth in the category.

2. We haven’t yet discovered a breakthrough product or design for this space. Simply applying current diamond jewelry use cases may not be enough for long-term business sustainability in this new innovation.

If you're interested in this topic, I’d love to chat more. Feel free to comment or DM me.

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🫶 Crafted with Love

"Every great product has a story—some resonate, others don’t. These stories may center on the product's origin, the problem it solves, the solution it offers, or the emotions it evokes. Sometimes, they’re about the user. Altogether, they enrich the brand's narrative and forge a deeper connection with the audience.

Today, I have two beautiful product stories for you. When I read them, I felt a blend of joy and the sense of something crafted ‘with love.’"

1. Moleskine mania by Roland Allen. How a notebook conquered the digital era? You would have seen them with your ‘designer’ friends. If not, the description below will certainly paint a picture of what we’re talking about and why.

You don’t need me to tell you what a Moleskine looks like, but you may not have considered how insistently its design sends messages to the contemporary nomad. The minimal black cover looks, at first glance, like it might be leather: robust but also luxurious. The non-standard dimensions, a couple of centimetres narrower than the familiar A5, let you slip the notebook into a jacket pocket, and the rounded corners—which add considerably to the production cost—help with this. They also stop your pages from getting dog-eared and, together with the elastic strap and unusually heavy cover boards, confirm that the notebook is ready for travel. The edges of the board sit flush with the page block, ensuring that your Moleskine can never be mistaken for a printed book. In use, it lies obediently open and flat, and the pocket glued into the back cover board invites you to hide souvenirs—photos, tickets stubs, the phone numbers of beautiful strangers. Two hundred pages suggest that you have plenty to write about; the paper itself, tinted to a classy ivory shade and unusually smooth to the touch, implies that your ideas deserve nothing but the best, and the ribbon marker helps you navigate your musings. 

(via Readwise)

2. Jony Ive's LoveFrom reinvents the button with Moncler by Mark Wilson. Jony Ive needs no introduction. He has been doing ‘novel’ design & product explorations since he left Apple. This story talks about one such adventure. 

“How could you connect something where you didn’t have to pay attention? Velco’s sort of ingenious in that way. But I don’t think it’s satisfying,” Ive says. 

Explorations into all methods of attachment followed. “I tried to do better zippers, and zippers are really hard,” Ive says with a laugh. The team eventually homed in on buttons, and dug deep into their history and permutations.

As Ive explains, the button as we know it addresses a tricky problem in design: How do you connect a hard object to a flexible one? The solution most buttons use is thread, because thread offers a pliable connection to a rigid system. When sewn onto cloth, everything moves but the button itself, allowing it to angle and squeeze into its buttonhole.

I found this in Om Malik’s ‘On my Om’ blog. Check it out for one more fascinating story of product reinvention.

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💯 Tiny Tricks for a Sorted Life

Emma Beddington shares 100 tiny tricks to organize your life and make it less stressful. No fancy tools, but some simple tactical things. I love how people get creative to find such scrappy solutions for things that bother them. 

Here’re a couple of my favorites.

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✨ Everything else

1. Mountain bike flips on a moving train. Crazy stuff! These are the most insane stunts I’ve seen.

2. Tyler Cowen’s "How I practice at what I do" turned into a podcast conversion using Google Notebook LLM. Pretty neat stuff! Sid shared a version of podcast discussing Stay Curious #175. It was quite amazing. Brace yourselves to see a lot more podcast episodes in the coming weeks.

3. Lego great ball contraption. Well the titles says Lego and contraption. Do you need anything else? 

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

📚 Art of Finishing, Developing Domain Expertise, OAuth from First Principles, Scammy Text Messages, New Ideas on Dating

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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, leave a comment or share with someone who will find it useful too. It’s highly encouraging. 

Pritesh