📚 Screenshot test, EAS framework, Calling out room dynamics, Tyler Cowen, The end of children, Crossword reborn
Knock knock situations, Fat salt & Gravy stains, 25 Years of Kottke and more
Hello, this is post #202.
This week was much more relaxing than the last few. Here are some quick notes before diving into today’s finds.
Holi came and went. I skipped the colors and opted for some much-needed rest at home. On the bright side, our interior work trips were productive, which feels great.
I’m listening to Land of Seven Rivers by Sanjeev Sanyal. The premise is strong, and the stories are fascinating, but some parts feel like a convenient retelling to push a certain narrative. I should balance it with another take on Indian history—got any recommendations?
Google Chromecast Gen2 had an outage due to a certificate expiry. I didn’t expect such a major issue and ended up resetting the device. Three to four days without casting power felt like an achievement. Watching long-form content on small screens is just not the same.
White Lotus Season 3 is testing my patience—they’re masters at building suspense.
And Ted Lasso is getting a Season 4. Yay!
And with that, let’s take a quick look at today’s finds.
A lot of goodness to experience today, let’s get started…
📸 Screenshot Test & Other Lessons from Figma
Figma’s CPO, Yuhki Yamashita, was a passionate user before joining the team and eventually leading as its Chief Product Officer. He was so captivated by the product that he set out to help build it himself.
In this First Round Review piece, he shares key lessons on scaling a product beyond the PMF stage—expanding from a single product to a multi-product suite and from serving one user persona to many. He also dives into the storytelling aspect of launching a successful product.
There are some great insights in this piece. Sharing a couple of them below for reference:
On how to enable new idea generation in your team…
On how to start building on a new idea…
On how external point of view adds edge to the internal expertise…
On effectiveness of a product’s story…
🙋 EAS Framework for Simplifying Forms
Use the EAS framework — Eliminate first, Automate where possible, and Simplify what remains — to minimize user effort and improve form completion rates.
Here’s the three guiding principles of EAS:
Eliminate first: Remove questions that are nonessential, nonurgent, or irrelevant.
Automate where possible: Minimize manual input by leveraging existing or inferable data.
Simplify what remains: Speed up input with helpful defaults, alternative input, and smart formatting.
This short NN/g article explores how to make users do less, with solid examples from real products. It’s a quick but valuable read—worth revisiting if you're involved in product building in any way.
(via sidebar)
⚔️ Art of Calling Out Room Dynamics
Picture a high-stakes meeting: a long list of grievances, selective hearing, rising frustration, wild assumptions, emotional outbursts, and circular arguments. Eventually, the group resolves by exhaustion. The decision? Mediocre at best, harmful at worst. And the team dynamics? Damaged.
If this sounds familiar, there’s a simple but powerful tool — calling out room dynamics. Stating the obvious and naming the situation can be the first step toward breaking the logjam and steering the group in a better direction. It’s not easy, but it’s worth trying, especially if you’re responsible for high-stakes meetings. Highly recommended.
(via Readwise)
🏋️ How to Be More Consistent
Sahil Bloom shares seven strategies for building consistency. The first two stand out—they’re foundational and easy to apply without needing much external input.
Every day is easier than most days.
It's easier to do something every single day than it is to do something most days.
Every day becomes an identity. It's a routine, a lifestyle, a structure, a schedule. It's daily evidence of who you really are.
Fire in the act, grace in the amount.
Hold yourself to the fire when it comes to the act, but give yourself grace when it comes to the amount.
In other words, make sure you do the thing, but don't worry about how much of the thing you do.
This approach gives you the flexibility to adapt to the natural chaos of life without breaking the streak, recognizing that anything above zero compounds.
I’m not a big fan of his writing these days, but posts like this make following his feed worth it.
🦸 Profile: Tyler Cowen
John Phipps profiles my favorite thinker in the new world - Tyler Cowen, the man who wants to know everything (Archive here).
Cowen’s blog (Marginal Revolution), his podcast (Conversations with Tyler), and his Emergent Ventures scholarships are endless sources of insight and inspiration. His relentless curiosity and drive to chase it make him a true role model.
If I’m a nerd of the information age, then Tyler Cowen is my hero.
I asked Cowen – it is the kind of question you come to ask him – what were the criteria for a perfect Central American square. He began plucking details from the scene around us. Music, trees, a church, a fountain, children playing. “Good balloons,” he noted, looking approvingly at a balloon seller. I genuinely couldn’t tell whether he was extemporising from the available details, or indexing what he saw against a pre-existing model of what the ideal square should look like.
👶 The End of Children
In “The end of children,” Gideon Lewis-Kraus observes that birth rates are crashing around the world. Should we be worried? (archive here)
It’s a deep dive into a topic that might not be on everyone’s radar, but that’s what makes it compelling. I enjoyed how it explores so many nuanced perspectives on something so fundamental and far-reaching.
A couple of snippets to give you a sense…
By the twentieth century, more rational explanations had caught up. An industrializing economy no longer required children to help on the farm. Women were free to enter the workplace. At the same time, improvements in medicine and sanitation radically reduced the rate of childhood mortality. Children became capital assets, and investments in their education were understood to beget healthy returns. Economists likened this to other consumer durables: as families get richer, they don’t just keep buying cars; they buy nicer ones.
There’s a philosophical view, best associated with the scholar L. A. Paul, that the decision to have children is fundamentally irrational. A rigorous cost-benefit analysis might produce an estimate of a child’s expected value, but the experience is transformative in a way that renders the calculation irrelevant. You will have made a decision by the lights of a person you will no longer be.
(via Commoncog)
🚪 Knock Knock Situations
Seth Godin uses Knock Knock jokes as a clever metaphor to help creators and builders rethink their approach to the market
If you create a knock knock situation, you have to alert people to what’s on offer, but not actually give them what’s on offer. You need ‘who’s there’. That means that your online posts and videos are about the thing, they aren’t the thing itself.
And the opportunity for tool builders and community organizers is to give away the punchline, often. To focus on abundance (of connection and utility and trust) not scarcity.
Seth puts it brilliantly: mass media once helped creators build anticipation and announce their work. Without a clear “who’s there,” you risk missing something crucial—an audience, a transaction, and ultimately, a business. You can still create for personal satisfaction, but it’s important to be clear about that choice.
🏅 Looking Back, Looking Forward
I love milestone posts where people reflect on their journey and share key lessons. They’re even more special when someone has been at it for years—insights shift from tactical tips to core truths about life. Here are a couple of great ones I’m saving for reference.
Jay Rayner looks back to the last 15 years of food writing in his last OFM column.
Fat is where the flavour is and salt is the difference between eating in black and white and eating in Technicolor, even if your cardiologist would disagree.
Great food can be found in the scuzziest of places. Gravy stains down your shirt are not a source of embarrassment; they are a badge of honour
Jason Kottke on 25 years of Kottke.org (Kottke.org turned 27 this week, and this post is from a couple of years ago.)
But by the time I actually got interested enough to start my own weblog, there were so many of them — hundreds! maybe thousands! — that I thought I was too late, that no one would be interested. I forged ahead anyway and on March 14, 1998, I started the weblog that would soon become kottke.org.
Some of my older posts are genuinely cringeworthy to read now: poorly written, cluelessly privileged, and even mean spirited. I’m ashamed to have written some of them.
But had I not written all those posts, good and bad, I wouldn’t be who I am today, which, hopefully, is a somewhat wiser person vectoring towards a better version of himself.
(via Sunday Snippets)
✨ Everything else
From sea to sky, from land to city. Explore the landscape art in public space in the Netherlands at Landart Nederland. I admire folks who are able to support such unique initiatives that give us a chance to celebrate our planet in such beautiful ways. (via The Curious Corner)
If you like playing crosswords, [Bracket City] is a fresh new take to add some challenge & excitement. I am pretty bad at this game, I must admit. (via recomendo)
Late Checkout: A Ritz-Carlton Story and a quick chat with Michael and Robert de Cozar of The Ritz Hotel, London. A glimpse into the world of luxury hotel concierges—true magicians behind the scenes. (via Sublime)
“We’re on stage, we are actors. We’ve got big smiles… You’re a person and that’s what we acknowledge.”
ICYMI…
Buffett’s 2025 letter, An open letter to my dog and Samarth Bansal’s blog are my favorites from last week’s post. Find these and more in Stay Curious #201
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!
I don't know if this is in the general vicinity of the kind of Indian history you're after, or if you've read it already - but one of the most fascinating books for me has been Early Indians by Tony Joseph. Intercontinental migrations, DNA & ancestry and debunking of several myths related to the true origins of the entire Indian subcontinent.
That sounds right regarding Sanyal, though I still find his work valuable from what I've read and listened to, and I would like to read his books. I find Indian history so vast that the big books either are too dense and require too much preexisting knowledge that I lack (like John Keay's India) or are more accessible but too thin for anything to stick (Michael Wood's India comes to mind). I prefer to read about specific regions and eras of India and slowly but surely put the jigsaw puzzle together (traveling helps a lot to make things stick). However, for an all encompassing but very readable and useful Indian history book, I found John Zubrzycki's The Shortest History of India to be great. I probably knew half of the material in it already, but it was a good review and it helped me piece things together.