📚 Stay Curious #238

Buffett’s Letter, Naukri.com Story, Orange Julius, Good Execution, Tim Urban on Toddlerhood, Personal Business & more

Nov 24, 2025

Hello,

It’s been a fantastic week and weekend. Before we get to today’s curation, here are two ideas I want to seed in your mind.

Curiosity

“Curiosities provoke people to investigate further... The initial “What’s going on here?” reaction doesn’t contain the insight, but it starts the person on the road to gaining the insight. Curiosities differ from coincidences in one way: They are sparked by a single event or observation rather than by the repetition of a pattern.
via FoundingFuel

Boredom

The interesting thing about not being busy is that you can study the people who are. All art begins with observation, and you can only observe when you are not sprinting to some destination. That is why a little boredom becomes useful. I slowly became aware of this boredom because I was always stuck in the wrong places, waiting for each phase to fade.
via Anurag Minus Verma

The first idea sits at the very origin of this newsletter and why we gather here each week.

It is “boredom” that fascinates and challenges me even more. As Abhishek Verma commented on a short post of mine, “Being bored is not equal to not being entertained. My brain often conflates the two quite erroneously.”

It is a powerful realization, one that can genuinely shift how you treat your time and life. I will leave it here today, but expect many more thoughts on these two themes in the coming weeks.

Today’s curation is a mix of stories that offered warmth and made me feel optimistic. Here is a quick list to give you a flavor:

I’ve loved these, each one made me pause and reflect. I hope they do this to you too. Let’s get started…

📝 Buffett’s 2025 Letter

Another letter from Warren Buffett, and this one is said to be his final note to shareholders. The baton now passes to Greg Abel.

Buffett’s letters always bring a certain warmth. They carry his joyful take on life, people, and business. He talks about Omaha, the colleagues he has learned from, the books that shaped him, and the simple lessons he picked up along the way. He never claims greatness, yet it quietly shines through his humility and gentle storytelling.

Letters like these need deep self-reflection and an honest look at one’s life — something Buffett seems to have in abundance. It will be interesting to see how Greg shapes and carries this legacy forward.

Do you know anyone else who writes like Buffett? I’d love to read more. These stories carry the essence of a life lived well, without ever trying to say so.

📰 Sanjeev Bikhchandani & Naukri’s Story

Sanjeev Bikhchandani is easily one of the OGs of India’s internet story. His startup Naukri.com and later his early bets on companies like Zomato helped shape the entire ecosystem.

I remember hearing his name even in my college days, but I never went deeper. Back then, I thought inspiration had to come from people who built iconic products I personally used or admired, and Naukri didn’t fall in that bucket for me. I’ve come a long way since. After watching the ecosystem evolve over the last 15 years, I’ve learned to admire the people who built before us, the ones who created the foundations we now stand on.

So when Mukesh Bansal hosted Sanjeev on his SparX podcast, I had to listen. It’s a one-hour conversation packed with lessons from the trenches. His story of how the idea for Naukri.com was born is genuinely fascinating. It shows how curiosity + sharp observation + stubborn determination can create legendary businesses.

Sanjeev’s journey (and Naukri’s origin story) deserves to be told more often. Here’s a quick gist from the conversation:

How he noticed an unusual way of using a product and got curious:

Jobs are a high‑interest category. I saw colleagues pass around Business India, reading the appointments section from the back, benchmarking roles.” ⁠

On seeing a pattern

“Because there were eight–ten people from IIM in one place… very good headhunting crowd… I realized different colleagues were getting different jobs in different companies — and these jobs were not appearing in print.”
“Headhunters kept calling my team; many roles never appeared in print. Print was just the tip of the iceberg—data was fragmented and not in one place.” ⁠

An innovation that could bring massive change… yet the start was in baby steps.

“In 1996 I saw the internet demo and thought: I don’t want to buy access; I want to run a server. We then aggregated appointment ads from 29 publications and put them online.” ⁠

“That’s when we realized, by mistake, we’d stumbled onto a big idea—and became an internet company.”

🪄 Claude Use Cases

What do you do when you’re handed an all-powerful tool?

In theory, you can turn any dream into reality. You can make tough tasks feel like child’s play. But it rarely works like that. Most of us stop at the basic “Hello World” level, get bored, and never reach the magic that sits just a few steps beyond.

That’s the real gap GenAI tools need to close. They offer endless possibilities, but new users (and even experienced ones) need simple, timely ways to discover what’s actually possible.

Claude recently published a page showcasing a wide range of practical use cases. It’s a smart way to spark ideas and give people ready-made recipes to try.

Take a look and see which use cases you could try; especially the ones you never imagined.

🥤 Orange Julius & Behavioural Design

So Sam Liberty’s Medium post is titled Everything I Know About Behavioral Design I Learned at Orange Julius. That’s class-A clickbait. But don’t worry, I checked it out, and it’s worth your time. I even dug up an archived version in case Medium’s paywall gets annoying.

The lesson here is simple, and it applies to almost everything you will ever design: What people say they want, and what they say they’ll do, is rarely what they actually want and do.

It’s a lesson we all need, yet we somehow keep ignoring it even when we bump into it. Sam breaks this down into five reasons, each one relatable and easy to act on once you spot it.

Here’s his key message; one that captures our role as designers or builders perfectly:

When someone tells you in a user interview that they would “definitely use” a feature, they probably believe it. They’re not lying. But they’re also not accounting for all the invisible barriers between intention and action.
Your job as a designer is to identify those barriers and either remove them or make them so small that users barely notice they’re there.

🎯 What Good Execution Looks Like

Yusuf Aytas’s What Good Execution Looks Like is one of the best pieces on execution that I have read in a long time. It covers such a wide range of challenges and solutions that I would not be surprised if he turns it into a book someday.

I loved it because it kept throwing up situations and signals that I see around me almost every day. Many of the solutions are things I have learned the hard way over the last couple of decades.

Here is a sample from his take on Process, which is often the favorite tool in any operator’s kit.

There is so much wisdom in one place. I am sure I will use this as a reference in my problem solving for a long time.

👶 Tales from Toddlerhood

So Tim Urban created Tales from Toddlerhood to share the truth of being a parent to very young children. It is classic Tim Urban with sharp observations and a witty style that lands every single time. The visuals will make you laugh out loud.

This theme may not be relevant for everyone. Still, I recommend it for the simple joy of good storytelling.

Here take a quick look:

Somebody had to say this!

💗 Personal Business

Charles Broskoski, one of the co-founders of Are.na, has written a heartfelt post about how Personal Businesses can hold on to their soul in a tough and unforgiving world. His message to creators is simple and powerful: know what makes your life’s work meaningful, and protect that meaning.

The companies that stand out are the ones who have a particularly high-quality way of doing things. That quality can be traced back to the people who run and work for the company having a deep personal connection to what it is they do.

Once you believe that, you also know how to make it flourish in spite of all that happens around you.

Maybe most importantly, a Personal Business is properly scaled. It doesn’t have to be small, but it should grow at a pace that optimizes for its own resilience rather than to dominate a market.

These ideas are for the people building such businesses. But what about the people who support them? They feel the essence and the clear reason behind the work. This creates a lifelong bond that gives you energy and support through any rough patch, and lets you enjoy the journey while you are at it.

It is a lovely post, and one I will keep as a reminder to think about why we do what we do.

✨ Everything else

Stuffed memories: Every toy has a story. Some of them were lucky to be captured in this place.
Remember Kiki and Bouba? Visit them and some more in this fantastic short video: The hidden linguistic messages in brand names!
And to end today’s curation, here’s a beautiful story of the neurodivergent genius who invented Formula 1 for marbles. I was sold at “Formula 1 for Marbles.”

ICYMI, here is the link to last week’s post: