💡 Tackling the hard thing first gets you to “no” faster.

Your weekly dose of new ideas & inspirations

Hey, Pritesh here. 

Welcome to those who joined us recently in this journey of discovering new ideas & inspirations. 

We’ve reached post #108. Here’s a quick glance of what do we cover today:

🎛️ 7 Qualities of conversation interfaces

🐒 Monkeys and the reverse salient  

🍎 Apple test

📈 Ergodicity & Long term thinking

🎨 Impossible street art

And much more…

If you enjoy reading “Stay Curious”, show your love by ❤️’ing it or leaving a comment or sharing it with a couple of your friends. Any support is highly appreciated.

And with that, let’s dive in.

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1. Conversation interfaces

Yura Turivny’s “7 Qualities of a Conversion Interface” provides a step-by-step approach to optimising user experience, covering aspects such as reducing cognitive load, anticipating user needs, and delivering relevant, high-impact content.

He has listed the 7 qualities in a fairly easy to understand & memorable manner. If you are into designing any digital product, check out the post for a good example led guide. 

Here are the 7 qualities that Yura covers, in any case.

1. High benefit ratio

2. Low logic ratio

3. Familiarity

4. Transparency

5. Farsightedness

6. Legibility

7. Comfortability

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2. Reverse Salient

Annie Duke connects two very interesting concepts in her recent note “Monkeys and the Reverse Salient”.  

The concept of reverse salient roughly means “the technology or process that is holding back development of the whole system (like ⚡️ ︎car batteries did). Solving the salient unlocks change.”

“Monkeys and pedestals” is a mental model for approaching problems. It tells us to attack the hard thing first because if we can’t solve for that there is really no point in doing the rest of the work.

Together both these concepts nudge towards the hard thing first. This gives you better chances for delivering a great outcome, or a lesser sunk cost. As she summarizes towards the end.

Tackling the hard thing first gets you to “no” faster. And the faster you figure out the monkey is untrainable, the less time and money and effort you have sunk into the project, making it easier to quit when the time is right.

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3. “Apple Test”

I am slowly getting a hang of the new “generative AI” and knowledge bots world. My twitter feed is (over) filled with chatter around this now. This ‘new world’ has a lot of new concepts and some of them are really fun to know. 

In “One chatbot to rule them all”, Jitha talks about one such thing - the  “Apple Test”. Here’s a brief intro: 

He runs it on ChatGPT Plus, ChatGPT Free, Bing AI, Google Bard and Anthropic Claude+ (these are the 5 most popular chatbots as of writing his post, by the way).

His findings are interesting to say the least. It’s surprising how such a simple question can actually expose us to current limitations of generative AI models.

This post also touches on 2x2 on decision-making from Stripe CEO Patrick Collison. Worth checking out and bookmarking.

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4. My 3-2-1 on Decision Making

Last month, my friend Satyajit Rout invited me to do a guest post for his weekly newsletter - “Curiosity > Certainty”.

Rout is a great thinker and a prolific writer. His command on the topic of decision making is unmatched and his newsletter offers a great set of curated insights into what the best have figured out, all to help you think and be better.

I am excited to curate a post for his newsletter and here’s the premise of my post. 

This 3-2-1 is the best of what I have discovered and found relevant as a 101 on this topic. Check it out and share your feedback.  

Guest Post: Your decisions are not all the same, so why treat them the same?

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5. Ergodicity & Long term thinking

Technically, an ergodic system is a system that has the same outcomes when one instance is averaged across 100 iterations or one hundred instances are averaged across one iteration.

Stoa Blog’s post – Making sense of "long-term thinking" – offers some really simple & easy to understand examples of the ergodicity. 

However, that’s just a segue to the main theme of the post - how long term thinking can benefit from understanding the concept of ergodicity. Here’s a snapshot from the post to know more… 

It’s a short post but with some great insights and good storytelling (as usual of the Stoa blog). Worth checking out!

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6. Advice for ‘Aspiring creatives’

In “Trust me, I’m creative” isn’t going to cut it, Jess Wheeler talks of the challenges he sees in the current generation of ‘creatives’ folks he meets.  

​I can vouch for this happening far too often. And not just in the field of ‘creatives’. I see this pattern in PM enthusiasts, SM experts and what not! 

Wheeler’s advice is simple - Show how you think, show you can see an idea through, and keep doing it until you can no longer be ignored.

You don’t find it useful or actionable enough? Then check out his post, the example from his journey & the way he made it possible is going to give you enough reasons to believe this one. 

(via Noheeriye’s WA channel)

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7. Everything else

Some random goodness from the internet:

1. “I got my name from Connie Chung. So did they.” A great story about what inspired Asian parents & kids in the USA when it comes to finding their English name. Fiftytwo.in had done an equally intriguing story on things that inspired scores of Indian parents when it came to naming their kids Sanjana.

2. Impossible street art. Joseph Ford showcases the world street artists would create if there were no limits. A brilliant idea beautifully executed. 

3. Omar Reda instagram is a great collection of portraits captured during his travels across the world covering remote communities.

4. Engineers compete to share the worst UI they can imagine. Hilarious stuff!

The title of today’s post is from Annie Duke’s post.

Before we sign off, here’s a quick poll for you. Pls do share your feedback, it helps make this newsletter better.

That's all for this week, folks!  

I hope I've earned the privilege of your time.

If you enjoyed this post, show your love by ❤️’ing it or leaving a comment or sharing it with a couple of your friends.