📚 Tom Whitewell’s 52 things, Actionable insights on user research, Exit interview, Lesson learned from burning things, As slow as possible
Drowning in toys, Bubble of manicured society, How it “Takes a village” and more
Hello, this is post #188.
We kick off today’s post with Tom Whitwell’s “52 Things I learned in 2024”. This annual gem inspires for two big reasons:
Tom dives into a wide range of themes—basically anything and everything. He uncovers fascinating ideas and presents them so engagingly that you can’t help but explore further. It’s a testament to how curiosity can lead you to incredible discoveries.
He’s been crafting these lists for over a decade. That’s serious dedication and discipline. Each post feels like a snapshot of his evolving interests and explorations over the years.
I’ve been curating “Stay Curious” for over three years now, and it’s become a wonderful chronicle of my own learning journey. Seeing Whitwell’s work & dedication inspires me. I look forward to continue this project with the same passion and energy. It’s been a fun ride for 188 weeks, and I’m excited for what’s ahead. I feel like I’m just getting started on this journey of curiosity—collecting the dots, one week at a time!
If you’ve been enjoying “Stay Curious”, why not share it with friends who’d love diving into something fascinating every week? Let’s spread the joy of curiosity and interesting discoveries!
I promise to bring you the most stimulating brain food every week. Here’s today’s spread…
Yummy, isn’t it? Let the feast begin…
✨ Tom Whitewell’s 52 Things for 2024
December isn’t even over yet, but Tom Whitewell has already dropped his “52 things I learned in 2024” post. Talk about being ahead of the game!
As usual it’s filled with gems! A couple of them to give you a taste:
13. Powerful showers are more energy efficient and more water efficient than weak showers. [Ian Walker]
26. Photographs of sporting events in the 1960–70s have a blue haze in the background that’s absent in modern photos. It’s because everyone was smoking in the arena. [Allen Murabayashi]
44. Takkyu-bin is a super convenient Japanese luggage forwarding service. For $13 you can ship heavy suitcases between hotels or airports, so you never need to carry your bags. Why doesn’t every country have this? [Craig Mod]
Tom’s curiosity and adventures are pure inspiration. He’s been crafting these lists since 2014, and I’ve highlighted the last three—2021, 2022, and 2023—in my earlier posts. It’s a great excuse to revisit those and see how this newsletter has evolved over the years.
🤔 Actionable Insights on User Research
I’m in the middle of a user research project and looking for ways to sharpen my skills. These two podcast episodes stood out as fantastic resources—right up there with the classic The Mom Test!
In Depth podcast episode with Jane Davis where she shares tips on how to get you started even when you don’t have a UX research team.
On the exploratory stage…
I really do focus on these, what can feel like meandering or indirect path interviews because they give you the chance to get the full picture of the problems someone is trying to solve during the course of their day, and it also lets the participant lead. So, rather than saying like, "Oh, tell me about all of the problems you have related to this topic." It's just, they might not even think of the thing you're trying to do as a problem, and that's quite telling, as well, is, if somebody isn't bringing that up as, "Oh, this is a real pain point for me." Then, it's time to examine whether you're even looking at the right problem space. Will someone pay for something if it doesn't feel like a pain point? Is always an important question.
One tactical advice that’s often overlooked (I did this mistake and can feel the pain already)
I always recommend doing it is, get transcripts. Whatever else you do to save money in your early stages as a startup, please, please, please record and transcribe your interviews with users and customers and people, so that you can go back and identify and pull out these common threads. It just makes everything so much easier.
Lenny’s podcast episode with Michael Margolis on how identify your bullseye customer in one day.
On how to understand user choices and core reason behind them using multiple prototypes:
And so there's something very valuable, just the way any of you have shopped for anything, right? You don't look at just one thing. If I showed you just one thing, you'd have some feedback and you'd have an opinion about it, like, "Let's shop for a couch. I like the color. The cushions are uncomfortable.
I like the fabric," or not. And that's helpful and that's interesting to hear, but as you start looking at two or three, then you start having this different reference points.
And when you're testing with customers, it's not up to them to come up with these different possibilities of what could be, and so if I'm presenting those, they're like, "Oh, that's interesting. I like the way this one has cushions that are made out of down, but this other one is really interesting because they deliver it.
Oh, but I like this because it's a style that I like and they actually take away my old couch." So then I can compare and contrast across these different possibilities, these different distinct value propositions. And I'm not looking for a winner but this comparison.
The other big benefit of having multiple prototypes is it helps teams avoid getting too wed to one specific idea. So you can get a little over-committed. There's a risk that you get over-committed to one idea, you're polishing that, you're working on it, you're too committed to that.
💯 Exit Interview
Jasmine Sun, a former product manager at Substack, penned an insightful post titled “Exit Interview” reflecting on her time at the company. She paints a vivid picture of Substack's unique work culture—a blend of diverse, talented individuals with deep empathy for their users. Here are a couple of standout snippets from her post that capture this spirit:
Somehow, all my colleagues seemed to moonlight as serious creatives on the side. On nights and weekends, our support specialists, product designers, and software engineers became novelists, singers, stylists, poets, producers, and photographers. It’s a rare trait for a Silicon Valley startup—everyone was secretly cool.
Beyond the "coolness" factor, having a genuine passion for anything is such an admirable trait. I've always gravitated toward people who deeply care about something and actively pursue it. It’s a strong signal that when they’re excited about their work, they’ll bring their whole heart and energy to it.
At Substack, we talked to writers all day long. Everyone at the company knew thirty-some key names, regardless of whether they had a customer-facing role. We didn’t craft artificial “customer personas” to frame product needs, because you could mention “Bari Weiss” or “Bill Bishop” and everyone knew who you meant. Creators joined us for Q&As at All Hands, beta tests and strategy calls, happy hours and dinner parties. The #feedback and #love channels delivered an hourly barrage of alternately furious and fawning email screenshots.
This is such a unique approach and definitely worth adopting. Nothing fosters genuine customer empathy better than spending time among them. Substack’s method seems perfectly designed to make that happen.
This perspective on a product builder’s role really resonated with me—so well expressed.
Building product forces a different kind of thinking than essay-writing: going from a critical mindset to a solutions-oriented one, from beautiful abstractions to concrete (and falsifiable) reality. And when you’re lucky, the ideas work!
Great post overall, worth a quick read!
🎲 Game Design Lessons from Bongo
Seth Godin teamed up with the Puzzmo team to launch a new casual word game called Bongo. I gave it a shot a couple of times—it’s decent. Not quite Wordle level addicting, but still fun for a quick play.
What’s more interesting is Seth’s series of posts sharing his insights and lessons from building the game. He makes some sharp observations, and I’ve pulled out the best takeaways for you.
Basic ingredients for a successful casual game
From the user’s perspective, a casual word game works when it offers a combination of:
Accomplishment
The creation and release of tension
A stretch or tickle of the brain’s processing power
Connection to friends (new or old)
Status from achievement
Satisfaction from accomplishment
A flow state
How to add sharability & social angle
Part of the breakthrough of Bongo is that there isn’t a right answer. There’s simply a better answer, until, finally, no one can find a way to improve it. This means the creator of the game doesn’t have to know the highest scoring play, and probably doesn’t.
Since the game is constantly iterating, there’s a really good reason to share your score. Just as Wikipedia gets better when others edit an article, you can work with your friends and improve while you’re playing.
From Thinking about power users (skive!)
Build around your power users, or not?
If you need to know a word like SKIVE to play well, the game isn’t as fun for some people. This is what Zach Gage calls the Scrabble problem–it rewards abnormal vocabularies. In 2015, Nigel Richards won the French Scrabble championships, and he doesn’t speak French! Instead, he memorized the French dictionary.
Zach’s insight, which I instantly embraced, was that we’d give bonus points for common words. Now, Brooke is playing on the same terms as everyone else.
🔥 Lesson Learned from Burning Things
Anil Dash wrote lessons learned from burning things.
Here’s his premise:
One thing I like to do is make fires. It’s often considered a less socially-acceptable pastime than my other wood-destruction hobbies like writing and woodworking, but each of these ways of killing trees teaches me something vital, and perhaps none is more full of portentous metaphors than building a wood fire in a fireplace or for a campfire.
What comes next is a masterclass in using metaphors. Each observation packs a punch, making you pause and reflect. These insights feel relevant far beyond their immediate context—yes, even beyond burning things!
Take this gem, for example:
The most important ingredient is invisible
It’s very obvious that you need fuel and a spark to start a fire. But the most important enabling aspect is oxygen, and it’s the part you can’t see. So many struggling fires are lacking only oxygen to enable them to become a true conflagration, but people often fall back to reshuffling the things they can see, rather than considering the vital parts that are invisible to them.
It’s a short read, but it’s filled with ideas that can spark deep thinking. Definitely worth your time.
Pure brilliance!
The next three pieces explore a shared theme: raising kids, the parenting choices we make, and what might be missing. If parenting isn’t your current focus, feel free to skip ahead to the "Everything Else" section!
🧸 Drowning in Toys
Anna North dives into why so many families feel like they’re "drowning in toys"—and she’s not wrong. I can vouch for it too. While industrial progress, with its lower costs and endless availability, is part of the story, there’s a deeper behavioral side to it. Drawing from academic research, she highlights fascinating insights and offers some practical ways to tackle this all-too-relatable challenge.
In a 2017 study, University of Toledo researchers found that toddlers played longer and more creatively when presented with just four toys than when they had 16 options to choose from (though that’s still a far cry from the 100-plus toys many kids actually own).
Kids’ favorite toys, meanwhile, tend to be those imbued with “social meaning,” Pugh said. “Kids use toys to connect to other kids — sometimes just by owning the same exact thing, sometimes by playing with it together, sometimes by accruing and sharing specialized knowledge about that toy.”
The social aspect of toys isn’t always so cute — kids can be bullied or feel inferior if they don’t have the same toys other kids have, and social comparisons can be painful for children whose parents can’t afford new purchases. And while wealthier families may be able to afford pricier toys, lower-income parents sometimes feel so much pressure to buy popular items that they’ll go without basic necessities to do so, Pugh has found.
But thinking about toys as social objects is also a reminder that playing is what makes a toy a toy — if nobody plays with it, it’s just part of the plastic graveyard. The toys that kids return to again and again are the ones that “require attention, imagination, and creativity,” Davis said.
When I look at my home, two things that stand out to me:
Buying toys seem an easy way to reduce guilt of not spending a lot of quality time with kids.
Sometime the toys are also for me, things that I did not have as a kid or would like to enjoy as an adult.
What do you think?
I’m not going to stop at critical observations on toys, there is some more that hit me hard this week.
🏰 Bubble of Manicured Society
Menaka Raman’s old post “The bubble of a manicured society” was trending up on my social feed this week, and I can see why. It’s a reality check for all of us parents. It points out everything we already know about how our parenting approach differs from how we were raised.
On the train home, I looked out the window as Chennai gave way to smaller towns and villages, fascinated by the changing buildings, dried lakes and station names. My children were glued to their devices, preferring to immerse themselves in a make-believe world rather than look outside at the real one. Another bubble inside their bubble. I don’t blame my children. These are the bubbles I have created. The question is, how do I burst them? Where do I begin?
There’s a strong sense of déjà vu—but somehow, we still can’t seem to break the cycle. Or should we?
If you’re not bored with the discourse on parenting world, here is one final one for today.
👪 How it “Takes a Village”
In How it “Takes a village”, Lila Krishna wonders Why do people lament the lack of a village while doing nothing to create one?
On the vulnerability of being a parent
I did try and make friends with other moms, and it got much easier once our kids were down to one nap a day. But it never felt like a “village”. We were friends despite our differences in how we raised children. I’m not sure we’d be comfortable leaving our kids with each other for more than a short while. Plus, I was very insecure about how others perceived my daughter and my parenting because she was very demanding, and it felt like too much of an imposition on parents with very calm kids. It didn’t help that they felt the judgiest.
Finally, some kind words to raise your spirits…
The best time to find a village was before you had kids. But the second-best time is now. And nothing’s wrong with you if you have trouble doing this - you’re trying to find strangers that you’d be comfortable trusting around your children. That’s not something we’ve ever been expected to do.
✨ Everything else
Gerardo Pontiérr creates stunning LEGO portraits that look like pixel-perfect mosaics at first glance. But the real magic happens when you view them from the side—they transform into intricate sculptural landscapes packed with hidden details. Truly ingenious craftsmanship! (via Dense Discovery)
Rishikesh Sreehari’s 10+1 Things is easily one of my favorite newsletters right now. His interests span such a wide range, and he consistently picks pieces that grab my attention. His crisp writing makes it all a joy to read. Amazing stuff! Here’s a quick tip from his latest post that had me thinking, "Why didn’t I think of this before?"
When you add a new contact to your phone, append it with their birthday. For instance, save it as “John Doe 2811.”
If you're in the mood for a heartwarming story, check out As Slow As Possible from 99% Invisible podcast. It covers a concert that will last 639 years. Projects like this reveal a side of humanity that's hard to grasp and reason with. They feel good because they remind us there's something bigger than our everyday lives.
ICYMI, “The real story behind the National Mall Photo”, “Hands” & “The lachak and matak of Hrithik Roshan” are my favorite picks from the last edition.
Don’t miss them! You can thank me later.
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!