📚 Travel Stories from Europe, Silicon Valley Canon, Shaan Puri’s Storytelling, Customer Journey to Nowhere, Tyranny of the Penny

The Secret Inside One Million Checkboxes, How to Build 300,000 Airplanes in 5 Years and more

Sep 09, 2024

Hello, this is post #175.

James Buckhouse shared some convincing reasons to say a good hello (or make a good first impression, for that matter).

We decide if we like something somewhere between 1/10th of a second and 7 seconds). First impressions have been shown to last for months and can sway one’s point of view even in the presence of contradictory evidence, and even when you can’t recall why.

Intro/opening bits in every post is my chance to say that ‘hello’ to you. How am I doing on these?

🇪🇺 Travelogue: Central & Eastern Europe

In “Travelogue: Central & Eastern Europe,” Trung Phan shares a round-up of 17 random thoughts that he jotted down in his trip to Munich, Prague, Budapest, Vienna and Dubrovnik.

The randomness of the thoughts is what caught my attention and got me to share it here. Here’re a couple of thoughts that are covered…

Hotel Showers Are Insane
River Surfing
European Timezones and Parenting Benefits
“No Stags Allowed”
European “Innovation”

He is talking the common man traveler language. The you-and-me traveler. Maybe, a little more observant and intellectual than us. Some tidbits from the post…

On hotel showers

We stayed in a nice (but older) hotel outside of the city centre. The thing about old hotels is that they need to be renovated. My amateur analysis is that it’s possible to renovate most older structures and maintain the charm of the original facade…except the bathroom.
Updating the toilet and shower to modern standards often involves making it look modern and, therefore, a bit out of place.
This is all fine except for the fact that hotel showers have turned into SAT exams. We stayed at 8 hotels on the trip and every single one had a different and confusing knob/heat/spray setting (half of them had to include instructions).
[...]
Look, I love the option to have a rainfall shower. But the knobs always take me 5-minutes to figure out. It doesn’t have to be this difficult. When you need a shower instruction manual, it is time to go back to the drawing board.

And some stories of shopping at Airport Duty Free shops

Not surprised that Ernő is minted. My 2x2 Rubik’s Cube cost €29 at the Duty Free. That’s not a typo. It was really annoying but then my kid spent a solid 9 hours over the next few days trying to solve it, which works out to only €3.22 an hour in babysitting equivalent cost. Kinda worth it.

On European bottle caps (yes, they are a big innovation!)

The story behind this incredible drink innovation is that the EU wanted to reduce plastic waste from loose caps and mandated they stay attached. It’s just peak EU regulation for probably very little long-term effect. While the caps do stay on (annoyingly), they require more plastic to manufacture. I can’t wait for the research paper in 5 years to show that these things had zero impact on the environment (similar to how the paper straw mandate accomplished nothing).

📚 The Silicon Valley Canon

I must admit, I found it hard to read through the first few paragraphs of “The Silicon Valley Canon”. Somehow I persisted (I don't know why) and gave it another chance. I am glad I did that.

After that Paul Rahe snippet , this piece transformed into a super interesting discourse on books, experts and what drives the conversation between Silicon Valley’s intellectual elites. Sample this…

On political elites of Washington DC

The operatives and the media men of DC are of a different species. They will freely talk of anything, regardless of how much they know about it. But by and large the pundits and politicos are not intellectuals, and little intellectual work is expected of them. Those who love ideas for their own sake travel the path of the credentialed expertise.

On tech elite of silicon valley

This silicon union of intellect and action creates a culture fond of big ideas. The expectation that anyone sufficiently intelligent can grasp, and perhaps master, any conceivable subject incentivizes technologists to become conversant in as many subjects as possible. The technologist is thus attracted to general, sweeping ideas with application across many fields. To a remarkable extent conversations at San Fransisco dinner parties morph into passionate discussions of philosophy, literature, psychology, and natural science. If the Washington intellectual aims for authority and expertise, the Silicon Valley intellectual seeks novel or counter-intuitive insights.

Finally, there is a long list of books that ‘belong’ to this Silicon Valley Canon. I will skip the list, but here are the broad themes that get covered:

You can divide most of these titles into five overarching categories: works of speculative or science fiction; historical case studies of ambitious men or important moments in the history of technology; books that outline general principles of physics, math, or cognitive science; books that outline the operating principles and business strategy of successful start-ups; and finally, narrative histories of successful start-ups themselves.

Why they read what they read, that’s the real takeaway. Such a fascinating read!

By the way, that Paul Rahe snippet was actually a great context setter for the post. Just that, I find it hard to read such stuff!

(via Readwise)

🥛 Shaan Puri’s Storytelling

Shaan Puri has got one of the most unique voices on my feed right now. He is unpretentious, goofy (downright silly sometimes) and (yet) shares some of the most useful ideas in a super digestible way. I’ve been following his 5 Tweets Tuesday newsletter (he scrolls, so you don’t have to) for a long time and found it highly entertaining.

Then, there are experiments like “leaked email” and “good friday reader’s question”. He gets creative with his formats, I must say. There is something about his storytelling that compels me to read it every time.

Finally, what prompted me to share his work here today is the two part series where he talks about How he spent a year “strategically broke” and the 3-step plan to figure out what you want to do in life.

I imagine, these are just two chapters in his biography (if he ever writes one). But, based on what I read, I am sure to to buy that book whenever he writes it. It’s going to be a great entertainer, if nothing else.

Here take a sneak peek:

So his two cents: Be strategically broke & give yourselves a season of wandering!

🛒 Customer Journeys to Nowhere

I love Tom Fishburne’s commentary on the world of marketing. He does it in style with his Marketoonist blog. Take the latest post covering the customer Journeys to nowhere.

He picks up an observation from NY Times:

“When did everything become a ‘journey’? Changing our hair, getting divorced, taking spa vacations — they’re not just things we do; they’re ‘journeys.’”

Relatable, isn’t it? He builds further picking insights on some other studies and lists out four broad archetypes of customer journeys:

The Routine: effortless and predictable (think Starbucks Pickup)
The Joyride: effortless and unpredictable (think TikTok’s For You page)
The Trek: effortful and predictable (think Duolingo)
The Odyssey: effortful and unpredictable (think Adobe Creative Cloud)

Never thought about customer journeys in this way, right? Now you can. At least, now you know that not all journeys are the same.

✈️ How to Build 300,000 Airplanes in 5 Years

In World War 2,

Over the course of the war the U.S. produced around 325,000 airplanes valued at roughly $46 billion ($800 billion in 2024 dollars). Not only is this more aircraft than what Germany, Japan, and Italy combined produced during the war — it’s also more aircraft than have been built for commercial transport in the entire history of aviation.

“How to build 300,000 airplanes in five years” tells us what conspired in those 5 years to make it possible.

A lot of things had to fall in place, and they somehow did. I was amazed to read about the depth of problem solving that was required and how it was materialized.

This piece covers business history unlike others. It's not focused on a person or single business. Rather, it tells us about the extraordinary journey of a complete industry through a phase of hyperscaling operations. Longish read, but worth your time!

By the end of the war, some aircraft were being flown directly from the factory to junkyards for scrap.

(via Shakti Shetty)

🇳🇴 Vacation Planning with AI Agent

Can artificial intelligence devise a bucket-list vacation that checks all the boxes: culture, nature, hotels and transportation?

Ceylan Yeğinsu (of NYTimes) attempts to find out. She used three virtual assistants (Vacay, MindTrip and ChatGPT) to design a 4 day itinerary for her dream vacation and shared her experience in “My first trip to Norway, with a.i. as a guide”.

She does her best to cross off things from her bucket list - travel, sightseeing, food, experience. And, there are odd discoveries and random surprises as she is going through her plan.

Read this post for two things:

Learn from Ceylan on trip planning, using AI bots and all things howtos. She has a fair amount of practical tips in a short post.
Experience Norway. Oslo, Fjord, Flam Railways, Gudvangen, Bergen - she takes us through the best of Norway. I had been to these places 15 years back, it was great to relive some of those memories.

I ended my trip in Bergen, which, despite being Norway’s second-largest city, maintains a small-town charm with its colorful wooden houses and cobblestone streets. With only half a day to explore, I followed Mindtrip’s short itinerary, starting with a hearty lunch of fish and chips at the bustling waterfront fish market and ending with a funicular ride up Mount Floyen for panoramic views of the city and fjords. The A.I. dinner suggestion at the Colonialen was perfect: cozy vibe, live jazz and locally sourced dishes.

(via Kottke)

💰 Tyranny of the Penny

Here’s the premise of “America must free itself from the tyranny of the penny”.

Most pennies produced by the U.S. Mint are given out as change but never spent; this creates an incessant demand for new pennies to replace them, so that cash transactions that necessitate pennies (i.e., any concluding with a sum whose final digit is 1, 2, 3, 4, 6, 7, 8 or 9) can be settled… we keep minting pennies because no one uses the pennies we mint.

The post goes in great depth covering history to chemistry to the cultural significance of this tiny coin to understand why we are here! There is so much I did not know and was amazed to know.

By the way, this problem is not unique to the USA. Canada, Australia etc have faced & eliminated it, many others are still figuring out how to take the bold steps.

Some snippets:

Fearing endless cycles of hoarding and penny ransom, Congress sought a new base metal for the coins. It would have to be cheaper than copper. It would need to withstand the trauma of being near keys in a pocket (a condition researchers dutifully replicated by rotating coins and keys inside a cotton-lined drum). Because a portion of America’s children will, inevitably, swallow her currency, it should be detectable by X-ray.

Retail legend claims that the “odd cents” pricing strategy (a Parisian trick imported by Rowland H. Macy to his New York City dry-goods store) proliferated after the cash register’s invention in 1879, as a tactic to prevent sales clerks from stealing. If a customer paid $3 for a $3 item, the logic went, a cashier could stealthily pocket the bills; if the price was $2.99, the customer would be owed a coin; to open the register, the cashier would need to key in the sale, thus creating, within the register’s hidden recesses, an incorruptible record of the transaction. That consumers tend to associate these prices with better deals (incorrectly, according to studies) was an added benefit.

✨ Everything else

The story of One Million Checkboxes got even more exciting. The secret inside One Million Checkboxes shows how creativity can flourish even in constraints, if the people involved are passionate about what they do. I love such stories of massive online collaboration that may look nerdy at first sight, but are actually a giant social experiment of human behavior. (via YC Newsletter)
Tapedeck.org brings to you a beautiful collection of a piece of nostalgia - audio tapes. If you were born in the last century, you would have used them for sure. I had so many of these. Alas, I threw them away in shifting cities. (via Colossal)
Maria Skog creates the most beautiful Crocheted Toasts, Ramen, and Turkey Dinners. I’m amazed by the endless possibilities in crochet work!

Before I go, here’s a quick link to last week’s post, in case you missed reading it.

📚 Anxious People, Product MVP Myth, Play Street, Filmmaking Process, Abandoned Ottoman Tomb in India

Pritesh

Sep 2

Read full story

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

Stay Curious

📚 Anxious People, Product MVP Myth, Play Street, Filmmaking Process, Abandoned Ottoman Tomb in India

Discussion about this post