Hi All,
Welcome back! Hope you had a great Thanksgiving break and came back refreshed! As you might have noticed, I took a break from publishing as well for thanksgiving. I hope you all did something kind for someone who could have used the kindness on Thanksgiving!
With that, here are this week’s reads
Online dating is now a thing apparently and people lie!!
Note in the charts above the up spike in “met in bar or restaurant.” In data science, the technical term for these reporting individuals is “liars.” They reported meeting in a bar because that is technically where the pair met in person for the first time, but the match was generated online.
I’m one of those people who has thought a lot about what it means to be successful and while my definition keeps changing (as I get older) this PDF is truly what I think it takes. What is your pain threshold for doing things you don’t like. What is your fighter quotient and scrappy quotient? When you see someone successful try to measure that
The common denominator of success --- the secret of success of every man who has ever been successful --- lies in the fact that he formed the habit of doing things that failures don't like to do.
You can’t copy culture. Totally agree. If any company thinks they can, they are stupid. This reminds me a lot of why Southwest was able to stand up to the large airlines. Their business model was built for them and each piece tied to every other piece. Culture is the same. Playbooks can tell you what THAT specific has done, not what will work for you. In fact should you even copy culture
Growth is nothing but a series of scientific hypotheses. Organization and clear hypotheses is the best tenet of a growth strategy
Most product teams do not think about strategy primarily because they are too busy with building without thinking. You should be writing a product strategy document without considering all the pieces.
Growing up in India if mindset equality was on my mind, I really wonder where I’d have ended up. A right mindset is the starting point.
I love this article on Sample Sizes
The same thinking that saved our ancestors and allowed us to build narratives around events can also lead us astray. Though we live in a time of information abundance, many of the most important decisions we make in our lives occur in areas where we have little comparative data to go on. If you are skeptical, consider the following line of questioning:
How many careers have you tried in your life? How many cities have you lived in? How many dates did you go on before choosing your life partner?
As someone who is constantly trying to find stuff to read I think each thing I read, as clickbaity as it seems makes me ask myself one questions : “what will I learn from this article/book/paper and do I care enough to learn that” This greatly helps me select reading that makes more sense to me. Here is the article.
Speaking of useful reading, as a technologist, this list of medtech innovations and the democratization of medical services is a great read
This read from Casey Winters talks about what it takes to become a Saas “marketplace”. Its not just a technical challenge, it is a cultural one, too
Ha! This article on the lessons eBay learnt on branded advertising was super interesting. With more and more ad stuffing it is likely you are going to pay companies to redirect results to you. Isn’t that literally what companies pay Indeed to do for jobs that too on Google ;)
Picture this. Luigi’s Pizzeria hires three teenagers to hand out coupons to passersby. After a few weeks of flyering, one of the three turns out to be a marketing genius. Customers keep showing up with coupons distributed by this particular kid. The other two can’t make any sense of it: how does he do it? When they ask him, he explains: "I stand in the waiting area of the pizzeria."
Which is why face to face is much more preferable. The ability to read signals is so important and in certain cases can help save your life. Imagine as a passenger traveling to a country you are not familiar with; do you trust the driver to get you to your destination safely. You probably think about this unconsciously if not consciously