Welcome to the seventy-eighth edition of '3-2-1 by Story Rules'.

A newsletter recommending good examples of storytelling across:

3 tweets
2 articles, and
1 long-form content piece

Let's dive in.

𝕏 3 Tweets of the week

Haha, it takes a few seconds, and then you get it.

Quite a remarkable roster of alumni!

Check out this entire thread on rock-cut architecture across the world. I loved this insight - about how masons might have given the idea of turning the quarry itself into a beautiful monument!

📄 2 Articles of the week

a. 'Why I Avoided AI - And How I Finally Embraced It' by Rhea Purohit

My wife (who runs an amazing children's museum in Pune) uses Chat GPT much more than me (she uses it for social media content generation, writing user instructions, emails to schools etc.). Heck, even my twelve-year-old son probably uses it more for his school assignments than I do for my writing work.

Folks who have been writing for a while surprisingly struggle to incorporate AI into their workflows.

This article is written by Rhea Purohit - someone who writes for Every, a publication that is at the forefront of the use of AI in writing. But I echoed with a lot of thoughts shared by her:

I’m acutely aware that LLMs can help me read, think, and write. AI carries the promise of doing great work in less time. It sounds like magic…but I still don’t use it as much as I should.

My hunch is that this is because I wrote for a living before AI became accessible. I know how to go from blank page to finished piece without using a LLM. I have workflows in place - reliable and efficient - to get the job done. They typically involve coffee, a Google document, a few stray research tabs, and many short walks. It’s familiar, comfortable, and - perhaps most importantly - I know it works.

While we took naturally to Google, ChatGPT feels a bit more unnatural:

AI, on the other hand, feels like work. It’s like hiring your first employee. Yes, they will eventually make your life easier, but there’s a lot to be done before that happens—you have to think about what you want to delegate, find the right candidate, and onboard them into your organization. Something similar happens when you start using AI. You have to figure out what parts of your workflow you want to automate, choose the right tool for the task, and iterate on the input you intend to give it.

I liked her advice to take it slow, and simple:

I’ve taken away the pressure of upending my workflow to integrate AI. While writing this piece, for example, I did not use an LLM to brainstorm an outline, generate a first draft, and get feedback on it from Dan Shipper and Kate Lee. But I did have Claude open in a tab, and I ended up asking the model to help me rephrase a few sentences I thought sounded awkward, and for feedback on a couple of paragraphs—and it was genuinely helpful!

b. 'Time management techniques that actually work' by Lenny Rachitsky

Product Management maven Lenny Rachitsky shares ten tried-and-tested tips for better time management.

This one I use for my work:

Use your calendar for to-dos: Instead of adding to-dos to an app, try slotting some into your calendar. You don’t need any fancy tools for this—literally just make your to-do into an event and put it on your calendar. If something comes up and you aren’t able to do the task at that time, move the event to a new slot.

I try to do this for my mornings. I schedule all clients calls for the afternoon:

Set up, and fiercely protect, regular deep work time: One of the most important professional development books I’ve ever read is Deep Work by Cal Newport. The core idea is that any work of real value comes from people doing “deep work”—focused, uninterrupted, and cognitively demanding work that stretches their brain. Unfortunately, most of our time is spent on “shallow work”—not cognitively demanding, logistical-style tasks, often performed while distracted. And that’s totally OK, as long as you get enough deep work time in.

This is of course, very difficult in a regular job. But for a crucial task, try and get at least 1-hour (or more) of distraction-free time.

🎧 1 long-form listen of the week

a. 'Why Trying Too Hard Can Backfire On You' on the Hidden Brain podcast

This intriguing headline caught my attention. The idea, as expressed by the show's guest, Edward Slingerland, is that often in life, 'effortless' performance works better than an effortful attempt:

There are many domains in life where practice and effort fail to work their usual magic. In these areas, it's effortlessness that triumphs over effort.

Edward wrote a book on the topic titled 'Trying Not to Try: The Art and Science of Spontaneity'

As always, I'm a fan of how the host Shankar Vedantam cues up interesting questions to the author - mostly referring to interesting anecdotes from the book. It's almost as if Shankar and team are saying: Look, the book has some great ideas, but if we discuss just the ideas it'll become dry and boring for the listener. So we will start the conversation with the fun incidents and anecdotes and use them to weave in the concepts.

For instance, check out the initial four of questions that Shankar asks:

Ted, I want to take you back to the time in your life when you were in your early twenties and you lived in San Francisco. You were interested in meeting women, and you tried hard to make romance happen. Tell me what you did.

...at one point, this was back in the day when we all rented movies at a store, you tried to catch the interest of a woman who worked at the video rental store. Paint me a picture of what you did, Ted.

Tell me about your experience of learning to play tennis and your interactions with the tennis pro who sometimes gives you lessons.

You tell a story about visiting a local science museum that features a game called Mindball. What is Mindball, Ted?

Every one of the questions is designed to elicit a story - a real-life incident, not an abstract concept. And by setting up the episode with these questions, even a 'boring' professor of Chinese philosophy can be made into an interesting conversationalist.

Speaking of Chinese philosophy, the conversation mentions the concept of 'wu-wei':

SHANKAR VEDANTAM: So you say that many early Chinese philosophers were preoccupied with the question of effort versus spontaneity, and many of these thinkers used a term called wu-wei. What is wu-wei? What does it mean, Ted?

TED SLINGERLAND: It literally means no doing or no striving. I translated it as effortless action, and it's a state, something like being in the zone as an athlete. It's a state where you lose a sense of yourself as an agent. You lose a sense of the passage of time. You get absorbed into what you're doing. You're not thinking about the results. That's effortless action. It's action that springs in a kind of spontaneous, natural way. And in modern terms, we would say it's a state where you're system two, your cold cognition is not really involved.

The conversation ends with an interesting reveal - Ted wrote his first book proposal after downing a couple of stiff drinks!

TED SLINGERLAND: ...I got interested in alcohol and other chemical intoxicants as cultural technologies that we've developed to essentially get around the paradox of trying not to try.

SHANKAR VEDANTAM: Ted credits alcohol with once helping him finish writing a book proposal. He had been stuck a long time, but something changed after he had a couple of stiff drinks.

TED SLINGERLAND: I really felt like I was taking dictation. But what it really is, is you're letting your subconscious, your hot cognition (System One, in Daniel Kahneman's terminology), which is really clever, which can see new possibilities, you're letting it drive for a little while and not trying to do top-down control. And that's what sold the book. It's became the first few pages of the book. It's what everyone loves. And I don't think I ever could have gotten there, pounding coffee and staring at my computer screen.

That's all from this week's edition.

Ravi

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Ravishankar Iyer

When trying too hard can backfire (3-2-1 by Story Rules #78)

𝕏 3 Tweets of the week

📄 2 Articles of the week

🎧 1 long-form listen of the week

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