As you may have read on LinkedIn/X, we are on a holiday in South India, doing the usual temple-hopping.

It's been great fun. The weather has been hot, but tolerable, especially in the mornings and evenings. The temples have been gorgeous (though the crowds have been a bit unnerving for our 7-year-old daughter) and the food has been exemplary!

I share some stories from the visit in the articles below.

The stunning Brihadeswarar temple in Thanjavur

In case you're wondering how I am finding time to do all this on a holiday...

I love doing this! So I find pockets of time for work, and
There are always pockets of time in the day - when kids have slept (or not yet woken up) or during car rides (I try to do my reading and highlighting then)

Having said that, this is not an externally imposed deadline. If and when I feel I need to take a break, I'll do the same!

And now, on to the newsletter.

Welcome to the one hundred and tenth 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

Crazy stat. And great use of contrast (5 days vs. 1 hour).

Yes. Dislike/anger is sometimes justified. But let it not rule your life, especially online!

Fascinating analogy. Will code be like food (limited amount we can consume) or will the demand for it keep increasing to continue to need many workers?

📄 2 Articles of the week

a. #TallTempleTales - A series by me on LinkedIn and X

In our temple-tour of Tamil Nadu in the last week, we have been to Madurai, Trichy, Thanjavur and Kumbakonam - and have had a great time visiting ancient temples with rich history, culture, traditions and yes, stories.

On LinkedIn and X, I shared a few stories that we heard from my dad and from guides in some of the temples:

How the poet Avvaiyar got a lesson in humility from the God Muruga
The legend of Karuppu Swamy and how he stands guard at the Azhagar Kovil near Madurai
How the poet Nakeeranar pointed out a mistake in a poem by Lord Shiva and stood up for his conviction

You can check out my LinkedIn and X posts to get up to speed on the stories.

b. 'The Average College Student Is Illiterate' by Hilarius Bookbinder (Pseudonym)

In this scathing indictment, the author (a PhD who teaches at a regional public university in the US) raises strong concerns about the reading and absorption abilities of the average US college student.

First, he sets some context - when he says 'average', he means it quite literally:

First, some context. I teach at a regional public university in the United States. Our students are average on just about any dimension you care to name—aspirations, intellect, socio-economic status, physical fitness. They wear hoodies and yoga pants and like Buffalo wings. They listen to Zach Bryan and Taylor Swift. That’s in no way a put-down: I firmly believe that the average citizen deserves a shot at a good education and even more importantly a shot at a good life. All I mean is that our students are representative; they’re neither the bottom of the academic barrel nor the cream off the top.

He believes that most students are unable to read and comprehend serious writing:

Most of our students are functionally illiterate. This is not a joke. By “functionally illiterate” I mean “unable to read and comprehend adult novels by people like Barbara Kingsolver, Colson Whitehead, and Richard Powers.” I picked those three authors because they are all recent Pulitzer Prize winners, an objective standard of “serious adult novel.” Furthermore, I’ve read them all and can testify that they are brilliant, captivating writers; we’re not talking about Finnegans Wake here. But at the same time they aren’t YA, romantasy, or Harry Potter either.

He's quite scathing here:

Students are not absolutely illiterate in the sense of being unable to sound out any words whatsoever. Reading bores them, though. They are impatient to get through whatever burden of reading they have to, and move their eyes over the words just to get it done. They’re like me clicking through a mandatory online HR training. Students get exam questions wrong simply because they didn’t even take the time to read the question properly. Reading anything more than a menu is a chore and to be avoided.

Naturally, writing is also not stellar:

Their writing skills are at the 8th-grade level. Spelling is atrocious, grammar is random, and the correct use of apostrophes is cause for celebration. Worse is the resistance to original thought. What I mean is the reflexive submission of the cheapest cliché as novel insight.

Phones are obviously blamed for this state of affairs:

It’s the phones, stupid. They are absolutely addicted to their phones. When I go work out at the Campus Rec Center, easily half of the students there are just sitting on the machines scrolling on their phones.

What do you think of this? Is the reaction too extreme? Do share any thinking that offers more insight on this area.

🎧 1 long-form listen of the week

a. 'Decoding cross-cultural communication with Erin Meyer' on ReThinking with Adam Grant

Prof. Adam Grant speaks with global culture expert (and author of bestseller Culture Map) Erin Meyer about the impact of cultural differences on communication. The lively conversation shares many examples and concepts around cross-cultural communication.

For instance, in Japan, Meyer learned that she had to be alert to how bright people’s eyes were to determine if they wanted to ask a question!

Erin Meyer: ...I had just written a book on cross-cultural differences, and I went on book tour. And I was in the US, you know, I gave presentations at bookstores, et cetera. Afterwards I would ask if there were any questions. Always a bunch of people would raise their hands. Then I went to Tokyo and at the end I asked if there were any questions and no one raised their hand. So I was a little bit disappointed. I went to sit down and my Japanese counterpart, Tomoko, who worked for the publisher, came up to me and she kind of said, you know, Erin, I think there were some questions.

Would you like me to try? And I said, yes, please. So she stood up and she said, Professor Meyer has just spoken with you. Do you have any questions? And no one raised their hand. Uh, but she stopped and she silently looked around the room and then after a few seconds she gestured to someone who was sitting there, from my perspective motionless.

And she said, yes, do you have a question? And this Japanese guy sat up straight. He said, oh, thank you, I do. He asked a fascinating question. So she did that a couple more times. And afterwards I said to her, but you know, Tomoko, how did you know that those people had questions? And she said, well, it had to do with how bright their eyes were.

Why do Americans speak up so much? Possibly because they had a participation grade in school, muses Meyer:

Adam Grant: Americas tend to be a lot more expressive than the rest of the world.

Erin Meyer: I would say we talk more than any other culture in the world, uh, when it comes to meetings. I’ve reflected on that and I believe it’s because we have a participation grade in our schooling system, which is unusual in the world.

And I don’t know about you, Adam , like when I was a kid in the US I almost had my hand raised even before I knew what the question was because I wanted to get that extra credit from asking questions. So I think that we have a lot of training on speaking up without preparing in the us and we see that if someone speaks, even if they don’t contribute a lot, the fact that they said something shows engagement.

This discussion reminded me of business school. So we also had Class Participation (CP) marks at IIM-A, and if we found someone speaking without necessarily making a clear point, we would say, “CP maar raha hai” (he’s just speaking for CP)

The term took a life of its own in our internal messaging boards with variants like ACP (Agreement CP), SACP (Strong ACP), Arbit CP (exactly what it implies), RCP (Repeat CP), Challenge CP (when the class pranksters would be challenged to insert absolutely random phrases into their CP in an actual class discussion)… Ah, fun times.

Meyer says that these differences have real-world ramifications:

Erin Meyer: I was working with a team a while ago, which is an American group. They purchased this big operation in China, and the Americans are complaining that when the Chinese managers come to meet with them, that they’re disengaged because they don’t speak much in the meetings. But then I talked to the Chinese, uh, leader of the, of that team, and he said, it’s so frustrating because we prepare, you know, for hours before these meetings.

And then we go into these meetings and our, our Western colleagues or our American colleagues, they’re, they’re just interested in, in showing off their knowledge. And, um, they just wanna hear themselves talk. And I think that that’s a really critical, uh, difference around the world when we’re leading multicultural meetings that we really need to be thinking about how to make sure that we are creating a balanced environment.

Even within a country, the culture can change based on the origin:

Erin Meyer: ...when it comes to feedback, clearly the most direct part of the US is New York. And the two most direct cultures in the world, when it comes to how, let’s say upfront or maybe blunt or frank we are with providing feedback, uh, are Israel and the Netherlands, and of course those are two populations that have had a huge impact on New York culture, right? I mean, New York was New Amsterdam, right? And of course the Jewish culture has had a such a, a, a big imprint on that area. I’m from Minnesota, which was formed by a group of Scandinavians. We tend to be rather conflict avoidant in Minnesota. They say Minnesota nice, right? And that comes from Swedish culture where consensus building is so important in that culture.

I loved this insight - the more heterogeneous the culture, the more expressive people need to be to explain themselves:

Erin Meyer: the more heterogeneous the group, the more explicit we are in our communication. So I talk about that as low context versus high context communication. I’ve lived in France 24 years. We have an expression in French, which is sous-entendu, and it means 'Don’t listen to what I said, listen to what I meant'.

So there’s like a lot of kind of like speaking between the lines and picking up implicit messages. And then in Japan, the highest context culture, also an extremely homogeneous population. There is an expression, 'kuki yomenai', which means someone who cannot read the air. So in Japan, like a good communicator can pick up all of those unspoken messages in the air.

That's all from this week's edition.

Ravi

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Ravishankar Iyer

How Different Countries Communicate (3-2-1 by Story Rules #110)

𝕏 3 Tweets of the week

📄 2 Articles of the week

🎧 1 long-form listen of the week

How the Indian Army prioritises Training (3-2-1 by Story Rules #109)

Writing as the Ultimate Brain-Gym (3-2-1 by Story Rules #108)

Tyler Cowen on using AI in Writing (3-2-1 by Story Rules #107)