This week took me to Hyderabad. I had my fill of some lovely roadside chai with Osmania biscuits, as well as some great IPAs at the craft breweries there.

Also was super-kicked to meet some IIMA batchmates who made time on a weekday evening for dinner.

We caught up over conversations, gentle ribbing and lots of laughter. The highlight of the evening was the hilarious Lakshman Sethuraman (when are you doing stand-up, bro?) regaling us with his insanely vivid memories of campus shenanigans.

And now, on to the newsletter.

Welcome to the ninety-fourth 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

As a Kindle reader, I'm not happy with this finding... but it is what it is.

I'm continuing on the Kindle though - it is just too convenient from a highlighting and referencing point of view.

Useful points on pricing models that could apply to other products too.

Provocative points by the Great Bong as always. Would you folks agree, or do you think there is still room for people-management skills in mid-management?

📄 2 Articles of the week

a. '15 Times to use AI, and 5 Not to' by Ethan Mollick

Professor, author and AI-power user Ethan Mollick shares some interesting ideas (not necessarily MECE!) of when to use AI and when not to.

This one seems an obvious use case:

Work that requires quantity. For example, the number of ideas you generate determines the quality of the best idea. You want to generate a lot of ideas in any brainstorming session. Most people stop after generating just a few ideas because they become exhausted but, the AI can provide hundreds that do not meaningfully repeat.

Some of my work involves usage like this:

Work where you are an expert and can assess quickly whether AI is good or bad. This can involve complicated and exacting work, but it relies on your expertise to determine whether the AI is providing valuable outputs. For example, o1, the new AI model from OpenAI, can solve some PhD-level problems, but it can be hard to know whether its answers are useful without being an expert yourself.

I struggle to use AI as an idea-brainstorming partner:

Work where you need variance, and where you will select the best answer as an editor or curator. Asking for a variety of solutions - give me 15 ways to rewrite this bullet in radically different styles, be creative - allows you to find ideas that might be interesting.

I could not agree more with Ethan, when he says that one should learn the skill of synthesis and not leave it to AI. (This is from the list of things of when NOT to use AI):

When you need to learn and synthesize new ideas or information. Asking for a summary is not the same as reading for yourself. Asking AI to solve a problem for you is not an effective way to learn, even if it feels like it should be. To learn something new, you are going to have to do the reading and thinking yourself, though you may still find an AI helpful for parts of the learning process.

Another interesting point on when not to use - when the effort is useful:

When the effort is the point. In many areas, people need to struggle with a topic to succeed - writers rewrite the same page, academics revisit a theory many times. By shortcutting that struggle, no matter how frustrating, you may lose the ability to reach the vital “aha” moment.

a. 'India Is Sacrificing Growth. It Needs to Stop' by Andy Mukherjee (Bloomberg)

In this deeply critical piece, Bloomberg columnist Andy Mukherjee lays out some hard-hitting numbers that show all is not well with the Indian economy.

One interesting stat - gold loans (potentially a sign of distress) are increasing while other forms of credit are slowing:

(Minor gripe - that table is terrible data storytelling. One, it should have been a graph. And two, they should show the earlier period first, then the latest period)

Another interesting chart - the economy still has to make up the Covid loss in GDP. (Although, I guess, this would be true globally right?)

The govt seems to be constrained on both the monetary and fiscal fronts:

Inflation, which spiked around the start of Russia’s war in Ukraine, has never been fully tamed. As a result, short-term interest rates are 150 basis points higher than in 2019, and — because food is still very expensive — the start of a monetary-easing campaign has been delayed. Fiscal policy, meanwhile, is pressed into the service of keeping 800 million Indians on free rations, a pandemic-era safety net being buttressed by state politicians with cash handouts to disadvantaged women.

This number also surprised me - reverse migration?! Is it still the Covid effect?

For the first time in many decades, more urban migrant workers went back to their villages and became a part of the agrarian workforce than came out to seek better opportunities in cities. A little over 46% of the population was in farming last fiscal year, compared with 42.5% in 2019.

I've read Andy before and he's, let's put it, not exactly a fan of this administration. So one needs to take this article with a pinch of salt. Still, the numbers (if accurate) are worrisome.

I'd love to read more perspectives on this issue - do share if you have come across something.

🎧 1 long-form listen of the week

a. 'The Best Way to Answer “So What Do You Do?”' Clay Herbert on The Nathan Barry Show

In this episode Nathan Barry (founder of Kit, the email platform that I use) interviews Clay Herbert (a marketing strategist) who shares some interesting and provocative ideas on how to introduce yourself better.

This is an old idea, but many people still miss it - your introduction should not be about you, it should be about your customer:

Your intro is actually not about you. It should be about who you help and why. You talk a lot about copy and messaging and talking about your customers. Not about yourself, right? This is the introduction version of that.

Second point - you don't have to tell your entire story. Leave some stuff for the audience to ask as questions:

Myth number two is that it should be 100 percent complete... When you look at poor introductions, and sometimes this is when you ask someone, so what do you do? And they tell you their life story. That means it’s probably too complete. They included too many details, et cetera.

Clay has an interesting formula for intros - 'Verb their noun':

So this can be 'verb their noun'... Your customer has a noun they want verb. And what I mean by that is... I used to do a lot of stuff with Kickstarter, crowdfunding, Indiegogo, all that other stuff... A terrible intro would be I’m in crowdfunding or I’m a Indiegogo guru, or I’m a Kickstarter expert. Those are common intros, but they’re terrible. The best one is I help entrepreneurs fund their dream. Okay, fund is the verb and dream is the noun. They have a dream. Yeah, if you were launching an app for you, it’s your dream to launch that app. Someone else that might be a film, someone else It might be a hoodie.

He suggests that we should gun for intrigue over information:

You want to shoot for intrigue over information. Yeah, so one of my favorites is Doug Brackman. If you meet Doug on a plane (and) you say 'so what do you do?' He’ll look you in the eye and smile and say 'we teach people how to meditate (slight pause) at gunpoint'.

So he uses guns and (teaches) long-range sniper shooting. It’s all very safe. Nobody’s has a gun pointed at them Yep, to teach how to calm your brain because you’re not going to hit the pie plate at 925 yards if your whole brain and body isn’t calm and he teaches you how to breathe and how to exhale when you’re shooting the gun and stuff. So "we teach people to meditate at gunpoint" is better than "We created a feedback loop for meditation".

The 'at gunpoint' thing opens this loop that you can’t just ignore the person and go back to your phone or your computer. And that’s part of the goal of the perfect intro. It’s not to shock the person. The goal is not to be so contrarian and shocking, but if it can open a loop that they’re curious about, they’re going to ask you a question

Another formula - to say that you are "X for Y":

So, I’m X for Y is where X and Y are both things that the person you’re talking to knows. But they’re typically not paired like that together. So it’s not peanut butter and jelly. Yep. So... you could say I’m a personal trainer for productivity, right? Personal trainers come to you. They work with you one on one. We’re not talking about a group class. You know, they could even carry the analogy through and say, you know, we all know what it’s like, maybe after Thanksgiving and we haven’t worked out, we let ourselves go a little bit. Or maybe you did that with your inbox or your downloads folder or your desktop or whatever, right?

Another one - we turn X into Y:

...transformation is we turn X into Y. This could be as simple as 'we turn ideas into books'. X is ideas, Y is books.

Some of these are a bit, um, gimmicky and sales-y...! But do listen to the episode with an open mind and you might come across an interesting (and better) way to introduce yourself.

That's all from this week's edition.

Ravi

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Ravishankar Iyer

How to Introduce Yourself Better (3-2-1 by Story Rules #94)

𝕏 3 Tweets of the week

📄 2 Articles of the week

🎧 1 long-form listen of the week

Damodaran on the Corporate Life Cycle (3-2-1 by Story Rules #95)

A Fascinating History of Modern Hinduism (3-2-1 by Story Rules #93)

How to Teach so Students Actually Learn (3-2-1 by Story Rules #92)