Phew - it's been a busy week with 4 training days out of five and I'm a bit exhausted! (In a rare state of affairs, I'm writing this newsletter at 8.30 pm on Friday night!)

Having said that, I did manage to catch a movie during the week (Thalaiva's Vettaiyan; would NOT recommend for Jailer fans).

Hopefully, next week will be easier and I can get in some book-writing time.

And now, on to the newsletter.

Welcome to the eighty-sixth 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

Great insight. I have a chapter in my upcoming book on synthesis and finding patterns in the data!

You may not be able to see this on a mobile screen (try zooming in) - a vast majority of the 250 startups are working with AI.

Hahaha.

📄 2 Articles of the week

a. 'The Song of Sweat and Fire' by Sarthak Dev

This article is a brilliant tribute to Rafael Nadal (who retired last week) by Sarthak.

He starts the riveting piece on one of tennis' greatest players... with a lament on the football club, Manchester United:

My favourite thing about this weekend is that I don’t have to watch Manchester United play football.

I've been a United fan since early '98. For fifteen sunlit years, United was a victorious army in red. Old Trafford was its fortress, and the devil on the team crest a warning to those who came too close. Then the architect of their success retired, and it has been a free fall since. These days, United struggle to beat relegation candidates.

See, I’m okay with my team not winning much. I’m a sports fan and disappointment is my middle name. But this, this is something else. This cuts deeper. Beyond the tactical flaws and technical deficiencies, what twists the knife is that the players often look completely devoid of inspiration and energy.

You'll realise that Sarthak is using the Man-U reference for the element of contrast - to show the difference in approach between his favourite football team and his favourite tennis player.

Instead of 'telling' that Nadal is tireless, Sarthak 'shows' it.... with a 2019 Nike ad featuring the player:

The ad begins with a clip of a 16-year-old Rafael Nadal playing an ATP Masters game against Carlos Moya. So much about Nadal is immediately recognisable: the long-ish hair spilling over a bandana, the shuffle on the baseline, and the intensity in his eyes, almost screaming “Vamos!” as his opponent prepares to serve.

The next forty seconds are a celebration of Nadal’s incredible career, a montage of his best moments. In the final few seconds of the ad, the teenage Nadal comes back into frame, and we hear a commentator’s voice dripping with disbelief. “Wow! This guy is relentless. Unbelievable! Is he going to play every point like that?”

Sarthak is a rare combination of a sports writer who is also a musician. This analogy pulsates with rhythm:

Tennis has an opera house aesthetic. Think Borg, Sampras, Graf, Federer - many of its best players look like ballet dancers shuffling on a velvet floor to the background score of Bach’s Prelude in G major. Fortissimo sensibilities don't quite fit the vibe. From time to time, you get players who use more power than precision, but you rarely get someone who wants to plug their violin into a distortion amplifier and belt out the opening riff of AC/DC’s Thunderstruck. And when one does, they rarely have the endurance to get through the whole song.

Sarthak's writing has a breathless intensity that matches the approach of his subject:

The idea that someone would approach every single point of every single game of every single match as if it were simultaneously the first and last point they’d ever play. It’s absurd. It’s impossible.

I'm not really a tennis follower... but Sarthak's writing has made me look at Nadal with newfound respect.

b. 'A Message From the Past (Thoughts on Nostalgia)' by Morgan Housel

A good ol' Morgan Housel piece - with the usual touches.

Metaphorical references between life and investing:

So much of what matters in investing – this is true for a lot of things in life – is how you manage the psychology of uncertainty. The problem with looking back with hindsight is that nothing is uncertain. You think no one had anything to worry about, because most of what they were worrying about eventually came to pass.

Thought-provoking quotes:

But as Thomas Jefferson said, “How much pain have cost us the evils which have never happened.”

Deep life philosophy expressed in the simplest language:

... the most important lesson in economic history, that’s true for most people most of the time:

The past wasn’t as good as you remember. The present isn’t as bad as you think. The future will be better than you anticipate.

🎧 1 long-form listen of the week

a. 'Why most public speaking advice is wrong - and how to finally overcome your speaking anxiety' Lenny's Podcast with Tristan de Montebello (CEO & co-founder of Ultraspeaking)

In this episode, Lenny Rachitsky (Product Management expert and creator) speaks with Tristan de Montebello who is the co-creator of Ultraspeaking, a course/set of methods for improving public speaking skills.

Some great insights in the episode - highly recommended that you listen to it in full.

Speaking is a meta skill:

...the biggest misconception with tackling your speaking is that people grossly underestimate just how transformative it could be to your life. And the reason it's so transformative is because speaking is not a specialized skill, it's a meta skill. That means that the better you get at speaking, the better your life gets.

Tristan makes an interesting point - when speaking we should not be thinking about speaking - it should 'flow':

The day I understood that speaking was a subconscious flow-oriented process and not a conscious process, completely changed the way I approached it. So instead of thinking tactics and frameworks and adding more to the outside of the things I need to think about, when I realized when I speak best, I'm actually not thinking about speaking.

It's the last thing I think about is the speaking part. I'm completely in tune with whatever it is I'm trying to convey to my audience or the person in front of me. And the goal is to get into a flow state and stay in that flow state all the way through the finish line.

The need to end strong (loved the plane-landing analogy):

Tristan de Montebello: ... This is a really important one, and this concept is called end strong. And it's, we had to bring this up because most people tend to end weak...

People tend to give a great answer and then either they kind of taper off at the end, which doesn't leave you with a good impression, or they'll actively say the doubts that are coming up in their mind of maybe they'll be giving a great answer and then suddenly they say, "I don't really know if that makes sense."

Lenny Rachitsky: I do that all the time. That's very relatable.

Tristan de Montebello: Yeah, but what the thing is, what happens when you do that? When you do that, it's like you're forcing this lens on your audience, where now even if they had the best of experiences with your answer, now they're looking at everything you said through the lens of, oh, this person was kind of uncertain.

So it's like you had a very smooth flight across the Atlantic and your landing was absolutely horrible. You were bumpy when you were coming up, and then when you hit the landing, you bounced three times and you thought you were going to die. You're not going to remember the smooth flight, you're going to remember the ending.

So a simple tactic here is, anticipate that as you get to the end of anything you're saying, you're going to naturally start regaining consciousness and you're going to start being a little bit more self-aware, and some of those uncertainties are going to pop up. Know that it's coming and make sure you land the plane.

At the end of the episode, Tristan shares two techniques that are really powerful. One of them - the accordion method - is a must-try.

That's all from this week's edition.

Ravi

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Ravishankar Iyer

Improve your Public Speaking Skills (3-2-1 by Story Rules #86)

𝕏 3 Tweets of the week

📄 2 Articles of the week

🎧 1 long-form listen of the week

How to Build Lasting Memories with your Children (3-2-1 by Story Rules #88)

A Data Story on India's New Elites (3-2-1 by Story Rules #87)

Stories about Confirmation Bias (3-2-1 by Story Rules #85)