Incite Your Month - December 2020
At CTQ, we kick each month off with a 5 minute collection of ideas & recos from the team’s recent curiosity diet.
It helps us ‘incite’ the rest of the month.
Watch Ramanand and Harish talking about our picks for December:
One great podcast episode
Adam Alter on The Joe Rogan Experience (Only available on Spotify)
Adam is a Professor of Marketing and has written 'Irresistible: The Rise of Addictive Technology and the Business of Keeping Us Hooked', a book about how humans have got addicted to phones. In this podcast, he talks about some extreme examples of addiction and how and why we get addicted to phones!
Top takeaway: Our hunter-gatherer instincts help us in a lot of ways but are also responsible for things like addiction to games and phones!
Listen to it if: ...you like behaviour, habits, addiction, technology!
One insightful book
Eat a Peach by David Chang
It's a memoir of David Chang, the chef behind Momofuku and the Netflix series Ugly Delicious. It is the story of his personal journey while he worked on the different restaurants and noodle bars.
Top takeaway: Chefs have to deal with making something impermanent (which will eventually be flushed down) be excellent and that can drive them to anger and other bad behaviour.
Check it out if: ...you like reading about personal struggles and journeys, the tough business of restaurants.
One fiction pick
Stories of your life and others by Ted Chiang
It's a collection of stories by Ted Chiang, a science fiction writer, who comes from a background of technical writing in the software industry. His 'Story of your life' was adapted for the movie 'Arrival'.
Check it out if: ...you are looking to read fiction to expand your perspectives. It definitely stretched our minds!
One article
Why walking on Legos hurts more than walking on fire or ice
Lego-walking is a 'thing' like walking on coal and broken glass. It's used as a team-building activity in corporate motivational events. That's because shared, ritualistic pain helps in release of hormones which helps in forming kinship.
Check it out if: ...you are curious about the science behind why stepping on a Lego piece hurts!
One smartcast
Future Fitness Gym with Sajith Pai on 'Personal Information Management Assistants'
Sajith Pai is an investor and writes insightful pieces on India, internet and media trends. He has written about the role of PIMAs who, in the future, will help leaders by summarizing and curating information relevant to them. He imagines the role of PIMAs analogous to the Executive Assistants of today. We spoke about PIMAs and how to hire them in our Future Fitness Gym session.
Check it out if: ...you are curious about this new job and why you may want to hire one!
Closing with our favourite reflective ‘FutureRing’ question from last month
“Which country/ geographical area should we follow because it is likely to become more relevant in the future?"
What would be your answer?
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