Content Factory Newsletter - Theranos, Bhediya, Forensic Autopsy, Total Football, Growth Mindset, Angel Di Maria - 2023 January #1 (10 Minutes Read)
Great recommendations/summaries of books, articles, films, podcasts and some personal learnings.
Happy New Year!
2022 was a great year content-wise for us. We finally got a break from all the ‘new-normal’ and ‘covid’ news updates and got a flavour of good cinema, food, society and culture. As always bringing you a bunch of content that we have read and felt the urge to share with everyone around us. For those who are here for the first time, do remember that all original links are embedded as hyperlinks to the title.
Articles
Theranos: The rise and fall of a company that promised to change the world
Content Factory Take: A lab testing company that offers a magical solution to all lab testing needs, claiming to have changed the industry forever. With once a valuation of over 9 billion, it went down like a house of cards. Theranos’s example is a gentle reminder that one should always look at the business fundamentals before getting fazed by the dizzying heights of valuation or marketing showbiz.Your Creativity Won’t Save Your Job From AI
Content Factory Take: Some of us at least have grown up with the understanding that there are inherent limitations to the power of artificial intelligence. However, this is changing. There is a host of emerging AI capabilities that can replace creative work done by humans. From text to image/painting converters to bioengineering, the space occupied by the new age AI technologies shows much promise. It will also change the way we search for answers online. From search engine-based research, we might move into an era of answer engines which will parse through millions of text-based knowledge found online to provide accurate answers to your questions. The work on these technologies is already underway in the form of ‘Consensus’. Do check it out. Of course, this is not to say, the same AI capabilities cannot take a violent and destructive form. It is very much possible. At that point, it’ll be all about putting the right safeguards in place.Elon Musk’s challenge to management thinking
Content Factory Take: The article touches upon how Elon Musk violates conventional norms of being a manager through his top-down, work-from-the-office, purpose-heavy style of management. Whether it would succeed in a social media company like the way it succeeded in a manufacturing and spaceship company is a question that looms.How to Find Clarity When You’re at a Career Crossroads
Content Factory Take: An article that I could relate to in many ways. It talks about why values should drive your career choices more than passion as passion can be a fleeting experience for many. For me, one of the key values I find important is having in-depth work friendships. Hence, I'm unable to connect to those workplaces where the relationships are weak, even if work is meaningful and high on impact. I strongly believe that one of the prerequisites of having such a strong relationship-focused culture is ensuring employees have a rich personal life. Unless you have a rich personal life, there wouldn't be anything worth sharing with your work friends. Thus it will all boil down to how you and your employee perceive your work life. Whether you both see it as 100% of your life or a part of your existence like the article suggests? Finally, I really liked when the author says every job has the unlimited potential to be crafted in ways that we find relatable to our life's purpose. Believing that there are unlimited ways in which you can define your job opens newer ways to be happy at work. It's also reassuring to hear the fact no matter how much we analyse a certain career decision, sometimes there are no correct ones only courageous choices.Content Factory Take: I was happy to find an article that reaffirmed my faith in keeping the writing process to be as simple as possible. I have stayed away from using jargon and tried to keep my writing as a process to have a conversation with the readers. The article emphasises the need for your content to be interesting. It defines interestingness as one that combines novelty and importance or in other words, provides a clear answer to the reader’s question - why should they care?
The author feels that writing should be like music. The rhythmic placement of words to create crescendos and rests, forcing its pace and punctuations can have a captivating impact on the reader. The article ends with a call for authors to find the golden mean between extremes of hypersensitivity to feedback and obliviousness to feedback and be open to wise criticism.
Identity Crisis
Content Factory Take: In one of the coldest moments in Argentinian civil war history, hundreds of pregnant mothers were kidnapped and children were separated from them for political reasons. These mothers in pursuit of their lost children prompted the setting up of the world’s first forensic genetic data bank. This became the cornerstone in the identification of victims in natural and human-made disasters across the globe. This a truly eye-opening article that touches upon the current ways in which dead are found and identified in tiring circumstances. It touches upon the agony the victim’s family goes through in waiting for the ‘missing’ person to be declared as legally ‘dead’. It shows why forensic science holds the key to fulfilling the human rights of the victim’s families by providing them closure. The article details challenges that await the forensic team during scene visits, and their use of autopsy, forensic odontology, and fingerprint as tools for identification and emphasises the much neededcentralised DNA identification centre for India.
Life, Death, and Total Football
Content Factory Take: The amazing story of Lars, a dutch football coach in the USA who dies battles cancer. His friend and the author of this article, an American learns about football and dutch footballing culture through Lars. Great read!
Sports
In the Rain, in the Cold, in the Dark
Content Factory Take: Argentinian striker, Angel Di Maria writes about his humble beginnings, sacrifices his family made, his skinny body, his injuries and his world cup dream that finally came true.Catch up on updates from world cricket through these mini-blogs by Gautam Jayasurya.
Movies
Bhediya
Content Factory Take: Minnal Murali in many ways was Indian cinema finally embracing a superhero movie in all its Indianness. It was rooted in a geography that was familiar, a vulnerable hero, a powerful villain with a cause that was relatable. Bhediya takes a similar route. Placed in Arunachal Pradesh, in the backdrop of a social issue, with Varun Dhavan in one of the honest performances of his career, supported by a stellar cast. Here is a blog that lays down why you need to watch without giving away the plot. Written by Gautam Jayasurya, consider this a small guidebook that will make your film-watching experience better.
Podcasts
The feeling of rooting for your team in World Cup 2022 Qatar
Content Factory Take: Aswin Sethumadhavan, a football enthusiast full-time and a banker part-time, talks about what it was like for him to experience his first world cup live.Rooted Cosmpolitan
Content Factory Take: I have always believed that at least some of us find ourselves in the middle of worlds - of language, culture, lifestyles, friends and so on. Here is a five-hour podcast that captures what the famous Kannada-English author, journalist and cultural icon, Sugata Srinivasaraju has to say about the importance of being rooted in one’s culture and language and yet being open to ideas of the world at large.
Books
MINDSET: Changing The Way You think To Fulfil Your Potential
Content Factory Take: When I was growing up, I always thought the world was filled with people who can and people who couldn’t. I felt jealous of people who could understand academic concepts faster, play sports better and write more elegantly. This is a book that I would send to my younger self. It talks about the most relevant idea of our times - The Growth Mindset. I first heard this word during my business school internship at Hindustan Unilever. I then dismissed it as a fanciful word that corporates keep in their brochures for the sake of better branding. As I started appreciating the weight of the meaning it carries, I grew closer to the word and today I live by it. Be it professionally or personally, the idea that a person should always look to grow, by constantly learning from his environment, people and content around him has been the guiding force for me.Got a bad appraisal? How do I improve by 1% from there? Got dribbled past by the opposition player? What do I do to stop that from happening next time? Boring writing? What do I do to make it more interesting?
The author narrates numerous examples of people and organisations who succeeded in life by constantly looking for avenues to improve and by deliberately practising those. If there is anyone who is still out there who believes talent is the end-all and be-all, they are doing themselves a great disservice by not reading this one.
What did we learn new this week?
Agnikul - While we were all fanboying about SpaceX, there are some very daring entrepreneurs who are very close to making private space launches a reality in India. Check them out in this podcast.
Excerpt from a piece from The Ken on Hiring for Startups:
Shouldn’t more layoffs mean more people looking for jobs? Not in the current scenario. Two factors are at play, making recruiting harder for some firms. Counter-intuitively, more layoffs are shrinking the ‘talent pool’ of promising recruits. Till 2021, candidates were on the move, and the pool was larger with all the voluntary attrition. The layoffs in 2022 have made the employees less adventurous when it comes to changing jobs. On the other hand, many candidates are unaffordable for companies. Thanks to dizzying pay packages doled out during the hiring frenzy in 2021. Startups find themselves faced with a double whammy: while they are being nudged to cut costs by going slow on hiring, they also cannot afford to hire laid-off workers who currently dominate the pool of job seekers.
What is the other Content Factory Content?
Till we are back with another great set of recommendations, check out the content from our full-time contributors, Gautam Jayasurya & Rudresh Dahiya on other platforms:
See you in the next post! Until then, please pass it forward, do that random act of kindness and if you still have time, share our work by clicking the ‘share’ button below.