On Olga Tokarczuk, Sleep Tracking and Tesla vs Nokia
Three stories that stood out for me last week:
The first recommendation is an interview with Olga Tokarczuk, the Polish novelist who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2019. She had suddenly burst into the scene, or so it seemed, at least to those who have not been exposed to her works. I was reading her book Flights when the announcement came out — a book about travel, and about blurred boundaries between nations and personalities. I am still not done with the book but I go back to it again and again; it’s one of those that you can go back to when the wanderlust strikes and you wonder why you travel. ‘Blessed are those who leave,’ says a character in the book. I found this interview helpful to know more about Tokarczuk and her way of thinking. She remarks during the interview that we are all a statement now, and we make it via how we dress, with our haircut and the way we act — we are walking billboards carrying our opinions and afflictions shrieking out aloud to anyone who cares to listen. She dwells on the topic of identity, both national and personal, in the interview as well. ‘We all have many identities, they are liquid,’ she says at one point.
An interesting take on Tesla’s future and how it relates to Nokia’s downfall came out in the Forbes magazine last week. It recounts the old fable of how Nokia was relieved when they took apart the first iPhone, for they knew all the components and could achieve better cost profile than Apple. However, Henry Chesbrough, who wrote this piece and also coined the term ‘open innovation’, highlights that the difference wasn’t in how the parts were assembled to give a new product, but more in the intangible software that led to a superior performance along with the excellent user interface. Chesbrough believes that both software design and the user interface will be the key differentiator for Tesla’s future also. When compared to the automobile giants like Ford, Tesla will continue to surge ahead given that it has identified the value levers that work with the consumers today.
I return to my favourite topic of sleep. FT published a guide to wellness last week and while several topics are interesting, this one on sleep tracking stood out for me. The core idea of this story is that if you are searching for a perfect night’s sleep, the sleep trackers may actually do more harm than good. For instance, a reading of your ‘bad’ sleep stats might make you anxious and further keep you awake. Moreover, the sleep tracking technology still seems to be work-in-progress and not there fully yet, so some of the conclusions that we end up drawing may not be accurate. In the end, the best judge of a good sleep is how refreshed you feel in the morning.
A quote that I came across last week:
“All of us are on borrowed time. There are no refunds and no guarantees. At some point, the only time you’ll have to worry about is the time you’ve wasted”
— Seth Godin
