🖐🏽 the five
Friction-maxxing, a new food pyramid, Claude Code, visual weather comparison and whimsical playing cards.
🪨 The benefits of “Friction-maxxing”: I really enjoyed this article with similar themes and insights to the ones I had been exploring last year (and ultimately turned into a TED talk). The author does a great job of illustrating places where the removal of the friction is leading to a sterile existence and counters with examples from her own life about where the friction of effort has resulted in the most meaningful moments - like raising readers on a memorable roadtrip.
I think it’s an important message to share so that more people can intentionally consider where they want to keep friction and where they’d like to remove it.
It’s a great platform from which I’d love to move in two, more nuanced directions:
1) intentional friction - It is not lost on me that too many people/families still face way too much friction in their lives and so the real conversation I think is about being intentional about which friction to keep and which to try to eliminate.
2) texture - I don’t think that friction is the thing we all care about, but rather living a life of texture, which requires friction. But that means thinking about the values that create the right texture for you and your family.And what does that look like on an everyday basis? How can feeding all of my humans have “texture” but in a way that allows me to arrive to my kitchen on a Tuesday night with 20 minutes and zero energy or get my youngest to actually sit down and read during family reading time.
But this piece does a wonderful job of starting these really important conversations, and so it the lead-off for this week’s Five.
🥦 New Food pyramid: I grew up in an Indian household, which is to say, I was given lemon ginger tea when I had a cold, turmeric milk for a cough, and good old ghee to make plain roti or kitchidi tasty. My mum was an OG “real food” advocate and was skeptical of anything artificial - whether it was aspartame, cough syrup or even margarine - when a natural option was available. That lesson has always stayed with me, through the different fashions and fads of diets which would find different villains - it’s Fat! No Sugar! No Salt! She would just shake her head and say: just have the real thing, just in moderation.
But I’ve found it so hard to apply the fundamentals of food in the average American supermarket because of the dominance of processed foods. (Long have I wished for the markets of Europe - that offer food that is tasty, fresh and relatively cheap).
So I was encouraged when I saw the latest food pyramid come out. One focused on “real food”. The site is also a delight, and shows what’s possible from a government endeavour.
But let’s keep our eyes on the real win: what we really need is ways to put it into practice - make this kind of food affordable and readily available everywhere, not just fancy specialty stores.
It’s a start though, and I’m excited to see where it can go.
Checking out Claude Code - I thought this WSJ article was a light and accessible way to dive into what Claude Code is and how it’s making it possible for anyone to create digital things of all sorts. It’s what I used to create my own blog again, completely to my specifications and gradients and functionality. It’s far from perfect, but man is it liberating to be able to have a vision in your head and be able to bring it to life without anyone else. It’s what many others are using to create tools and toys that do a thing they have dreamed up.
The reason I think Claude code is worth checking out is that it enables non-technical people to participate in digital creation in a way that just hasn’t been possible before. There are definitely things you’d want to run by an engineer if you want to deploy more broadly but for little toys and experiments for yourself, it’s really great. If you want to read up more on it, I suggest this piece and this one. Yes you need to get comfortable with the terminal and some other basic commands but that’s a small price for the benefit over time I think.
In any case, reading about it and getting more comfortable with capabilities is a great place to start.
☔️ Weather Explorer: a fun little pet project that helps people visually understand and compare the weather of different cities. But also a reminder for me on why I think it’s so important that everyone should be able to cook up their own little digital pet projects…. so you can explore your curiosity through an active lens.
It’s one of the most core muscles to exercise as a founder - to see everything in an active stance - that you could act on should you wish, instead of passively consuming (even if that consumption is just information on what’s the annual rainfall difference between Vancouver and Palo Alto 🫣). And something that you could build yourself with Claude Code… just sayin’.
🂡 Whimsical playing cards: What more is there to say but that I find such delight in cleverness that sits at the intersection of form and function.