(Video link here.) We recently came across this great talk by Joshua Foer that explores the success of “experts.” The video is 17 minutes, which we know is long, so we’ve culled the gist for you, hoping you’ll listen at some point; we think it’s truly useful and super interesting.
According to Foer and the scientists he draws from, becoming an expert has a whole lot more to do with psychology than innate ability. We generally push ourselves to achieve at a given skill only up to the point at which we can get the job done. Foer uses the example of typing—most of us type for at least an hour a day, yet we don’t get measurably faster…we settle into a speed we think is good enough. We hit an “OK plateau.”
Psychologists who study skill acquisition have found that experts across a wide variety of fields know that you can’t improve at something as long as you’re stuck on the OK plateau, and routinely use the four strategies below to ensure that their minds continue to climb uphill, so to speak. Even if you’re not striving to become an “expert” in your field, we think these strategies are helpful for anyone trying to pick up a new skill or practice, or get better at an old one. Here they are: read more…
We’ve written many times before about the fantastic Canal House Cookbook series, but this summer Christopher Hirsheimer and Melissa Hamilton took their work to a new level by hosting the first annual Smallholding Festival in Ottsville, Pennsylvania. The festival featured a number of skill-shares and do-it-yourself exhibitions including cheese-making, beekeeping, canning, bread-baking, and spit-roasting. Also on-hand was Margo True, the author of The One-Block Feast: An Adventure in Food from Yard to Table, which is worth checking out if you’re an aspiring urban farmer/gardener/d-i-y-er/beekeeper
Even though we’re telling you about this event after it’s happened, you can actually bring a few of the exhibitions directly to your own home. The Smallholding Festival website features four free pdfs with step-by-step instructions for read more…
Recently, we came a cross an old hard drive that we had swapped out of a computer long ago; who knows what revealing bits of information were on it? We searched the internet to learn how to dispose of a hard drive without leaving ourselves open to industrious hackers. We could either wipe it clean by ways that were way beyond our competence or…DESTROY IT. A friend of ours took it onto the street and smashed it to bits on the sidewalk using a $9 hammer we’d bought on Amazon. She returned with the twisted wreck, which had become was curiously beautiful…an inadvertent sculpture. read more…
A post in Zen Habits echoed what we’ve been thinking lately:
I don’t do boring exercise. If I hate doing something, I stop doing it. I don’t have enough life left to waste doing stuff I hate.
A big part of blogging is sitting on your ass, surfing thrillingly, but virtually; we don’t get enough exercise because we hate the gym thing and we don’t have much time these days, nor the $$ to pay a trainer to make us work out. We need exercise that we can do easily, that’ll get our heart rates up and really work some muscles and be fun, and that we’ll be self-motivated to do.
This unattributed image posted on You Are the River recently was accompanied by the words “I’m so hungry.” Yeah we are too. It reminds us of the endless possibilities for making fried eggs into a compelling meal any time of day – breakfast, brunch, lunch, dinner, or a late supper.
Fried eggs are great on just about anything, providing a cheap, satisfying, easy-to-make hit of protein. They’re the reason Sally’s cookbook The Improvisational Cook features Spaghetti with a Fried Egg and Parmigiano Reggiano on the cover (recipe here). Often finding herself tired, hungry and too crazed to cook, she’s riffed endlessly on the theme. A whole section of The Improvisational Cook is devoted to it, and includes oven-roasted peppers or sweet onions, mashed or hashed potatoes, ratatouille, polenta, warmed over risotto, fried bread, asparagus, spinach, potato chips… As a life strategy, she makes sure she’s got organic eggs on hand when the larder is low.
Maria Robledo has a way with flower arranging, or perhaps we should say: off-the-cuff displays of just about any fresh branch, or flower or bunch of leaves. The other evening at her house, we were smitten with the huge green vase into which she’d poured a shallow pool of water; she simply floated a few flowers that she picked one of the bushes growing in her Brooklyn backyard. read more…
This is the really fast gist of a two hour presentation Richard St. John gives to high school students (Video link here). We edited the transcript down to a handy little list:
“…the first thing is passion. Freeman Thomas says, “I’m driven by my passion.” Carol Coletta says, “I would pay someone to do what I do.” And the interesting thing is, if you do it for love, the money comes anyway.
Work! Rupert Murdoch said to me, “It’s all hard work. Nothing comes easily. But I have a lot of fun.” Alex Garden says, “To be successful put your nose down in something and get damn good at it.” There’s no magic, it’s practice, practice, practice.
Fun!..have fun working.
Focus. Norman Jewison said to me, “I think it all has to do with focusing yourself on one thing”
Push! David Gallo says, “Push yourself. Physically, mentally, you’ve gotta push, push, push.” You gotta push through shyness and self-doubt. Goldie Hawn says, “I always had self-doubts. I wasn’t good enough, I wasn’t smart enough. I didn’t think I’d make it.” read more…
This winter, after a few weeks of feeling pretty down, my spirits were lifted in the oddest place—a diner bathroom in Burlington, Vermont. The walls were decorated with quotes, and on the side of the stall I happened to enter was this from Eleanor Roosevelt: “No one can make you feel inferior without your consent.”
Just that simple reminder did me a ton of good. You can almost imagine Eleanor saying it with a bit of sternness in her voice; but only because she knows you are capable picking yourself up and dusting yourself off. I remember thinking how lovely it would be to find messages like those more often, which is why I was so pleased to come across Miami-based artist Augustina Woodgate, who sews little poems into the tags of thriftstore clothes, at work in the video, above. (Video link here.) read more…
This weekend, Sally will be on public radio’s The Splendid Table talking with Lynne Rosetto Kasper about fresh cherries, which are at their peak now. She’ll discuss way to improvise with the fabulous fruit, and reprise her spectacular, effortless recipe Warm Fresh Cherries with ‘Leaves‘. Check Splendid Table’s website for air times.
When we saw Design Milk‘s recent post featuring Room 39′s lacy throw made of dye-cut felt, we were instantly smitten with the headboard made of painted pegboard. We’d never noticed that when pegboard is used in a NON-utilitarian way, it acts as a wonderful design element. This curiously modern headboard would be easy to make: buy a 4′x 8x sheet of pegboard at a lumber yard or online (we love that encompasses the whole bed area, not just the bed), paint it, and anchor it to the wall.
We always admire people who fearlessly take things apart on the way to REconfiguring them in a new way. So we love the antique table Faye from You are the River hacked, to give it a rustic/modern look; she salvaged rough-hewn top and added moderne legs. “I picked up a super funky table on Craigslist for $50, removed all the rusty screws, sanded it down, removed the legs and voila, I have yet another dining table!” It’s the legs that make it (They remind us of the one Sally designed out of black steel some time ago. read more…
We’ve gotten a little lazy of late, since we dislike going to the gym (yellow walls with black floors under florescent lights) and we spend so many long hours at our desks. We could get stymied by our slide into laziness by comparing ourselves to all those buff self-disciplined people that faithfully climb onto the treadmill at the crack of dawn. Instead, we took a cue from this New Yorker cartoon, and decided to improvise a workout for ourselves at home, to just START with something simple, and work up: a bit every day. We figure doing something is better than doing nothing. And who says we have to work out a gym: the right way is what’s right for us.
A trainer we know has been showing us exercises we can do at home, with no special equipment, using chairs, walls, floor, steps. (We’re planning to write a post about it, once we know more.) We’re amazed at what we can do at home IF we just get off our butts and start.
Which we did, today…doing a few reps of light weights, some squats and some wall push-ups, after we’ve warmed up with skipping-rope-without-a-rope. We’re going to try to build working out INTO our workday, read more…
“ It is a book about writing that provides guidance on how you can re-discover skills you likely possessed before getting caught up in the notions of “good and bad”.
It’s more than a book. It’s a public service. Barry is trying to help everyone reconnect with lost creative capability and provides a path for doing it.
The book was published in 2008 and is a wonderful work of art in itself.”
We love it, and how daring, non-linear and honest Barry lets herself be…
Stuart Mason Dambrot, ‘the improvised life’s resident concilientist|futurist has sent us many wonderful ideas since our first syncronous meeting on a New York City street corner. The latest, the work of designer Siren Elise Wilhelmsen, inventor of the Toast Spoons we recently blogged as well as Found, an oddly stylish stool put together from scraps found in a carpenter’s workshop. “Depending on which business and which projects they are working on, the waste will always be different and one stool will never look the same as the other; each item is unique.” read more…
It is high season for ramps, the pungent wild leeks that grow throughout the Appalachian and Catskill mountains. Ellen Silverman sent us photos of the sublime ramp butter she was given by a friend, with an utterly simple recipe that will keep you in ramp heaven for days. She wrote this in her email:
“Cyd McDowell is an amazing food stylist and lover of all things food. She picked the ramps on her property upstate she lives near Great Barrington. All she did was chop the ramps put them in the food processor with good salted butter (I think she used Plugra)… and process. She brought the butter to me when we met for a coffee; it was in a little glass bowl with a round of natural wax paper placed on the top.
We ate it on everything for three nights…on fish sauteed one night and panko-fried another, roasted chicken, steamed clams, bread, asparagus, potatoes; we licked the remains off of our fingers! Now, very regrettably, we have finished it…”
What a gift!!! We could imagine ramp butter in risottos, on pasta, on grilled meats, to cook scrambled or fried eggs in, and of course, on toast…
Here’s a rough little recipe that allows you to gauge the “rampiness” of the butter, and calibrate it as you wish: read more…
, which is worth checking out if you’re an aspiring urban farmer/gardener/d-i-y-er/beekeeper
features Spaghetti with a Fried Egg and Parmigiano Reggiano on the cover (
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