Category: People

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Food and Drink Happiness People

Guess Who’s Coming To Dinner?

Thanksgiving is over and hopefully you had a nice celebration with your family.

But now after recovering from Thanksgiving, who’d you invite to dinner if you could invite any five people you wanted?  Narrowing it down, let’s say they have to be alive too. Here in this part of Mexico the weather is getting nicer by the day. The evenings are a pleasant blend of dry and cool, perfect for eating dinner outside on a patio with friends.

So, if you were going to have five living people over for dinner who would they be? I know who I’d invite. Here’s the list, in no particular order, I’d like to meet them for dinner separately or in a group setting: Christoper Hitchens, Michelle Obama, Elizabeth Gilbert, Alain de Botton, and Seth Godin. There’re other people I’d like to invite too, but for now these are for the first dinner party.

Why these particular people? Well, I’ve heard all of them speak publicly and enjoyed listening to what they had to say. Most have written interesting books and are keen observers of people.

Christopher Hitchens Christopher Hitchens is one of the top intellectuals and debaters trodding the planet. I’ve written about him here. He has cancer and may not make it another five years (but I’d have included him on my list anyway).

Michelle Obama Michelle is the invitee I know the least about. But I’ve seen her speak and her background and current situation are fascinating. She attended Princeton and Harvard Law and practiced law afterwards. Then of course there’s that whole White House thing. Plus since she’s not a politician, she can be unguarded and open.

Elizabeth Gilbert Honestly, at first I’d dismissed Elizabeth a few years ago; ignorantly thinking her popular “Eat,Pray, Love” was a chick lit book. Then I saw her speak on TED and in a PBS series and I changed my mind. Then I read the book too and liked it.

Alain de Botton Alain is a sharp observer of modern life. Last year he was invited to spend a week at a desk watching, chatting with and writing about passengers in London’s Heathrow airport. His observations were even turned into a book so if he can convert a week in an airport into a book he’s got to be pretty clever.

Seth Godin Seth is an entrepreneur and blogger,  blogging about marketing and the way ideas spread. He’s blogged daily for years and it’s still interesting and current. It’s one of the blogs I never miss. He also has 12 best sellers that have been translated into 33 languages. Here’s a talk he gave last year at TED.

Next, what sort of food would I serve? I don’t know. I’d check with everyone to find what they each preferred and figure out something delicious everyone would like. I guess I’d have to feed the secret service guys too.

But really I’m most interested in the conversations that would happen.

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Happiness Heros Ideas Simplifing Sites Streamlining Unclutter

Teashop Takeaway Part II

Here’s the second part of my excerpts from the teashop video about “Life Management.” The primary speakers are Leo Babauta and Tim Ferriss.

You can check Friday’s post Teashop Takeaway (by scrolling below this post) for a longer introduction to them.

I’ve read many of their blogs over the years and a couple of their books as well. Neither of these guys was well know even three years ago. As they became successful writers, more people wanted slices of their pies. A pie really doesn’t get much bigger, you just have to cut thinner slices. So I’ve seen their ideas about life management evolve and morph with their circumstances. The foundations remained, but tweaks were made as they scraped the barnacles from the hull.

-Distractions – Simplify your life so you don’t have so many distractions. Try to eliminate as many distractions as you can. Then you need to become comfortable with letting small things go by the way. Let little bad things (say incurring a late fee) happen. Accept the small losses that allow you to focus on the one or two predetermined most important items.

-Time – There’ll always be more requests for your time than the time you have.

-Meetings – Avoid having meetings and conference calls. If you must have them, then set the agenda beforehand along with a start and end time and stick to it. Also, send out an email before the meeting to the participants sharing your goals and everyone can come in prepared.

-Slowness – Don’t fear slowness. Try building slow periods into your schedule. Really work to have dinners with three or more friends at least once a week. Doing this can help you appreciate things in real-time.

-Multiple Interests – Identity diversification is vital so you don’t become too attached to your work or any one thing. Find at least three things you can identify yourself with and try to set goals within each area.

-Deferring – Don’t defer things. Instead do or use things and appreciate them now. Cultivate an awareness of what’s important. By not deferring things, you’ll put yourself into the position of feeling that you’re living well.

-Gratitude – Try to express gratitude for what you think is good in your life. Once a week (or more) jot down three things in your life you’re grateful for. Appreciation is often a casualty of our modern quest for action.

-Introductions – When meeting someone new, try asking them, “What do you do when you aren’t working?” And see where the conversation goes.  It’ll be a more interesting start for you both than the common “What do you do?” This also touches on the identity diversification idea I was just talking about.

The ideas Leo and Tim share in the video cover lots of the broad categories they deal with in their writings. (Tim is actually trying to transition away from only being recognized as a life management writer, to become more associated with tweaking the human body’s performance).

If you want to get the gist of what Leo and Tim are about, you could watch the video and read my excerpts in under two hours saving yourself time and maybe money. I’m not saying to not read their stuff, I do and like it.

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Happiness Ideas People Sites Streamlining Time Savers

Teashop Takeaway

Recently, I watched a video of a panel disscussion that was shot in a San Francisco teashop. It was a public talk about “life management” featuring the shop owner and three guest speakers. Two of the guest speakers were Leo Babauta and Tim Ferriss and they provided the bulk of the interesting ideas.

Both of these guys have very popular blogs, generally addressing how to optimize your life, although each has a different presentation style. Looked at from a high school yearbook voting perspective, Leo would’ve been voted most likely to become a writer; and Tim would’ve been pigeonholed as most likely to succeed. You could imagine one is a tea drinker and the other a coffee drinker.

With success, they’ve risen in prominence and demands on their time have increased forcing them to more tightly focus on what works best to enable them to be productive while living non-harried lives.

Leo recently moved to San Francisco from Guam with his wife and six kids. Tim is a single San Franciscan and self-described as hyperactive in many endeavors with a penchant for traveling. They manage very different lives, plus each has to control their time eaters.

The video is an hour and a half long and most people won’t geek out for that long; so I’ll present what I think are some of their top takeaway ideas for making their lives better.

-Low Info Diet – To confront information overload, Tim deals with info on a “just in time” (only when info directly affects him) basis. This is in contrast to a  “just in case” style (taking in as much info as possible). Most situations covered by  high info consumption rarely arise. He says he “tries to get to the bottom of things, not stay on top of things.” If they miss something that’s important,  it’ll be brought to your attention as it bubbles to the surface in conversation.

– Keeping Up – The need to keep up with everything and everyone is self-created. If the expectation from other people is that you probably won’t get back to them generally they will not harass you unless it’s important.

-Single-tasking – You will have a saner and calmer life if you single-task. Do one thing end to end.

-Prioritizing – On getting things done, they both single-task, concentrating on getting the one, most important thing for that day done before doing anything else on their to-do-list. What is the most important thing to do? Probably the most uncomfortable one. Another test for importance is: if that one thing is the only thing you get done, you’ll feel your day’s still a success.

-Worrying – Worrying is not the same as preparing. The things most people worry about don’t usually even happen.

-Control – Everything is always changing, so try to give up trying to control things and be flexible instead.

-Slowness – Build-in or schedule slowness into your week and have those blocks of time become fixed, with other activities coming second. For example, Tim will not change a hike or dinner date if there are three or more friends getting together. These built-in times also act as a bracket, creating an ending point for the day.

-Big Shots – With success, Tim found he’s been welcomed into rarefied business circles,  there he’s been surprised how most of the hyper-successful individuals are relaxed and casual in most of their life dealings, able to concentrate on “the one most important” task in a day and accomplish it. These people weren’t the frazzled people you might imagine; being overwhelmed doesn’t fix anything, you need to have clear priorities.

-Routines – Develop routines, rituals, and routines to simplify your life. Routines will save your limited decision-making time since you won’t have those routine decisions to make.

-Habits – You’ll need to do something new at least five times before it will set in  as a habit, and stop just being an experiment. People generally respond to a better habit.

-Motivation – Rather than having to depend on discipline, motivation works as a better incentive. If you know your friend is waiting for you to go for a walk, you’re more likely to do it.

-Focus – Focus on your breathing to help you see what’s going on right now since your breathing is a constant and an easy thing to latch onto to bring yourself back to the present.

Lots of good stuff here I think. Too much for one post, so Tuesday I’ll post the second half.  If you like the ideas so far, give the video a look in case I missed some points that might mean more to you.


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Heros Ideas

It’s Not All About The Wave

Here’s a photo of my friend, Brian, and me returning from surfing at a favorite spot of mine. The way in and out is via a verdant jungle path.

I really love surfing and the things that come along with it, like using this path. It’s a beautiful little trail, so even if the surfing on a particular day isn’t good the journey to and from the beach will be a little trek through a beautiful tropical landscape.

Besides actually riding a wave, there’re other aspects of surfing that are fun. For example, if your board is short enough, you’ll be able to pass under (duckdive) under approaching waves when you’re paddling out to surf. To duckdive, just shove the nose of the board down as deep as possible and then step down hard on the tail. You’ll pop out of the back of the wave ready to keep paddling out.  The whole wave will have simply passed over you. When done right, it’s a very smooth and tranquil sensation. Somehow it feels like magic, slipping smoothly under a wave that moments before was going to crash on top of you.

Normally, surfers don’t talk about duckdiving a wave. It’s something that’s done to get out to where you want to be. For me, it’s an underappreciated part of surfing, and is a nice prelude to  hopefully catching a wave when you get out to the break.

If you want to see what surfing is like, the surfing portions of “Blue Crush” capture the feeling of surfing on film pretty well. Story line aside, in “Blue Crush” the surfing sequences feel very real. Even most of the waves they ride are normal Hawaii waves. The majority of surfers, including me, will never surf the giant waves that creep into the public news landscape. So the waves, even the bigger ones, shown in “Blue Crush” are within the range an average surfer might encounter. Plus surfing in Hawaii is tops, on any size wave.

If you broke it down, the actual time most surfers spend riding on waves is counted in seconds for most rides. A normal ride would usually be under a minute! Accumulating a total of more than several minutes riding time during a day would be counted as a rare and special day. Surfing is quite a bit like fishing; most of a fisherman’s time is spent fishing not catching.

All of the activities associated with surfing like getting to the break, chatting with your friends, duckdiving, studying the ocean’s vast horizon, and just being out there make surfing the attraction it is for those of us who enjoy surfing.

P.S. A side note. Saturday, Kelly Slater, secured his Tenth World Surfing Championship! His point lead now is that far ahead of his competitors; and the season is still not over. Slater is largely unheralded in the general press even though this is like Micheal Jordan winning ten NBA titles or Lance Armstrong winning the Tour de France ten times.

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Books Drink Heros People Uncategorized

An Atheist In The Foxhole

Christopher Hitchens has cancer. He thinks he won’t win and the cancer will take him.

Too bad. Of course it’s always too bad when someone dies from cancer. He’s been an enthusiastic, lifelong smoker and drinker and would no doubt say that he enjoyed the ride.

He’s a hero of mine. Not because of his lifestyle but because of his stances and defense of what he thinks is the way things are. A long time ago William Blake wrote “… create a system or be enslaved by another man’s.” Good advice, I think. Hitchens has never been shy about pointing out the enslavement foisted upon most humans by religions large and small.

Hitchens is an atheist. And now that he’s dying and thinks he won’t make it, he’s still unrepentant.  He’s only 61. With esophageal cancer that’s spread to his lymph nodes and lungs, he says he’ll be very lucky to live for five more years.

He’s an atheist in a foxhole; and he plans on staying one. Hitchens has gone on record about this now, while he has all of his faculties. If he is said to have had a last-minute conversion while he lie dying,  it’ll be due to him having lost his ability to think due to the cancer or its treatment.  Any claims of sudden conversion at the end will be due to having a diminished mind and not a sudden switching of sides because he sees the light. Because he’d say that religion is darkness.

As a controversial figure because of his views and  his wide exposure from his prolific writings and speaking, Hitchens has been engaged in conflicts most of his life. The title of his 2007 book is “God Is Not Great,” that’s a pretty good way to draw fire. It’s a good book too.

Hitchens has lots of experience in holding his own against what he considers bad ideas. I hope he can keep it up.

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Exercise Food Food and Drink Health Ideas Opinion People

George Clooney Spans A Lot of Time

This is going to be tough, to distill “paleo” into a short pithy post, but I’ll try.

Take George Clooney. If he spread his arms out wide, they’d span about six feet. Now, imagine his outstretched  arms representing the two or so million years humans have been around. With that in mind, the time since we started farming is represented by less than the length of his middle fingernail. So most of his six foot arm span is the time we were foraging for food. We’ve been hunter-gathers for most of our time since leaving the trees.

It’s estimated we’ve changed (genetically speaking) less than one percent since farming started around ten thousand years ago. That’s not much change. During all that time before farming started our bodies became fine tuned to what was provided by living as hunter-gathers.

For food, we would have sought out but rarely found much in the way of sweets, instead we ate animals, fish, leafy vegetable, berries and some fare like bugs and grubs that grosses most of us out . We aren’t adapted yet to thrive on our current diet of simple sugars, grains and dairy.

Currently, with our incredible successes as farmers, grains and simple sugars are cheap and widespread, fueling humans around the world. We’re like diesel engines supplied by fuel tanks of gasoline. We might occasionally add a quart of oil to the gasoline to make the fuel a little more compatible, but the little diesel engines aren’t running too well.

Apparently, preagricultural humans were felled by childbirth, infection and traumatic injury. And the ones who dodged those bullets, were taller, stronger and longer lived than our more recent ancestors who became farmers. Hunter-gathers didn’t suffer much from the diseases of civilization like obesity, heart problems and the cancers affecting us now.

Every account I’ve seen of healthy native populations encountering and then embracing a western style diet soon fell prey to the same constellation of ailments associated with the more technologically advanced population who introduced the refined diet to them.

This is a broad area to look at. But there’s good reason to do so. And most people looking at how our ancestors lived come away with insights on how to improve their lives today, and not by picking up a spear and eating grubs.

This is about the clues to the environment humans adapted to over the millenia. Look at “The Black Swan” author, Nassim Taleb, he’s erudite and urbane, spending his time (away from the outdoors) in cities around the world. But by paying attention to these clues from our ancestors he’s able to better live in his modern world. Wealthy enough to do as he pleases and travel often, he says “I was able to re-create 90 percent of the benefits of the hunter-gatherer lifestyle with minimal effort, without compromising a modern lifestyle, in the aesthetics of an urban setting.”

This is a broad area for investigation. Humans are tool users and seem to not like rules. So here are a some of the take-away tools I think are useful:

Avoid sugars and grains and embrace meat, fish, leafy vegetables, berries and nuts. Skip meals sometimes. Sleep longer, in complete darkness. Become an occasional sprinter instead of jogging regularly. Get a little sun. Walk a lot. And finally, randomly do some brief but very intense exercise.

Here’re a few places to start looking if you want more information:

PaNu –  the site of a board certified MD with his thoughts about Paleolithic nutrition and modern life, a very good source to start with. He’s a busy guy, so his site is not updated very often but that’s ok.

Mark’s Daily Apple – this site serves up good solid information, but with distracting contests and self promotions.

Evfit – an old school website layout but chock full of good information.

This is a big subject I’ll revisit in later posts, I hope this was a useful introduction for you.

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Ideas People Sites Things

Good Business, Bad Business

Lots of articles, blogs, and books have been written about business. I’ve read some of them and the “takeaway” message from most investigations boils down to this: cheerfully give people more than they expect. This seems to be the foundation of successful businesses large and small.

Here’s something that happened to a good friend of mine, Rick. His laptop PC was old, underpowered and overloaded – time for an upgrade. Planning on being in rural Mexico for the Winter, Rick was trying to sort out a new laptop to buy before heading South .

There’s an Apple store near his house in the States and after a few visits he became enchanted with MacBooks.

But, when he finally pulled the trigger, he reasoned a $700 PC laptop would do the trick. So he ordered one online. It showed up and he unpacked it. He studied it for a couple of minutes and putzed around on it for a few more. Then he repacked it, sent it back, ate the $70 restocking fee, and bought the MacBook he’d been eying.

He’s happy now. And as always, I’m sure quality will be remembered long after the price is forgotten. So far, he feels like he was cheerfully given more than he expected. He’ll be heading to Mexico soon and his computer is something he doesn’t have to worry about.

I use a Macbook too but am in no way associated with Apple. And I know folks who’re happy with their PC’s. I’m just trying to provide an example. Sure, Apple is known for its catchy ad campaigns and innovative products, but I think the true key to their success has been consistently providing their customers with more than promised.

Here’s an example toward the other end of the customer satisfaction spectrum. Generally speaking, when surfing the internet, we expect free content. So having to pay to look at content drives traffic away and reduces the spreading of that site’s ideas, and restricts the site’s following too.

Arthur De Vany is an accomplished academic in economics and an early proponent of a lifestyle based on an evolutionary perspective. If you go to his website you’ll be frustrated by having to pay $39/yr to see most of his site’s content. Maybe he has lots of subscribers but he’d have a much larger following if it were free. And now, from what I could see, he has a book coming out. He’d wind up selling a lot more books if his site was free because he’d have tons more traffic. I’d guess selling more books would generate more income than charging $39/yr for content on the internet.

There’re probably some people paying to see Art’s material. And maybe his site would exceed my expectations, unfortunately, my expectation is free content so I guess I’ll never know.

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Ideas People Story

Small Gestures

Katharine Hepburn said “I’m an atheist, and that’s it. I believe there’s nothing we can know except that we should be kind to each other and do what we can for other people.”

I clipped out part of an article several years ago that struck home and backs up Hepburn’s idea. All I have is the clipping, the magazine and it’s author are lost in my marshy memory, sorry. The back story was about a writing program for older people. The program seemed to help them to better deal with aging. Participants ranged from violinists to bricklayers and from cowboys to doctors. The author said what struck her is what older people chose to write about.

“No one regardless of what they did for a living, ever writes about their jobs, or their weddings, or the birth of their children, or the war, things that many people would assume most older folks would write about.” She said “they write about the relationships and the very small gestures that have made them human.”

I guess this rang true to me at the time as well as now. It was just something I’d noticed and suspected was true and it was reassuring to hear it from someone with experience with a large pool of people.

About fifteen years ago I was driving across France. I didn’t speak much French and was traveling alone. I had some camping gear with me and pulled off at a nondescript rest spot to cook dinner. A French tour bus pulled in to let the passengers stretch their legs. I was cooking away on a small stove atop a picnic table.

Some of the passengers had brought along snacks for their journey. As I was cooking, a middle-aged woman walked over to my picnic table. I thought she was going to ask if she and her traveling buddies could share the picnic table since I was obviously solo. Instead she offered me a slice of the lemon tart she’d made for the trip. With my hand gestures and toddler French I accepted. She gave me a slice and I thanked her.

A few minutes passed and the break was over. Everyone reboarded their bus and motored away to where I don’t know. But that was a damn good lemon tart and a lasting memory of a small gesture.