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Dewitt Jones and Clear Vision
Not many people understand creativity. Dewitt Jones, a National Geographic photographer, does. And this video on the creative process, HOLY COW, it’s so good I had to buy it so I could watch it whenever the yearning took me.
But this isn’t just for artists. The principles of creativity apply to any creative endeavor–from writing and drawing to building microchips and parenting.
Go here. Watch the brief clip. Then watch the whole Clear Vision video. Tell me what you think.
Capture the zing!
The Sing-Off, Sam’s Salmon, The Englishman Who Went Up A Hill
One of the best TV programs this fall
American Idol was good until the judges became irrelevant and annoying. Or maybe I was just tired of the format. I didn’t think I’d watch another singing show. But I tuned into the opener for The Sing-Off on NBC last week, and holy harmonies, Batman–it was wonderful.Ten of the best a’capella groups in the country compete for a $100,000 prize and a recording contract with Sony Music. Unlike American Idol, the groups represent a wide range of ages—from kids in high school to older adults—and backgrounds. They don’t use any instruments, just their voices, to sing incredible arrangements of modern songs with percussion, bass, and lovely vocals. This ain’t no choir music. And unlike American Idol, the judges actually have interesting and useful things to say. Also unlike American Idol, the judges eliminate the groups until three are left. Only then do the rest of get to call in and vote.
We were glued to the TV watching each episode. The programs are all two hours long, but move like lightening. Our favorite groups at this point are Committed and The Backbeats.
This whole show runs a total of three weeks, one episode each on Monday and Wednesday. It started last week, continues this, and finishes next week. Some of you might be depressed, feeling you’ve already missed it.
Not so! You can watch all of the full episodes online at www.nbc.com/sing-off/ (with fewer commercials). Then tune in for the grand finale. I can’t wait.
Are you kidding? From a can?
Canned tuna fish is one of those un-meats. It doesn’t taste like fish. It doesn’t taste like chicken. I guess the all-white albacore is okay. But tuna’s not one of those spectacular foods I crave.So you’d think, as I strolled the isles of Sam’s Club, that I would have passed up the canned Member’s Mark Atlantic Salmon. But one of my wild culinary urges, the ones that rarely pan out, overtook me.
I purchased a pack of five, seven-ounce cans for $11.88. I brought the pack home put it on the shelf and didn’t dare open it. What was I thinking?
Canned salmon? Canned meat?! When was the last time you had a steak out of a can?
It couldn’t be good.
Of course, my sensible hesitations only last so long. I broke down one afternoon when the cupboards were bare. I saw the salmon and thought that it might go well with a salad and baked potato.
I opened the can. It was pink, like the trout I used to catch and immediately fry when I went camping as a boy. I tasted it. And it tasted like . . . fish. Real fish. The light delicious taste of those trout I caught so many years ago.
I enjoyed a wonderful meal that day and have had several repeats since. Boneless, skinless filets in water, packed with omega-3 fats, all grown on fish farms in Chile.
Great movie set in Wales
I enjoy Hugh Grant as an actor. I loved him in Sense & Sensibility with Emma Thompson, one of my most favorite movies ever. And so I was curious about another movie with Grant that received two thumbs up from Siskel and Ebert. It’s called The Englishman Who Went Up A Hill And Came Down A Mountain.The setup is unusual. In 1917, with the war still raging in Europe, two English cartographers visit the small South Wales village to measure what is claimed to be the “first mountain inside of Wales.” The villagers are proud of their “mountain,” but become alarmed when the Englishmen measure it and find it’s not a mountain but a hill. The villagers are determined not to lose their status. Especially not to two Englishmen. What follows is good humor, drama, and a bit of romantic comedy. I think you’ll fall in love with the characters. It’s a wonderful tale. And it’s on DVD.
As a little bonus, here are the opening lines, given to us by two narrators.
“Narrator: For some odd reason, lost in the mists of time, there’s an extraordinary shortage of last names in Wales. Almost everyone seems to be a Williams, a Jones, or an Evans. To avoid widespread confusion, Welsh people often add an occupation to a name. For example, there was Williams the Petroleum, and Williams the Death. There was Jones the Bottle, and Jones the Prize Cabbage… which described his hobby and his personality. Evans the Bacon, and Evans the End of the World. But one man’s name was a puzzle, and it wasn’t until I was 10 years old that I asked my grandfather about the man with the longest and most enigmatic name of all.
“Grandfather: The Englishman Who Went Up a Hill but Came Down a Mountain? Now there’s a long name for you. And a long story. You are not going to fidget, are you? For this is a story… an epic story. Yes, epic.”
Good Stuff! Brown Bananas, Peerless, and Cinderella
I’ve solved the banana bane.The banana bane is this. You buy bananas, and the next day they’ve got freckles. Nobody likes freckled bananas, so everyone leaves them on the counter, thinking that someone else in the family must be a freckled banana fan. But nobody is a freckled banana fan, which means a few days after that, they’re brown. Then black. Then you toss them into the garbage and go to the store and start it all over.
I’m going to tell you how to stop the madness. I’m going to tell you what you do with brown bananas. The Brown family discovered this last week. (Yes, the Brown family discovered the solution to brown bananas, strange, isn’t it…)
I know some of you are thinking, oh, banana bread.
Are you kidding? Banana bread is cake in bread form. It’s nice once in a while. But who wants to make four loaves of cake every week and gain five million pounds?
I’m not talking about a sumo weight-gain program that involves cake.
And I’m not talking about taking them over to Joan and Cardon Willis’s place and feeding them to their pigs. They have a very nice sow who, Joan reports, loves bananas. The sow’s little piglets do whatever she does. She scratches her bum on a post; they scratch their bums. She grunts; they grunt. So I assume since mumma loves bananas, the little piggies love bananas too. But I’m not talking about turning your bananas into someone else’s bacon.
No.
I’m talking about extending their useful life by days.
I’m talking about consuming them yourself.
I’m talking about making something delicious, sweet, and healthy with them.
What is this magnificent discovery?
Smoothies.
With brown bananas.
What?
Yes. Look, we were out of fruit. We had milk, freckled bananas sliding towards completely toasty tan, and a little bit of chocolate powder. We were desperate.
Desperate people try desperate things. Some do not work out. Like the one time I tried asparagus in eggs. Think green sticks for breakfast. But sometimes they do.
Case in point: John’s Chocolate Banana Whip.
- 1 brown or freckled banana
- 1 cup of milk (use almond milk if you don’t like the cow variety)
- 1 tablespoon Nesquick (no, you don’t need the 3 tablespoons they recommend)
Throw it all in the blender and frappe until smooth.
It’s heaven. Especially good after a nice hike-jog in the middle of the day.
BTW, frappe is one of those words that makes you think I know what I’m talking about. Can you feel my chef aura radiating off the page?
But Nesquick, John. That’s so white-trash unhealthy.
Fine, you don’t want the added sugar? No problem. Try this one.
Ellianna’s Strawberry Surprise
- 1 brown or freckled banana
- 1 cup of milk
- 1 cup frozen strawberries
Frappe until you’re happy.
You can do this with frozen blueberries. You can add Greek yogurt–and let me tell you the Great Value plain Greek yogurt made with whole milk is delicious. You can add more fruit. Less fruit. Add ice. Whatever you like.
The bottom line is that brown bananas are delicious in smoothies. And they should be—bananas are at their sweetest when they’re brown.
It’s summer. It’s hot. Time for smoothies with sweet brown bananas.
*****
I like a clean van. But I live in the country, and I don’t have a pickup. This means the minivan has to haul stuff. It’s hauled hay, plants, dirt, kids—you name it.
We vacuum, but there are things a vacuum can’t touch. And if we want our van carpet and upholstery shampooed, we have to drive an hour to Logan, then leave the car at the shop for a full day.
A full day.
They want you to drop it off in the morning, pick it up in the afternoon. So what am I going to do all day? Bring my bicycle and ride around with Brent, the happy dude with horns and flags on his bike that pedals up and down main street, waving to everyone?
Needless to say, shampooing was infrequent.
But then one day a few weeks ago I was talking to Patrick Floyd in Laketown. I was actually talking to him in Suzanne Siddoway’s basement.
What were two men doing in her basement?
We were doing what many men do in her basement…
We were sitting around waiting for her to cut our hair. What else would men be doing in her basement? (You know, it’s Quin’s basement too.)
And Patrick said that he’d started a new business called Peerless Detailing. He was trained and had the equipment to detail boats, cars, vehicles of all kinds.
I said, “Do you do just a shampoo?”
“Whatever you need,” he said.
I said, “Duuuude!”
You have to read that with kind of a hope, like a thirsty man seeing an ice cream truck in the middle of the Serengeti.
He said, “Yeah.”
I said, “Man.”
He said, “Yup.”
I said, “Alright.”
After that scintillating conversation, I took my van over. Patrick of Peerless did verily clean that carpet and upholstery. And he did it for less money than it would have cost me in Logan! And in less time!
I got back a new van. It smelled great. Looked great. I felt like rolling around on the carpet in joy, but refrained. Instead, I drove home, and everyone in the house rejoiced. We drove around a little, just to celebrate.
A week later, we had to haul more crap. I took the seats out. I put them in the garage. This was a dumb thing to do. I’d learned long ago to put them in the house. See, we leave our garage door cracked so our mouse control service can get in and out, the mouse control consisting of five cats.
Sometimes, other cats figure they can help themselves to whatever’s in the garage. Some of those cats are stray toms. And because I don’t mark my territory with my own scent, which I’m sure would put the fear of whatever cat god is out there into them, they think they can muscle in. Feel like they can claim the place for their own.
And so they spray.
I’ve been meaning to get a gun. A paintball gun, if nothing else. I figure a few stings with a paintball ought to learn the dogs and cats and deer. It’s my theory, and I’m going to test it one of these days. So if you one day see various animals walking around with polka dots, you know what’s going on. Anyway, I don’t have a gun, and I’m not going to go around and mark the perimeter of my yard. You know how much water I’d have to drink!
So this cat came in and sprayed.
He sprayed one of my newly cleaned captain chairs!
(Anyone who wants to practice their marksmanship on live targets, just let me know.)
So what do you do? Well, I’ll tell you this: we didn’t have to set the seat on fire. No. We just called Patrick.
Patrick did his magic and removed the offending blankity-blank cat spray. And the seat was as good as new.
Can I tell you how happy I am we now have someone doing this in Laketown?
I’m ecstatic. I plan to take my vehicles in once or twice a year. Why not?
If you need your boat or car or van detailed, I think you’ll be pleased with Peerless. You can call Patrick at (435) 535-1493 and set up an appointment. I think he’s mobile to boot and can to it at your residence.
*****
Okay, movie time. I have four daughters. They all wanted to see Cinderella.Except, what new thing can you do with Cinderella?
I mean, how many different ways can you see her leave a glass slipper behind and still reel in shock at the story turn?
Well, how many Bond movies do we see that follow the same darned plot? And we still love them. It’s very often the details that make the difference. And this new Disney version of Cinderella with live actors included a number of wonderful details.
Like how Cinderella got in this fix in the first place. And how her position in the household devolves.
And what’s motivating the stepmother, who is played wonderfully by Cate Blanchette.
And the relationship between the king and prince, and Cinderella and her father.
And a little bit of wisdom.
I enjoyed this film. I think the key thing that lifts this above many remakes is the insight it gives into the key characters and relationships. And the many small surprises along the way.
If you have daughters, this is a no-brainer for a date. If you liked the original Cinderella, I think you’ll be pleasantly surprised by this version. If you like romances, this is a classic. Furthermore, you’ll go away with a little something to think and talk about. I gave it a try; I was glad I did.
Peak
How many pushups can you do in a row?10, 20? Could you do 100?
And you’d have to be a freak if you could do 500 in a row, right?
Well, no.
You’d just be human.
In 1980 Minoru Yoshida of Japan did 10,057 pushups nonstop.
In 1993 Charles Servizio of the good old USA did 46,001 pushups in 21 hours and 21 minutes.
In 2016 David Escojido of the USA did 2,298 pushup in 1 hour.
You might think that these folks must be oddities. They must be gifted. They must have some weird thing in their DNA allowing them to do these things.
But you’d be wrong.
None of these people were born that way. In fact, what researchers are finding is that most of the folks that we think are prodigies—folks like Mozart, Tiger Woods, chess masters who can play 20 games at once without even looking at a board—the biggest thing that separates them from the rest of us isn’t DNA.
Anders Ericsson, a researcher at Florida State University, has spent the last 30 years studying what gives experts their edge. And he reveals in Peak: The New Science of Expertise that he and other researchers have found that while there are some physical traits like height and size that definitely make a difference in some physical activities (notice how all the top gymnasts are short), what really sets people apart is how much of a certain type of practice they’ve done.
Not just practice, but a certain type of practice.
Practicing “hard” doesn’t do much for you. Putting in a lot of hours doesn’t do much either. Instead, you need to practice in a way that has been shown to lead people to actually improve their performance. You still have to put in a lot of time practicing—there is no shortcut—but only the type of practice he explains in the book seems to lead to the increase of performance.
Is he saying that anyone can do anything?
No. When I first looked into his research, one of my big issues was that it seemed he was claiming anyone could do anything with 10,000 hours of practice.
But he’s not saying that.Is he saying genetics has no influence?
It can, but what he’s found is that it doesn’t have the role we normally think of when we think of top performance. And, most importantly, we place artificial limits on ourselves by thinking people are born to this or that activity.
There is far too much to post here. What you need to know is that what he shares in this book is fascinating, compelling, and surprising. I’ve been training people for over thirty years. And I found myself enlightened. If you’re at all interested in education, or getting better at some activity (from parenting to golf), or helping your kids get better, you’ll want to read this book. Highly recommended.
Good Stuff! How to Make Meetings Work
Do you regularly sit through meetings that seem to accomplish nothing?
Meetings where people drone on and on and on.
Meetings where people discuss and no decision is ever made.
Meetings that always slide off topic.
Meetings that should never have been held in the first place.
In many cases, the reason these meetings stink is because those organizing them are not aware there’s any other way to hold a meeting. But there is. I was fortunate enough to have been exposed to it just out of college while working for a business consulting firm in San Francisco. (And why they didn’t teach this in my business degree I will never know!)
After learning the simple and powerful principles, I was eventually paid to plan and facilitate meetings for clients. In some of these meetings they were making incredibly important decisions. I remember a client flying me and a colleague from San Francisco to Delaware for two days of meetings.
You might be groaning at the thought. But they paid thousands of dollars to have us come and facilitate. And when we were done, the energy in the room was palpable. A number of those that were involved were astounded and said they’d never been involved in such productive sessions. They’d accomplished more in the hours we were there than in months of other meetings. They were happy and grateful we’d come.
Think of that—happy and grateful for a meeting that went on for hours!
When meetings are done right, the collaboration and synergy can be amazing. Now, you may think that some secret handshake is required to learn how to do this. Or that it’s only for those with some special knack. Or that it’s only for high-powered jobs. If you do, you’d be wrong.
And that’s because you can learn the principles all for a few bucks. They’re laid out in perfect clarity in How to Make Meetings Work by Michael Doyle and David Straus. This is the book that was the source of our training sessions all those years ago. And I reread it every few years to brush up. The principles work in everything from a family council to a board meeting to class settings. I know because I’ve used the ideas in all of them. And when I fail to take just a few minutes to prepare, that’s when the meeting becomes, well, just another (yawn) meeting.
If you hold meetings of any kind and want to improve them, give this book a try. I think you’ll be happy you did.
Author Janci Patterson Goes Indie
I met Janci Patterson a few years ago when she was shopping her book Chasing the Skip to NY publishers. It’s about a girl named Ricki. Her mother flakes and runs off, and so Ricki goes to live with her estranged Dad who happens to be a bounty hunter. I was hooked right there. But it gets better. Ricki gets to ride along and help and, wouldn’t you know it, develops a crush on a guy the dad is chasing.I loved the premise. Traditional publisher Henry Holt loved it too and thought Janci had done a great job telling the tale, so they made her an offer that Janci accepted. It was published in 2012.
Sounds like a match made in heaven, right?
Well, Janci just released another book called Everything’s Fine, a mystery about a girl named Kira. Her best friend commits suicide immediately after her first date with her longtime crush, Bradley Johansen. Kira’s devastated and wondering why. She’s sure the answers are in her friend’s journal. As she searches for it she quickly learns she’s not the only one who wants that journal. Someone else is trying to keep the secrets the journal contains hidden.
Another great premise. And this book won the Utah Art’s Council award for Best Young Adult Novel. Clearly, Janci can tell a story. But Janci didn’t take this one to NY.
She’s publishing it as an indie.
Here are her own words explaining what helped convince her going indie was doable.
A Paradigm Shift
For years I refused to think about self-publishing. This wasn’t because of the stigma, honestly, but because of all the work I watched my self-publisher friends put into creating, shipping, and marketing their books. I couldn’t do that! I told myself. I wanted to be a writer, not a publisher.
When it became obvious to me that self-publishing was the next logical step in my career, I was terrified. Having published with a big publisher, I wasn’t willing to skip steps in the publishing process–it was my editor’s keen eye and the rounds of revision we did together that transformed CHASING THE SKIP from a messy d
raft into a product I was proud of. I wanted to be just as proud of my independent work, and for that, I knew I’d need help.I knew just enough about book and cover design to know that I couldn’t slap them together on my own and expect them to be instantly good. But when I did the math on what I’d have to pay an editor and a book designer and a cover designer to put out even one book (let alone the several I have waiting), I knew that I couldn’t afford it. Self-publishing felt even more impossible than selling books in New York–I knew how I wanted to do it, but I didn’t have the resources.
So it was with this trapped feeling that I attended the Precision Editing Group’s workshop on indie publishing last fall. The workshop was packed with great information, but the thing that impacted me the most was a presentation by Heather Horrocks. She was talking about the importance of editors, and as a side comment, said something to the effect of, “yes, all my books have now been edited, but when I first got started, I didn’t have an editor because I couldn’t afford it.”
It’s not my intention to suggest that editing isn’t important, because it is. But that one sentence blew my mind. I’d been working with the New York publishing paradigm for fourteen years. And in that world, there are very few ways to be published. You query agents. You send books to publishers. You do your very best to follow all of the guidelines and to do everything perfectly right, hoping to minimize the barriers that stand between you and success as a writer.
But this self-publishing thing was a whole different game. I sat in the audience at the workshop, stunned. That was the moment when I finally realized this truth: there are as many ways to publish as there are people who are publishing. There is no one right way to do it. There are so many things you can do that can help you succeed. It’s better to do something than nothing, because nothing is never the road to success. Even if that means you’re doing it wrong.
So when I got home, I made a list of my assets. Forget about what I lacked. Forget about what I didn’t know. What did I know how to do? What resources did I have access to? And, most importantly, who could I ask for help?
If you’re looking to self-publish, I’d suggest that you do the same. Because here’s the thing–your list of assets is going to be uniquely yours. You have a unique set of skills; you know a unique network of people. You don’t need to worry about who and what you don’t know. Instead, focus on what you do have, what you can do. If you’ve been writing for years, you probably have some book-related skills. If you’re part of a community of writers to which you regularly contribute, you probably have some friends who you’ve helped in the past, or can help in the present, who would be motivated to help you out in return. Start from there, and you can pick up the rest as you go along.
In the end, I did have my book edited (repeatedly!) and my cover designed by a graphic designer. I was able to do that because I had friends who believe in me who were willing to enter into financial agreements that didn’t involve them getting paid in full upfront. I wouldn’t have thought to work out those arrangements when I was focused on doing things right–it was only when I opened my vision to look at what was possible that I began to envision what shape my own unique path might take.
Each path to publication is different, not only for each writer, but also for each book. With all the options available to us, it’s not enough to focus on our feet, doing only the next “right” step. Opportunity is everywhere. Focus on what you have, and even if you don’t win the jackpot on the first try, at least you’ll be playing the game.
