Recalcitrant Egg 3

  Earlier this week I finished reading James Clear’s excellent   Atomic Habits . There are lots of good tips and ideas in this book, but I think the overarching idea he has is that you have to reframe your behavior away from pursuing goals and towards pursuing identities. Identities trump goals. By that, what I (and he) mean is instead of setting a goal of losing 25 pounds (me), I should create an identity of being a healthy person. Then, when I am tempted to get the double cheeseburger with extra large fries and of course I’ll take the 24 ounce beer, I would ask myself, “Is this what a healthy person eats?” to which the obvious answer is no. From p. 39 of the book he talks about creating new identities: New identities require new evidence. If you keep casting the same votes you’ve always cast, you’re going to get the same results you’ve always had. If nothing changes, nothing is going to change. It is a simple two-step process: Decide the type of person you want to be. Prove ...

Normally K and I like to go out to dinner on Saturday nights, but with yesterday's blizzard, we were in for the day. In fact, we went out to do round one of snow clearing right before dinner and when we came back in we basically agreed we were on our own for dinner. We had had a big feast on Friday with spaghetti and meatballs, and I realized we had a ton of left over ziti, and I also had some Working Man's Porter, so I decided to whip up some Working Man's Porter Mac & Cheese. It's really a snap to throw together homemade mac and cheese - it doesn't take much longer than making a box mix and tastes about 10X better. Seriously, you can make the sauce in the time it takes for the macaroni to cook, then it's just a matter of broiling the top (if you want that). You can also do without the crispy breadcrumbs, but why would you want to? Recipe follows - but bear in mind I literally did all of the below without measuring, so effects may vary. Ingredients: 4 oz p...

  I have to admit, the last several years have been depressing to me. There has been a rise of authoritarian populism on the Right and Left in America, and with the pandemic, people seem to be drifting away from the liberal (i.e., classical liberal, not Progressive) values that are the foundation of our country (life, liberty, pursuit of happiness). Pile on top of that an increasingly aggressive communist authoritarian government on the move in China to make the world safer for their unique brand of oppression, and Russia poised to attack Ukraine… it all seems like the liberal experiment that was born in 1776 is coming to an end, and was perhaps pointless to begin with. But! It’s useful to dial back the intellectual macroscope and see the world in centuries, not years when I start to feel like this. And this graphical article is just what the doctor ordered. 200 years ago, no one lived in a liberal democracy. Today, a fraction of people live in liberal democracies, but the differen...

  made pretzel bites with maple aioli as an app for last night's birthday party at the LHH. Didn't get final product pics, but they were yummy. Take your basic pizza dough recipe, roll out strings of about an inch in diameter, then chop into 1 inch rounds. Do the second rise, then drop into a bath of baking soda for 2-3 minutes, then baste with butter, sprinkle on salt, and bake at 350 for about 15 minutes. Aioli is 2 parts mayo, 1 part dijon mustard, 1/4 part maple syrup - mix well.

I feel like I am often not as assertive as I should be. And it leaves me feeling... resentful.  At first blush, Nice Guys seem like saints. They appear generous, flexible, and extremely polite. But if you scratch beneath the surface, you’ll often find a helpless, anxious, and resentful core…  That's from a good article from The Art of Manliness, Quit Being a Pushover: How to Be Assertive They argue: When you’re assertive, you are direct and honest with people. You don’t beat around the bush or expect people to read your mind about what you want. If something is bothering you, you speak up; if you want or need something, you ask. You do all this while maintaining a calm and civil demeanor. The article gives some good tips on how to stop being passive, or worse passive-aggressive.  

I introduced the personal SWOT analysis here . I discussed strengths in this post . I discussed weaknesses in this post .  This week I wanted to close up the discussion by touching on the remaining three components of my version of the personal SWOT: Opportunities, Threats, and the Value proposition. Having thought now about our strengths, and within strengths, really focused on the things we are drawn to, that we not only do better than other people, but also give us meaning and satisfaction, and having now also thought about our weaknesses as not only things that we have failed at, that we recognize we may not do as well as other people, but also as things we do not like doing and do not give us meaning and satisfaction, we can turn to the external world where the opportunities and threats lie.  When I was in high school, I ran track. I was a fast sprinter. I loved the 100M and 200M. These were races that were all power and little strategy. You just dumped everything ...

I committed to a year of creating a piece of visual art each day for 2021. This is the third time I have completed an art "365". I had previously also done two photography 365s, which is where I got the idea to do an art 365. I finished the 2021 365 on December 31st with the above watercolor painting which I called "Magician".  I explored a number of styles, from ink with watercolor washes  to charcoal to water color with gauche and ink splashes. I found people really like custom bookmarks, so I made a lot of those.  But I think the style I most enjoyed, and the subjects I most loved doing, were dancers and musicians, captured with minimalist brush work with India ink.  It was a long project. The power of a daily discipline is it forces you to reach for something when you are sure there is nothing there. And yet - some of those days produced the best pieces. You can see the majority of the individual pieces here on Flickr:  https://flic.kr/s/aHsmTm7Ua4 I refined...

In a previous post , I talked about the strengths portion of the personal SWOT analysis . It’s fun to think about your strengths. But it’s necessary to also think about your weaknesses. Remember, strengths and weaknesses are meant to be internal examinations. We’re not looking at advantages and disadvantages presented by your environment, we’re looking at ourselves. So questions for personal weaknesses include things like, What do I really not like doing? What do I always avoid? What have I failed at? But also, what limitations do I have - in terms of family obligations, or financial obligations. If you have a young family, or a child with a disability, or you have to care for an elderly parent, those are limitations. If you have very high debt for whatever reason - maybe school debt, house debt, hopefully not consumer debt - then you are going to be limited in your choices.  Some weaknesses pass with time - children get older and more self-sufficient. Some weaknesses can be worke...

Continuing with the Personal SWOT analsys from my previous post : I didn’t do a personal SWOT analysis before I decided to retire from the Army and come to UNH. But if I had, I think it would have supported the decision. I did do the analysis recently to help me think through what post-tenure will look like. When organizations go through a strategic planning process, an important part of the exercise is to get focused on what is important, and to set aside the things the organization is not going to try to do. One of my Read recommendations this week is for a Gail Golden’s book, Curating Your Life . More below - but one of her key points is you have to make hard choices about what matters and what you can accept being bad at. A personal SWOT analysis can help you with that. If you don’t want to take time to do all five parts now, I’d suggest meditating on the Strengths portion. I thought I’d take a few words this week and talk about that part. I really like the question, “What do you ...

So I am giving you a New Year’s assignment: do a personal SWOT analysis. The link above is to a slide deck I gave my seniors last semester. You should be able to download the file. For those of you not familiar, SWOT stands for “Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats”, and it is a simple framework commonly used at the early stages of strategic planning for organizations. You can also apply this framework to your own life, and that is what I had my seniors do (I also did it for myself). The majority of my students took it very seriously and turned in some deeply thoughtful discussions about themselves and their hopes. I won’t be collecting your assignments, but I recommend taking an hour and trying this exercise out. New Year’s is the perfect time to do this. Let me know what you think! Format: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/13mlj11SfU49sEmbhlEfaAmExa9oTnceQ/edit?usp=sharing&ouid=116556535244578085779&rtpof=true&sd=true