Year of the Dog

We didn’t have dogs growing up, so I didn’t really know what I was getting myself into when we adopted Gem. On balance, that seems like the best – or perhaps only – way to have made what turns out to be such a big life choice.

H.L. Mencken once said, “if I ever marry it will be on a sudden impulse, as a man shoots himself.” And though I wouldn’t compare marriage to suicide (at least most days), I do agree it’s a pretty rash, uninformed choice. Because, really, when you’re popping the question, what do you know about what married life is like?

Getting a dog (like, I assume, having a kid) is even crazier. You don’t really get to audition people for the role. There’s no trial period. Instead, this little thing shows up and it’s yours and there’s no going back. Worse, some of those little things grow up to be much nicer dogs (or people) than others, and you have no idea what yours is going to be.

In light of that, we couldn’t have been luckier with Gemelli. He truly is a wonderful puppy. Smart and curious, playful and funny, he’s a happy, confident, friendly guy. He’s just stubborn enough to be related to Jess; regardless of her schedule, Gem somehow manages to drag her every afternoon to Central Park, where he makes her lift him up to watch the ducks in the reservoir. And from the early days when he figured out how to unlatch his own crate, and let himself out to wreak secret midnight havoc, I knew he was enough of a troublemaker to be related to me.

By now, each day starts with a paw to the face (GET UP! GET UP! IT’S TIME TO GO TO THE DOG RUN!!!), ends with twelve and a half furry pounds sprawled across our legs at the bottom of the bed, and I can no longer imagine it any other way.

So happy first birthday Gem, we love you. Here’s to many more years together, though ideally with less pooping inside the house.

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August 22, 2013

“The entrepreneur takes risks but does not see himself as a risk-taker, because he operates under the useful delusion that what he’s attempting is not risky. Then, trapped in mid-mountain, people discover the truth—and, because it is too late to turn back, they’re forced to finish the job.”
– [Malcolm Gladwell](http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/books/2013/06/24/130624crbo_books_gladwell?currentPage=all)

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July 27, 2013

Give it a Minute

*[or, Happy Birthday to Me]*

Apparently patience is on my mind these days.

I know [I blogged about it this weekend](https://www.joshuanewman.com/2013/07/give-it-a-minute/), but while reviewing notes from the past year, I also re-discovered this clip from the great [New York *Times* interview of Louis C.K a few months back](http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/07/arts/for-louis-c-k-the-jokes-on-him.html?pagewanted=all&_r=1&):

>*Does it matter that what you’ve achieved, with your online special and your tour can’t be replicated by other performers who don’t have the visibility or fan base that you do?*

>Why do you think those people don’t have the same resources that I have, the same visibility or relationship? What’s different between me and them?

>*You have the platform. You have the level of recognition.*

>So why do I have the platform and the recognition?

>*At this point you’ve put in the time.*

>There you go. There’s no way around that. There’s people that say: “It’s not fair. You have all that stuff.” I wasn’t born with it. It was a horrible process to get to this. It took me my whole life. If you’re new at this — and by “new at it,” I mean 15 years in, or even 20 — you’re just starting to get traction. Young musicians believe they should be able to throw a band together and be famous, and anything that’s in their way is unfair and evil. What are you, in your 20s, you picked up a guitar? Give it a minute.

Today, turning 34 (officially my ‘mid-thirties’), I’m finally old enough to start appreciating Louis’ advice. I’ve spent most of my life thus far in a hell of a hurry. And boy have I screwed up a bunch of things along the way as a result. I’m still setting right any number of those messes. But I’m also, slowly but surely, putting to use the lessons learned, doing things better and smarter and wiser than I would have in my brasher youth.

A third of a century down, and, on balance, I feel pretty great about where I am. I couldn’t be happier with Jess and Gemelli, with my family and friends, with Outlier and CrossFit NYC, with my life here in New York.

At this rate, in just another third of a century, I should be really cooking. Which, I’m starting to think, sounds about right.

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July 16, 2013

Paradox

Recently, I stumbled across [Dance in a Year](http://danceinayear.com), an awesome single-page site from designer Karen Cheng. Atop the page, a video chronicles Karen’s dance skill progress over the course of a single year, from “embarrassing even alone in your room” to “ready to hit the club”.

Below the video, Karen shares her secret: practice every day, setting small goals along the way.

Or, in other words, the same advice that pretty much everyone ever gives on learning or doing anything at all.

Still, obvious isn’t the same as easy. Incremental progress is, by definition, slow. And daily hard work takes, well, daily hard work. So, instead, we Tweet and Facebook and Foursquare and Instagram our way through the day, chasing minor instant gratification, the sudden small changes that yield immediate inconsequential results.

And it seems we’re getting great at doing that! Problem is, it’s precisely the opposite of what it takes to actually be or do the things most of us really want out of life.

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July 14, 2013

“What I love about the consumer market, that I always hated about the enterprise market, is that we come up with a product, we try to tell everybody about it, and every person votes for themselves. They go ‘yes’ or ‘no,’ and if enough of them say ‘yes,’ we get to come to work tomorrow. That’s how it works. It’s really simple. With the enterprise market, it’s not so simple. The people that use the products don’t decide for themselves, and the people that make those decisions sometimes are confused. We love just trying to make the best products in the world for people and having them tell us by how they vote with their wallets whether we’re on track or not.”

– Steve Jobs, June 1, 2010

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May 17, 2013

“As the details about the bombings in Boston unfold, it’d be easy to be scared. It’d be easy to feel powerless and demand that our elected leaders do something — anything — to keep us safe.

It’d be easy, but it’d be wrong. We need to be angry and empathize with the victims without being scared. Our fears would play right into the perpetrators’ hands — and magnify the power of their victory for whichever goals whatever group behind this, still to be uncovered, has. We don’t have to be scared, and we’re not powerless. We actually have all the power here, and there’s one thing we can do to render terrorism ineffective: Refuse to be terrorized.”

\- Bruce Schneier, [“The Boston Marathon Bombing: Keep Calm and Carry On”](http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2013/04/the-boston-marathon-bombing-keep-calm-and-carry-on/275014/), *The Atlantic*

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April 16, 2013

Weathered

Sometimes, a new product is so clearly superior that, as soon as you see it, you stop using anything else.

For weather, that’s the case with [Forecast.io](http://forecast.io).

Like hiring [Nate Silver](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nate_Silver) as your meteorologist, it collects weather data from a slew of sources, then aggregates it statistically to generate the most accurate, current, local forecast possible. You may know the developers – and the accuracy of their data – from the Dark Skies iPhone app, which can uncannily alert you it’s about to start raining a few minutes before it does.

Combine that data with a clear, user-friendly front end, and you’ve got an easy winner.

*[Nota bene: head to [the same http://forecast.io URL](http://forecast.io) from your iPhone’s browser, and you can install the site as an app, too. Like the desktop version, it will instantly supplant whatever else you’re using now.]*

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April 15, 2013

Size of Dog, Size of Fight

If people look like their dogs, Gemelli was apparently the right choice, as several people have commented that we do somehow look similar.

But as much as we apparently resemble each other physically, it’s in personality that we even more closely overlap. Like me, he’s laid back, overly friendly, and curious enough to get himself into trouble.

And it seems we’re similar in at least one more way. This morning at the dog run, we walked in just in time to see the three largest dogs there – a husky, a flat-coated retriever and a pit bull – neck-deep in a royal rumble in the dead center of the run. As soon as I let Gem off the leash, he immediately took off for the three of them, jumping straight into the middle of the fray.

“Is that little dog yours?” asked the owner of the retriever.

Yes, I told her.

“And he’s how big?”

About twelve pounds.

“Well,” she said, “he definitely has an outsized sense of self-confidence.”

My dog, indeed.

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April 14, 2013

Complements to the Chef

[Ed. note: yes, friends and family who wrote in to correct, I know that the phrase is ‘compliments to the chef’ with an ‘i’. This was an attempt at cleverness – entrepreneurship being a complement to cheffing – that apparently wasn’t so clever after all. Tough crowd.]

Recently, I’ve started to notice how many entrepreneurs are interested in both cooking and photography. Which makes a lot of sense.

Entrepreneurship is basically the art of slogging daily through nebulous victories and vague defeats, for years and years at a time. Successful startups are those where the victories at least slightly outpace the defeats, consistently enough for the edge to compound gradually. Even in today’s world of lean startups, of building minimal viable products and iterating fast and always shipping, the process of slogging and compounding moves excruciatingly slowly. It takes a long time to see anything happen, and an even longer time to see anything incontrovertibly significant – anything big enough to impress your mom or your non-entrepreneur friends.

Like entrepreneurship, cooking and photography are about making something from scratch, and about sharing it with others. Unlike entrepreneurship, they also let you do so exceedingly quickly. Over the course of an afternoon, you can create something that never existed before, yet that’s still good enough to be appreciated by family, friends or the broader world. And it’s not just the immediate validation – that appreciation (or lack thereof) also provides fast and clear feedback to quickly guide iterative improvement.

After a long day of slow slog, it’s hard to explain how very gratifying that can be.

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April 8, 2013