Joshua Bryce Newman

[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.

Here’s an easy recipe for becoming a hypochondriac: start as a physician’s child, to absorb medical knowledge by osmosis. Get an undergraduate degree in something like neuroscience, so you have just enough academic health knowledge to be dangerous. Factor in general neuroticism and a vivid imagination. And then, through years working in tech, get extremely good at Googling up obscure yet painfully fatal diseases that all begin with innocuous flu-like symptoms. (A few weeks after I’ve helped clean out a dusty storage closet, I’m certain that a mild headache is an early symptom of Hantavirus.)

But if I’m good, Jess is even better. Because not only is she able to convince herself, she can often convince me, too. A few years back, for example, while I was out in Los Angeles for work, Jess decided that her stiff neck was actually the onset of meningococcal meningitis. I spent much of the afternoon responding to her worried calls and texts from New York, to say that, no, I was pretty sure she didn’t have meningitis. But I spent most of the night staring at the ceiling above my hotel bed, trying to think of how I would explain to family and friends that I had poopooed Jess’ concerns the very day before she died in her sleep.

(Spoiler: Jess is still very much alive. Though she did discover that spending hours on a couch with your laptop, head propped up sharply on a stack of pillows, is a pretty reliable route to a sore neck.)

Impressive, I know. But if you think that’s good, you should see what we can do with our powers combined, and focused on a six-pound puppy.

Of course, Gem has actually been totally healthy. But that doesn’t stop us, at least a few times a week, from Googling up crazy strings like “puppy choking sounds sleeping”. If he walks by his water bowl one time too many without drinking, we’re just a couple of clicks away from diagnosis: OH NO HE’S GOT PARVOVIRUS AND HOLY CRAP MORTALITY RATE FROM THAT AS A PUPPY IS LIKE 90%!! Gemelli, we barely even knew you!

As a result, we’ve basically been helicopter-parenting this poor dog: putting his favorite fleece blanket on him when we find him asleep on the floor; cutting his high-end food into smaller, bite-sized pieces. All the ridiculous and overbearing behaviors I’ve long mocked in New York dog owners.

I’ve been joking for a while that Gem is a pretty good pre-child warmup lap. Perhaps that’s true. But if nothing else, he’s a good chance for us to tone down our overprotective mania. Because if we don’t, I fear our future children will be in for the life of therapy bills inevitably caused by having to wear helmets and water-wings whenever they leave the house.

This morning, on the way to work, I passed Bob Balaban helping an elderly homeless man on the corner.

And, really, I wasn’t surprised. It seems like something the characters he plays would be likely to do.

That, in turn, reinforces my belief about actors, honed during my years running Cyan Pictures: an actor’s personality ‘in real life’ is usually the average of the characters he or she plays.

That may not hold true in the theater world, where people are willing to suspend disbelief, and actors can further diverge from their actual selves. In a play, if a black guy and a white guy are brothers, we write it off to creative casting; if someone ‘opens a door’ by miming turning and pulling an invisible doorknob, we call it minimalist staging.

But if that happens in a movie, we assume that one of the brothers must be adopted, and that the guy miming opening a door must be nuts. In movies, we’re simply less willing to believe, to diverge from reality. That, I think, constrains much further the range of characters an actor can believably take on. (Unless you’re Meryl Streep.)

Which is all to say, most characters end up only a standard deviation or so away from who an actor actually is.  Average those characters out, and, in my experience, you’ve got a pretty good sense of the real person beneath them all.

Old parable:

A mother is teaching her daughter how to make pot roast.

“Before we put the roast into the pan,” says the mother, “we cut an inch or two off either end.”

“But why, mommy?” the daughter asks.

“Well,” admits the mother, “I don’t really know. That’s what your grandmother taught me.”

A few months later, the grandmother comes to town.

“Ma,” asks the mother, “when we cook pot roast, why do we cut the ends off the roast? Does it help the roast cook more quickly?”

“No,” the grandmother laughs. “When you were young, I only owned a small pan; I had to cut the ends off a roast to make it fit.”

++

I thought of that hackneyed story recently, when I stumbled across this odd bit of history: in 1630, Governor Winthrop of Massachusetts Bay Colony owned the only fork in colonial America. While the fork fad had quickly spread throughout Europe, it hadn’t yet hopped the pond stateside. So while Europeans began to master a fork-driven cutlery style – keeping the fork always in the left hand, and the knife in the right – the Americans, eating with knife and spoon, instead adopted the zig-zag – switching spoon from left hand (to steady the food while cutting) to right (to scoop up the food; impossible with a spoon when held upside-down in the left).

Just shy of four-hundred years later, my kitchen drawer is full of forks. Yet, all my life, I’d eaten in that same zig-zag, spoon-inspired style.

A month or so back, thinking of Governor Wintrop and 1600′s era utensil innovation, I switched to European style, fork held unchangingly in my left hand. And while, at first, the change felt exceedingly strange, soon I started to see the advantages. It made eating more elegant and efficient. And, if I’m ever stuck with a small pan, it would be way more effective when cutting the ends off a pot roast.

Over the course of my career thus far, I’ve spent enough on corporate legal bills to put an entire law firm’s children through college.

As I continue to dump dollars into legal costs – papering new deals, putting old ones to bed – I’ve started to think there should be some sort of law school equivalent of life experience credits.

Because if time working on contracts counted as sufficient prerequisite, I’m pretty sure I could by now totally ace the bar exam equivalent of the GED.

Perhaps due to my hacker roots, for more than a decade I’ve organized my life in a collection of text files. But when it comes to actually executing, I’ve discovered I’m far more productive working off a printed-out version of my Today.txt to-do list than I am with the same list on-screen.

For notes in meetings, too, I find paper and pen works better for me than an iPad or laptop. Much as for solo business strategy and planning sessions, where I tend to do my best work when I’m scrawling page after semi-legible page of ideas, mind-maps, outlines and diagrams. (Jess refers to this as my Beautiful Mind mode).

For years, I did my scribbling with blue Pilot G2 pens. Then about twelve months back, I switched abruptly to black Sharpie markers, usually writing on blank pieces of printer paper rather than yellow pad.

About three months ago, I ended up purchasing a variety pack of Papermate Flair Felt-Tip Pens to correct a document using the red pen. Though that pen was fine, and though the collection also included perfectly nice black and blue pens, I quickly found myself using only the green pen. I carried it in my pocket all day, using it at work, at home, to sign bills in restaurants.

A few times, I popped into Staples I happened to be passing by, hoping to find more green pens. But, in each case, the green was only available bundled in four-color packs. So, by now, a pile of unused black, blue and red Flairs sit unhappily in my desk, as I run through the ink in the couple of greens I own.

I don’t have a good explanation for why I like the green pen so much. It stands out? It’s easier on the eyes somehow than blue or back? It’s the color of money? It’s the logo color of Jess’ newly launched Dobbin Clothing. (See what I did there, Jess?) But I do know that, soon, I need to start actually ordering these pens in twelve-packs online, because amassing unused other-colored felt-tips doesn’t seem like a particularly good long-term plan.

Kermit was right.

A few months back, my brother and I ended up staying at the same hotel in Orlando while attending a good friend’s wedding for the weekend. While we were there, we agreed to meet at the hotel’s gym one morning to work out together.

Or, at least, that was the ostensible plan. But, really, both of us knew we weren’t there for a workout. We were there for a Grand Competition of Manliness and Strength. Somehow, that’s what our workouts always become.

Of course, a little competition shouldn’t hurt. But, in our case, it does. Because, while both of us are fairly conservative in our exercise in general, putting safety and effectiveness first, and while both of us will gladly admit in the abstract that we have differing physical strengths and weaknesses as compared to the other, if you actually put us into a gym together, all of that goes right out the window, and we instead each become monomaniacally focused on totally crushing the other.

In that situation, we’re even further set back by a phenomenon that I will here call ‘brother strength’ – essentially, a less benign relative of the sort of ‘mother strength’ that allows slightly built women to lift cars off of their children in emergency situations. Here, instead, it’s channeled towards, say, allowing a brother to bench press more than his sibling, even if his doing so flies in the face of all recorded exercise physiology and science.

I, for example, almost never train the bench press, whereas my brother does frequently, and has since his ice hockey days. Also, he outweighs me by about twenty-five pounds. But if you make him go first, and I get to go second, I can always, always bench at least five pounds more than he can.

And then, say, if we get on the pullup bar, and I go first, David can hop on and do at least one more rep than I did, even if that entails knocking out more in a single set than he’s performed in total over the past year.

Driven by a strange cocktail of testosterone, adrenaline, and long-submerged childhood rivalries, we can go back and forth like this, the second brother to try a given feat invariably besting the first, for literally hours on end. Eventually, we leave, laughing, perhaps part with an overly firm, hand-crush-attempting handshake.

And then, a few hours later, the high passes, and the hangover sets in. Down in Florida, the next morning, I woke up sore not just in my muscles, not even just in my tendons, but down in my very bones. My only solace, later that evening at the wedding reception, was noting that my brother looked equally rough.

But somehow, still, we both managed to pull ourselves out onto the dance floor. And we both did our damndest to out-boogie the other, excruciatingly painful as it may have been. Or, maybe, it didn’t hurt at all. Once the brother strength kicked back in, I don’t remember feeling a thing.

A few days ago, skimming through the always excellent Ask Metafilter, I stumbled across a great post asking about America’s quirks as seen by foreigners.

A slew of international readers weighed in, listing the number of American flags in non-civic setting, the giant portion sizes, that cigarettes are sold at drug stores with news agents and tobacconist shops nowhere to be seen.

And then, one said: paper toilet seat covers.

And I thought: paper toilet seat covers?!? Certainly, we must not be the only country using them. The very idea of pooping sans-paper struck me viscerally as below barbaric. Were all of these foreign people raised by wolves?

But a bit of cursory Googling confirmed the usual; we’re the ones who are really the barbarians here. Toilet seats, it seems, are actually far cleaner than faucets, door handles, toilet paper rolls, even office desks and workstations. And, further, it’s essentially impossible to catch anything from a toilet seat, regardless of germ content. From the Mayo Clinic and the CDC on down, the consensus was clear: the seat covers are an odd Americanism, a placebo at best.

(Also discovered in that Googling: women’s bathrooms apparently have twice as many germs as men’s, and men, who get the bum rap for supposedly carelessly peeing on toilet seats, are actually much less likely to do so; we lift the seat when peeing, whereas germaphobic women apparently pop a high squat hovering over the seat and pee all over the place. The fairer sex indeed.)

Of course, I’m not alone in my faith in the power of the toilet seat cover. A USA Today poll showed that nearly 90 percent of Americans erroneously believe diseases can be transmitted by sitting on toilet seats. Which is why, perhaps, even armed with the knowledge that I’m accomplishing nothing by doing so, in the days since discovering this all, I’ve continued to paper up – I just also feel vaguely guilty and foolish for doing so. A little knowledge is a dangerous thing.

Even decades before I started CrossFit NYC, I was deeply fascinated by fitness. I’d read textbooks, medical journals, any fitness websites I could find. From the anaerobic pathway to Zatsiorsky’s power output formulae, I consumed it all.

Nutrition, though: not so much. I read up enough to become a very early Paleo Diet convert, have kept up sufficiently to field the odd question from gym members or from family and friends. But after even fairly cursory amounts of nutrition reading, I inevitably find my eyes glazing, resort to a fast skim of the balance of the text. I’d like to know more about nutrition; I just don’t want to put in the work.

About six months ago, I discovered Paul Jaminet’s excellent book, The Perfect Health Diet. It is, by far, the best diet and nutrition book I’ve found. (It’s also perhaps the best researched; each page is about half text and half footnote.) And I discovered his equally smart and thoughtful blog, which synthesizes cutting-edge information through a lens of deep domain expertise and common sense.

And, in short, I realized that I could save a lot of time and angst by just making Paul my outboard nutrition brain. Here was a generally brilliant guy, who already knew much more about the field than I did, and who was following new developments far more closely than I could make myself. So why not just piggyback on his erudition, and simply agree with whatever he concluded?

More recently, I’ve been thinking that I might similarly be able to offload some of my political and economics brain. Reading and watching more of Fareed Zakaria, I’ve found myself being impressed by, and agreeing with, virtually everything he says. Sure, I continue to consume political and economic books, articles and podcasts. But the world is a big and complicated place. And I simply can’t keep up, in depth, on all fronts, with somebody who spends more time and energy – and has for decades – on a given subject than I do.

I’ve been kicking the idea around in general: if I want to be a well-versed generalist, but also believe that I accomplish more when I focus on less, can I square the circle by outsourcing more and more of my less-critical thinking to an array of outboard brains?

I often hear from people that theirs is a ‘relationship business’, and that it therefore isn’t really susceptible to the influence of technology.

In my experience, there are two different types of businesses that are driven mainly by relationship: commodity businesses - where any choice is as good as any other – and businesses with terrible data – where people have no idea if any choice is better than any other.

In commodity businesses, perhaps that makes sense.  If you’re buying crates of #10 envelopes – all roughly the same in terms of quality or price – you might as well buy from the guy with whom you’d like to have expense account drinks.

But in data-less businesses, the situation is far less sensible.  A restaurateur stocks a given liquor due to relationship only because he can’t quantify whether his customers would more likely purchase a different drink, in a way that would yield better profits, customer satisfaction, or other ROI.

And, indeed, in the majority of professional or creative businesses – from medicine and law, to music, film, publishing, and fashion – where so many decisions are ‘relationship-driven’, I strongly, strongly suspect things fall into that second, less sensible, data-less relationship category.  Decision-guiding data has already started showing up increasingly in those worlds; as the data trickle turns to flood over the next five years, those industries will start looking very different than they do today.