“I profoundly believe that the power of food has a primal place in our homes that binds us to the best bits of life.”
Jaime Oliver
English chef
A great 20 minutes from Jaime Oliver at TED this year (probably a good one for your kids to watch too – 12 and up).
I completely love the accent. It’s brilliant. Isn’t it?
Speaking of dining… Can I give you 3 ideas that have had a great impact in our house?
“Virtually all multitaskers think they are brilliant at multitasking…
It turns out, multitaskers are terrible at every aspect of multitasking. They get distracted constantly. Their memory is very disorganized…
We worry that it may be creating people who are unable to think well and clearly.”
Clifford Nass
Stanford University
Scary and exciting… PBS’s Frontline production, Digital Nation – Life on the Virtual Frontier.
Pick this over your next top model-chef-bachelor-biggest-smallest-loser-winner show (86 minutes). You can watch the whole thing or watch it in 9 segments (click on the little circles below the video to see the chapter choices – so much added content on their site).
Incredible to have access to such great stuff… on demand… for free. Thanks PBS, MacArthur Foundation, Park Foundation, Verizon, and contributors.
(Here’s 4 quick tips to minimize the bulk of distractions… because you want your time to matter.)
I got an email from the president last night wishing me a Happy Thanksgiving. In case you're not as close with him as I am, I thought I'd pass along the message (it's after the jump).
I'm sure he'd be fine with it.
We need to stop looking into our hands so much.
Cells, berries, and ithings get too much attention.
Five days ago, I decided to try an experiment. It’s part of my real world immersion program.
I’m doing my best to make it so no one knows I have a cell phone. No checking for emails or messages when people are around me. No answering a vibrating phone (a ringtone? please) if I’m in a face-to-face conversation with another human being (ruuuude man).
My thinking here is this’ll make me more available to the people in front of me and the life around me and also help me focus more. I’m guessing it’ll also help me improve my real world communication skills (listening is a part of communicating) and consequently help me help others better.
The only downside I can think of is not being instantly available for a real emergency (but this is possible several times throughout the day anyway).
So far, it feels good. (update after 2 months below)
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(It’s scary that people text and read while they drive (grown-ups are especially surprising given that we’re not supposed to be that stupid)… make-up application too (yeah, I saw you taking that turn putting on your mascara in your rearview). I’m sure it’ll slow down as each of us personally know more and more people who have accidents (severe or not) but we’ll probably have to stick our finger in the socket a few times before we get disciplined.
If you’re up for a frightening (and very disturbing) awareness video on the topic (I’ve shared it with my 15-year-old who is with driving friends now, but I’m pretty hardcore as you likely know if you read my stuff), here’s 4 minutes. Do not watch it if frightening and disturbing are not your things. I’m serious. It’s a British PSA.)
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Update: Nothing but great things to say about the device diet. In fact, I downgraded to a regular phone a couple weeks after this post. The phone still has great keyboard features, etc. but it’s less of a distraction now (and I save $500 a year in usage fees).
I did violate the diet a couple weeks ago though and got a lesson — classic bad dad moment. I was looking up something on the phone at my son’s basketball game and missed his one basket of the game. I’m pretty confident I won’t pull that again.
If no cell phone sounds cwazy (so crazy, I spell it cwazy), here’s a Bloomberg/ Businessweek piece that might play to your ego and encourage more focus.
Grocery store checkout. Magazine display. 3 weeks of the last 4.
You can walk off belly fat. Whitney and Oprah are in a cat fight. Jessica lost a puppy. Jennifer's having a baby.
It's on with Justin and it's over with Justin. The walk off has you in your skinny jeans. A Kardashian is having her dream wedding (who are these people?).
Oprah's in it with Michelle now. Tori is losing too much weight. Jon & Kate are spying, stealing, and having their lives wrecked.
Who's paying for this stuff?
(we need to reboot)
Eating… (1) real food (2) slower (3) in the dining room.
A few months ago, we decided to start eating in the dining room when we have dinner as a family. I realize this might be a ridiculous statement to those of you who already do this but for the 5 of us, it was new. We were kitchen table people.
Absolutely a wonderful change that’s created 3-4 nights each week of real fun (we can’t seem to get all of us together more than that). And finally, we’re putting that room to real use.
Additionally, partially in response to reading Michael Pollan’s In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto, we’re trying to eat more real food and doing it slowly. For more depth on eating real food, consider Pollan’s book (intro to the book is here).
On easting slowly… We’re all working on enjoying our food a little more by minimizing our tendency to push it through the system from plate to stomach in two seconds.
Hilarious and pathetic at the same time (once we’re aware).
How often we find ourselves chewing something while loading our next bite onto our forks only to keep it just outside our mouth… shoving it in once the previous bite is gone so we can be sure not a gap of space exists between our lips and stomach.
Sleep eating at its best.
(the image is of a dining room in Italy from a few year ago… a great trip)
