May 2013 – The Art of Doing

The Secret Ingredient for Success

What does self-awareness have to do with a restaurant empire? A tennis championship? Or a rock star’s dream?

Our story in the Sunday Review of The New York Times, January 2013

What does self-awareness have to do with a restaurant empire? A tennis championship? Or a rock star’s dream?

David Chang’s experience is instructive.

Mr. Chang is an internationally renowned, award-winning Korean-American chef, restaurateur and owner of the Momofuku restaurant group with eight restaurants from Toronto to Sydney, and other thriving enterprises, including bakeries and bars, a PBS TV show, guest spots on HBO’s “Treme” and a foodie magazine, Lucky Peach. He says he worked himself to the bone to realize his dream — to own a humble noodle bar.

He spent years cooking in some of New York City’s best restaurants, apprenticed in different noodle shops in Japan and then, finally, worked 18-hour days in his tiny restaurant, Momofuku Noodle Bar.

Mr. Chang could barely pay himself a salary. He had trouble keeping staff. And he was miserably stressed. Continue reading “The Secret Ingredient for Success”

Inside the Mind of Mark Frauenfelder:
A Blogger’s Word Cloud

A Word Cloud based on our interview with Mark Frauenfelder, co-founder and co-editor of BoingBoing, the iconoclastic blog, for a chapter in our book on “How to Create One of the World’s Most Popular Blogs.”

Frequency is the currency of a word cloud. The more a word is repeated, the larger it appears in the cloud. Click here to see the interactive version.

This word cloud is based on our interview with Mark Frauenfelder, co-founder and co-editor of one of our favorite blogs (for a chapter in our book on “How to Create One of the World’s Most Popular Blogs). Frauenfelder’s iconoclastic BoingBoing (whose motto is Brain Candy for Happy Mutants) has been firing out a melange of digital innovation, DIY creations and wacked-out art for a decade and a half. (Already in blog years, several life cycles long.) What we see in Frauenfelder’s word cloud is his focus is not on market share, metrics or SEO, but on building a community of people by writing interesting and amazing posts rooted in real life that will connect with the reader.

Simply put, as Frauenfelder told us: Continue reading “Inside the Mind of Mark Frauenfelder:
A Blogger’s Word Cloud”

Reset: From Perfect to Imperfect

How a New York Times reporter’s life went from perfect to imperfect and just right once she learned how to ride the wave.

For our blog we’ve wanted to write about some of the people we’ve come across who have changed their lives in profound or unexpected ways. Diane Cardwell is one of them.

If you had met Diane Cardwell just a few years ago, you would have thought her life was perfect with the prestigious job as a reporter at The New York Times, the handsome, ambitious, NGO-ish husband, the beautiful Brooklyn Brownstone they actually owned and land upstate to build their dream home someday. But when her marriage fell apart, Diane told us, her life no longer made sense to her. Continue reading “Reset: From Perfect to Imperfect”

Alien Hunter, Jill Tarter:
An Artist’s Interpretation

Mankind has been gazing up at the stars for hundreds of thousands of years, wondering, “Are we alone?” Astronomer Jill Tarter, one of the world’s leading alien hunters, has put this quest at the center of her life.

The Art of Doing Artist’s Interpretation project is a collaboration between us and imaginative artists we’ve chosen to depict the superachievers in our book.

Since we think artist Michael Wertz’s work is brilliant, we asked him to create a piece of art about one of our superachievers. Because of Wertz’s love of all things extraterrestrial—from his childhood pillowcase covered in cosmic Peter Max imagery to the Carpenters’ ode to space, “Calling Occupants of Interplanetary Craft”—he jumped at the chance to depict astronomer Jill Tarter, one the world’s most prominent alien hunters. (Chapter 15 in our book on “How to Find Extraterrestrial Life.”)

The term alien hunter might conjure up images of Roswellian conspiracy theorists or UFOlogists, scanning the skies for sleek hovering spaceships and little green men, but astronomer Jill Tarter is far from that. Tarter is a TED prize-winning leader at the SETI Institute (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) where a team of scientists at the Hat Creek Observatory in Northern California operates a powerful telescope array in the world’s most technologically advanced search for signs of life in the universe. Continue reading “Alien Hunter, Jill Tarter:
An Artist’s Interpretation”

The Art of Parenting: Obama Style

Presidential parenting, how the Obamas, particularly Michelle, set a conservative agenda.

Whatever you may think of Barack Obama’s politics, Michelle’s child-rearing style is decidedly conservative without a shred of the touchy-feely, go-with-the-flow stereotype of liberal parenting.

In a New York Times story last fall, Jodi Kantor, noted Obamologist, wrote that ‘Some staff members joke that they wish they could send their own children to Mrs. Obama’s boot camp for training.’

Kantor reports on a few of Michelle’s household rules for Malia 14, and Sasha 12: Continue reading “The Art of Parenting: Obama Style”

Western Swing Music Legend, Ray Benson on Living the Dream

Ray Benson, frontman of Asleep At The Wheel, on living the dream: “If you can do anything else, than do that. But if you can’t be happy unless you’re a working musician performing every night than this is what you’ve got to do.”

Any one of us can fantasize about becoming the next X, Y or Z, whether it’s Steve Jobs, Justin Bieber or Julia Child. Well, of course, we all have dreams of spending our days engaged in what we’re passionate about. But how do you do it?

Writing our book, we had the chance to speak to dozens of extraordinary people who are doing just that—living their dreams. When we talked to Ray Benson, leader of the Austin-based, nine-time Grammy award winning Western Swing band, Asleep At The Wheel, about what it takes to keep the dream of playing music alive for over 40 years he told us: Continue reading “Western Swing Music Legend, Ray Benson on Living the Dream”

What the Creators of IVF Can Teach Us About Innovation

Dr. Robert Edwards spent decades trying to solve the riddle of infertility with IVF. His innovative approach was a lot like any you could find in a modern-day startup—underfunded, scrappy and improvised.

It was in the mid-1950s when Robert G. Edwards, a young post-grad student who worked menial jobs to pay for his tuition at the University of Edinburgh, got a crazy idea.

Working on a genetics project with mouse embryos at a university lab, Edwards wondered if he could “pluck the egg from the ovary [of a woman] and fertilize it in the laboratory,” he wrote in his book, A Matter of Life. More importantly, he thought, if he could transfer the resultant embryo back into the woman’s womb, he’d solve one of mankind’s most vexing biological problems–infertility.

Considering this leap from mouse to man, it was an audacious thought, and a highly unlikely goal for a young scientist-to-be. But nearly 25 years later, in 1978, Edwards’s dream came true when the first child was born through in vitro fertilization.

The history of every innovation is unique with its own idiosyncratic quirks, characters, and defining cultural moments. But when we look back on ideas that were mere visions before they were embraced by the public, such as IVF, it can be helpful to see how an innovator like Edwards (who died earlier this month) pulled it off. Here are some lessons any entrepreneur or visionary can borrow from Edwards’s quest: Continue reading “What the Creators of IVF Can Teach Us About Innovation”