GRIZZLY PEAR

written snapshots

Category: Notes

  • EntreLeadership, Dave Ramsey, 2011

    Given the guests on the podcast with the same name, I went ahead and borrowed EntreLeadership from the library. The book is a simple, quick enjoyable read.

    Admittedly, I’ve never run a business and have no intention to do so in the future. However the book seems like it could be a good primer spanning for a would be entrepreneur, even if much of the topics are covered elsewhere (such as Covey’s 4 quadrants, or Ziglar’s 7 spoke Wheel of life).

    However there is one piece of advice that did not sit well with me. He proudly flaunts his “no gossip” policy, which is a fireable offense. It seemed odd to me, so I slipped onto the internet and came across the Daily Beast expose on his exceedingly heavy handed leadership practices.

    Then it all snapped in focus. This is a man who has been the boss so long he has forgotten what it is like to be an employee. He has no idea that his position as the founder and owner is a singular one. His perspective is applicable only to himself.

    Just flip one of his other exhortations around. He wants each of his employees to act like entrepreneurs. So if I’m running my own little freelance gig, shouldn’t I talk with my fellow freelancers about market conditions? Shouldn’t I make sure that my primary client is treating me fairly? Shouldn’t I “gossip”?

    I get that employees should not waste their time bellyaching at the break room. It is better if they bring up concerns to their management so the problems can be fixed. However, that type of trust is earned, not demanded.

    This writer has been boss so long, he has mistaken great culture with a populace that has been cowed into submission. And that too is a classic mistake entrepreneurs make.

  • One Small Step Can Change your Life, Robert Maurer, 2004

    I recently went on a Kaizen kick borrowing all the books on this subject from the library.

    Most were straightforward business books from the mid to late 90’s, before the malaise that hit Japan and mad the subject less of a juicy marketable subject.

    But One Small Step Can Change Your Life, by Dr. Maurer, was an interesting self help book where the main premise is that very small steps can ultimately be very fruitful, hence the title. It is a very optimistic book, with quite a few examples from both business and historical lore as well as personal interactions by the author.

    Like any self help book, it is a persuasive hamburger – it starts and ends by selling you on the effectiveness of of the topic with a multiple steps process in the body of the text.

    In this case, you are given a primer on kaizen as a business practice and then some examples on how this approach can be applied to one’s personal life. This book’s six-point program consists of:

    • Ask Small Questions
    • Think Small Thoughts
    • Take Small Actions
    • Solve Small Problems
    • Bestow Small Rewards
    • Identify Small Moments

    And then it closes with a reminder that kaizen is good for both for changing course on bad habits (or jumpstarting inactivity) as well as stacking gains on top of previous successes.

    The basic premise is that sustainable change comes from small steps that are consistently applied over a long period of time. This stands in contrast to the “innovation” or bootcamp mentality – which are banking on shocks to the system to make lasting change.

    The issue with the drastic change approach is that sometimes the system will often bend but snap back into place – the inertia is too much. Kaizen is small so it is immediately actionable, and it entails such small steps that the recalcitrant system doesn’t know what hit it.

    Coincidentally, I listened to a podcast about meditation and one of the suggestions for creating a practice is to just aim to meditate for 1- minute every day. While such a goal may seem ridiculously paltry, it creates a habit and it creates opportunities where you decide to meditate for more than a minute. While the decision to go an extra minute may also seem miniscule, the podcaster noted this choice was actually quite momentous. That first minute is motivated by an extrinsic factor (your previous commitment to meditate for a minute every day) but the second minute is voluntary and motivated by intrinsic factors now that your obligation has been satisfied.

    This seems to me to encapsulate the spirit of this book. Make a small step and the ride the wave to continuous improvement.

  • Fridge Bread, Oct / Nov 2019

    I’ve been playing with rising the dough in the fridge, and aside from the lost space in the box, it has worked out really well. The main thing is that the timing is much more forgiving.

    400g all purpose flour
    300g water
    200g starter
    4g salt

    The only change from typical recipe is adding a lot more starter (and of course throwing the dough in the fridge for 2-3 days after the autolyse and mix).

    Along with proofing in the fridge, we are now playing with using fresh wheat berries in the bread. I soak the 100g of berries in 200g water overnight and then process it in the vitamix (using the last 100g of water to wash out the container into the dough).

    400g all purpose flour
    300g water
    200g starter
    4g salt

    This system is proving pretty promising, getting the flavors of whole wheat bread without concerns about the oils in the flour going rancid.

    And now that we’ve gotten into the soaking business…next step, sprouted grains!

  • MaNiKi (Crazy Car variant), Dominique Ehrhard, 2002

    This morning I slammed together a DIY set of MaNiKi (also called Jungle Smart and Crazy Circus) using Duplo Blocks.

    I made three different colored cars (green, blue, and yellow) and put them on red and orange Duplo Houses. I wrote up a cheat sheet using the MaNiKi commands.

    So the only thing that didn’t match the published game was determining the goal for the round. Instead of having the 24 cards as in the published game, I took 5 pieces and put them in a bag, green, blue, yellow for each car with red and orange for each of the houses.

    To set the goal, I draw one piece at a time. All of the car color tiles are stacked in order and then placed on the first house tile that came up. After the second house tile comes up, any further car tiles (if any) are placed on that second house.

    This system worked well enough, though the cards in the published game make for better gameplay, since the goal is immediately revealed and the game can proceed without the drawing process.

    That said, this makeshift set worked quite well in teaching my five year old the game. She’s not ready to play competitively since she can’t work out the order of operations in her head, but she caught on surprisingly fast.

    It’s definitely a sharp little game, one worth trying, and possibly buying as well!

    One last note. In the photo, you will see a little tower to the right. I used that tower to keep track of the starting setup for a round. If there were any mistakes we could easily go back to the beginning to work out the correct answer. It’s not necessary for the rules as written, but a nice accessory for beginner games.

  • Kingdomino, Bruno Cathala, 2016

    With the two little ones, I haven’t been gaming much. In this time away, I’ve allowed theories kind of harden into preferences, and one of my favorite things to hate is multi-player solitaire.

    So let’s say you make a game of four people building their own little board with zero interaction outside of drafting tiles.

    Yeah f’ that…and the committee who gave this game THE award.

    But Kingdomino is an SDJ and it was being sold at half off at Target.

    So I picked it up.

    And damn, it’s a nifty little game.

    I still doubt I would enjoy its more complicated sibling Queendomino, but the committee still knows what it’s doing.

  • Visit from the sister (games!)

    My sister and brother-in-law visited Vegas this week so it gave me a chance to play some games between chasing the kids around.

    Innovation (twice)
    Circus Flohcati
    Aton
    No Thanks (twice)
    Times Square

    When you have a limited time budget, it’s interesting what came out to be played.

    I’ve always acclaimed Carl Chudyk, the designer of Innovation, as a “minor deity”. And this assessment hasn’t changed. His ability to have a completely chaotic game result in a memorable gameplay experience, is really something to behold.

    As for the other games, Aton and Times Square are both excellent, albeit slightly 2 player fussy games.  Aron is a gridded area control game and Times Square is a linear tug of war, but both games have multiple levers to push and pull constrained by the card draw making for great 2 player experiences.

    It was also a lot of fun to introduce No Thanks and Circus Flohcati to my sister and brother in law. Just fun light fillers, easy to teach but with meaningful decisions.  Both well designed games, also by Thorsten Gimmler and Reiner Knizia respectively. My daughter even joined in for No Thanks and enjoyed it well enough.

    Interestingly, all of them were card games, as were almost all the other games I would have thought to pull out. Amongst the board-dice-cards categorizations, I definitely lean towards cards.

    But honestly, my daughter had the most fun of all when we played hide and seek in the house.

  • Trapped in paradise

    My in-laws have a peach tree in their back yards, and to keep the birds from eating all the peaches, they wrap it in a net.

    The net got compromised and three birds ended up dying in the summer heat before we realized what was happening.

    There are many colloquialisms for what just happened.

    But mainly it’s sad.

    And a warning to the rest of us about life in general.

  • A short list of Books

    I was rereading Damn Good Advice by George Lois and I realized it is most likely one of my favorite self help books along with Checklist Manifesto by Atul Gawande.

    Then there are the two Jocko Willink and Leif Babin leadership books, Extreme Ownership and the Dichotomy of Leadership. The first is clear and concise, the second is a necessary counterbalance to the literally extreme title.

    And then Seth Godin’s most recent book This is Marketing, as well as his older classic The Dip. The first book is about selling, or as he defines it, making change in the world. The second is about quitting fast versus having grit and trying to navigate both great options.

    And I need to re-read the massive tome Design for Ecological Democracy by my first architecture professor, Randy Hester.

    Honorable mentions:
    The One Thing
    Essentialism
    Dale Carnegie
    Do it Tomorrow

    The Leadership Pipeline

    Throw in some “impractical” books like Invisible Cities and Labyrinths and that’s not a bad reading list at all.

  • Mirai, Mamoru Hosoda, 2018

    Over the long weekend, we watched Mirai, winner of the Japanese Academy Prize for Animation in 2018.

    Of his films that I’ve seen, this was his tightest story and I really enjoyed it. I am fond of slice of life family stories, but I felt that he did not do a good job wrapping up the end to Wolf Children so acclaim is not guaranteed. However I can happily say he stuck the landing on this one.

    It also helped that the family included an architect, so the house in the film is pretty cool (albeit questionable IRL). As easter eggs, it was also fun to see the Ikea products in the house, presumably to signify a modern sense of style on a middle class budget.

    And of course, it helped to have two kids spread apart almost exactly the same difference as the protagonists on screen. It was fun to watch the kids, but also of exchanges between the mom and dad.

    This is a family film and the kids will dig it, but it is parents who will really grok what just happened.

  • Weiqi (Go)

    No that I taught my girl Xiangqi (Chinese Chess) I’m getting greedy and I want to teach her Weiqi (Go).

    I guess I need to be careful that I’m not transmorgifying my general acquisitiveness for games into forcing her to play different new games all the time.

    That said, I think she did enjoy playing Xiangqi. She didn’t really enjoy the initial teaching part, but she did like moving pieces around and eating my pieces that I offered up to her by purposely bad plays.

    Even though I’m naturally quite bad at Xiangqi, at least I’ve played it quite a bit and know how it works. But Weiqi is not a game I’ve played much, so I guess I need to play a bit online and then once I’ve at least gotten the rules worked out, then I’ll drag out a chess board (9×9 vertexes) and we’ll see where it goes.