Merce Cardus's Blog, page 61

How to Cook The Perfect Thanksgiving Turkey

One turkey. Two types of muscles. Two different temperatures needed to cook properly. Put away the roasting pan and get ready to spatchcock the bird. What does it mean to spatchcock a turkey?

Split that mother open, says Food Lab columnist J. Kenji López-Alt, author of The Food Lab, and splay it out so the parts of the bird that need to cook hotter are exposed to more heat. Your turkey will end up looking a little less than ideal, but it also won’t be dry and boring like most Thanksgiving tu...

The Road Less Traveled By

The Road Not Taken by Robert Frost is one of the most famous and widely-r ead American poems. It’s also one of the most commonly misinterpreted. What was Frost really saying? What is the significance of poetry? Let’s watch as John Green offers us some potentialanswers.

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood, And sorry I could not travel both And be one traveler, long I stood And looked down one as far as I could To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the other, as just as fair, And h...

How High Will You Fly?

Everyone knows that Icarus’s father made him wings and told him not to fly too close to the sun; he ignored the warning and plunged to his doom. The lesson: Play it safe. Listen to the experts. It was the perfect propaganda for the industrial economy. What boss wouldn’t want employees to believe that obedience and conformity are the keys to success?

But we tend to forget that Icarus was also warned not to fly too low, because seawater would ruin the lift in his wings. Flying too low is even...

How to Overcome Self-doubt

Pro Football Hall of Famer Michael Strahan is the author ofWake Up Happy: The Dream Big, Win Big Guide to Transforming Your Life. In the book, Strahan shares his strategies for suppressing the defeatist attitudes that prevent people from enjoying their accomplishments.

We all doubt ourselves

I doubt myself every day. I still do. It’s a work in progress and I think that’s the thing about it. It’s not as if you say, “I’m happy and I got it. I got the keys to happiness.” But I think there are...

You Just Have To Start

There are only two paths in life: average and awesome. The average path is easy because all you have to do is nothing. The awesome path is more challenging, because things like fear only bother you when you do work that matters. The good news is Start gives readers practical, actionable insights to be more awesome, more often.

What it takes to be awesome

One afternoon while meeting with a friend, I started to dissect Dave Ramsey’s life on a whiteboard. He’s been an incredibly successful aut...

Evolution Is Moving Us Away from Selfishness. But Where Is It Taking Us?

We live in our emotions, explains renowned medical researcher Dr. Rudolph Tanzi, coauthor of Super Genes: Unlock the astonishing power of your DNA for optimum health and well-being. Our emotions and overall outlook on life correspond to different parts of the brain. How you decide to approach your life determines which parts of your brain become activated. If you allow fear and worry to rule you, the brain stem is exercised. If you embrace things like creativity, empathy, and community, you...

Overcoming Procrastination

Procrastination identifies the reasons we put off tasks—fears of failure, success, control, separation, and attachment—and their roots in our childhood and adult experiences. The authors offer a practical, tested program to overcome procrastination by achieving set goals, managing time, enlisting support, and handling stress.

Change is a Process

Making a change and learning new behavior happens gradually over time. There are many different models of how change occurs. James Prochaska and hi...

LinkFest ~ Best Reads on Better Living: Love Is Never Enough

Quote of the day

We can never really know the state of mind— the attitudes, thoughts, and feelings— of other people. We depend on signals, which are frequently ambiguous, to inform us about the attitudes and wishes of other people. We use our own coding system, which may be defective, to decipher these signals. Depending on our own state of mind at a particular time, we may be biased in our method of interpreting other people’s behavior, that is, how we decode. The degree to which we believ...

LinkFest ~ Reads on Writing, Screenwriting & Self-Publishing: A Writer’s Soul

WRITING

The Fatal Flaw of Underwriting, Writer Helping Writers| Tweet

Underwriting is just what it sounds like: it’s the failure to put things on the page that need to be there. When somebody picks up a gun and fires it off, and we didn’t know there was a gun on stage, that’s underwriting.

How to Write Can’t-Look-Away Chapter Breaks, Helping Writers Become Authors| Tweet

Chapter breaks in novels are like the Becher’s Brook jump in National Velvet. That’s where the bodiespile up. Many...

Think You’re Thinking for Yourself? Think Again.

“There’s no more central message of psychology than the fact that most of what goes on in our heads we have no access to,” explains social psychologist Richard Nisbett, author of Mindware: Tools for smart thinking, who offers some smart thinking tools in this video interview. He also delves into the science of influence, in particular the power some parties enjoy by influencing the behavior of others.

We have no idea what goes on in our heads

There’s no more central message of psychology...