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Kindle Notes & Highlights
“Adapt what is useful, reject what is useless, and add what is specifically your own.”
“When you have the best and tastiest ingredients, you can cook very simply and the food will be extraordinary because it tastes like what it is.” And: “Good cooking is no mystery. You don’t need years of culinary training, or rare and costly foodstuffs, or an encyclopedic knowledge of world cuisines. You need only your own five senses.”
What we really need to do, to design, is look at the extremes. The weakest, or the person with arthritis, or the athlete, or the strongest, the fastest person, because if we understand what the extremes are, the middle will take care of itself.”
look at what the outliers are doing differently (and what they’re not doing at all).
Sometimes, whether in the world of fire-making or cooking, finding the path of least resistance is as easy as Googling “backward,” “upside-down,” or “reverse,” plus whatever skill you’re deconstructing.
Sweet—Table sugar or other sweetener. Sour—Ideally, “sour salt” (citric acid),21 as it’s odorless, but lemon juice or vinegar will do the job. Bitter—Tonic water (quinine). Salty—Various types of salt: table salt, kosher salt, sea salt. Umami—Human breast milk. What’s that? You don’t have human breast milk on hand? A little MSG will work. Barring that, try dashi (or its constituent parts, kombu seaweed or bonito flakes), mushrooms, or the little white crystals on good ol’ Parmigiano-Reggiano.
play with foodpairing.be, which is based on the Volatile Compounds in Food (VCF) database.
mango with cayenne pepper.
1. What are commonalities among the best competitors? 2. Which of these aren’t being actively taught (i.e., implicit) in most classes? 3. Which neglected skills (answers to #2) could I get good at abnormally quickly? The sweet spots were the places where all the answers overlapped like the center of a Venn diagram.
If you were to sum up the last 50 years of behavioral psychology in two words, it would be: “logic fails.”
A goal without real consequences is wishful thinking. Good follow-through doesn’t depend on the right intentions. It depends on the right incentives.
Making effective decisions—and learning effectively—requires massive elimination and the removal of options.
The easiest way to avoid being overwhelmed is to create positive constraints: put up walls that dramatically restrict whatever it is that you’re trying to do.
Just remember ABC—Always Be Compressing. It’s the key to low-stress, high-speed learning.
“Practice makes permanent.”
“Procrastinating is like masturbating. It feels good at the time, but, in the end, you’re just fucking yourself.”
Tim Anderson, author of the “Heirloom Technology” column in Make magazine.
“When you are nervous, uncomfortable, that’s when you’re learning.”
“The amateur trains until he gets it right; the professional trains until he gets it wrong.” In other words, the amateur plays within his or her sphere of comfort, where nothing can go wrong. Amateurs never see their true potential. In contrast, the professional constantly pushes the envelope, until something inevitably goes wrong. This is how they uncover weaknesses and become the best in the world. It’s also how they get an awesome high through their craft.
“Discovery consists of seeing what everybody has seen and thinking what nobody has thought.”
“Creativity is allowing yourself to make mistakes. Art is knowing which ones to keep.”
foodpairing.be
while you thought you needed the tea ceremony for the caffeine, what you really needed was the tea ceremony.”
action and a benevolent warning not to squander time. I’m often asked how I define “success.” It’s an overused term, but I fundamentally view this elusive beast as a combination of two things—achievement and appreciation. One isn’t enough: Achievement without appreciation makes you ambitious but miserable. Appreciation without achievement makes you unambitious but happy.
