RWL#247
Life is like a Texas sheet cake edition
Greetings from the University of New Hampshire! Yesterday we celebrated a family member’s birthday and I baked a white Texas sheet cake for the occasion. This is a super simple recipe that has become a go-to for me. It’s a dense, moist cake, and with the butter cream frosting, it is simply amazing! I’ve substituted vanilla for the almond flavor in the past, but yesterday I did use the almond and have to say I do prefer it. The amount of effort involved in baking this cake from scratch vs. using a box mix is minimal. It is a few more steps, but they all basically come down to dumping ingredients in a pot and stirring, so it’s not complicated. The result is head-and-shoulders above what you are going to get from a box mix. It’s worth the modest additional work.
A lot in life, as it turns out, is like baking a white Texas sheet cake. Taking a little more time to make something of quality is almost always worth it, if the thing is important. Birthday cakes are important. If you care enough about someone that you are making them a cake, then don’t cut corners. Take 20 minutes to prepare a cake from scratch instead of 10 minutes from a box. It’s a marginal cost of 10 minutes to do something right. If you don’t have the time to do something right, then maybe you are doing too many things and you should cut back. That’s an important part of life, too, as it turns out. Setting priorities and giving the priorities the time they deserve, is critical to success. If you do the important things well, you won’t regret having skipped the box cakes.
Also, everything is better when you slather buttercream on top of it.
Enjoy the links!
(pic is cake and book bookmark I made for another recent birthday)
Read
What: Captain Awkward, How to tighten up your game at work when you’re depressed.
https://captainawkward.com/2013/02/16/450-how-to-tighten-up-your-game-at-work-when-youre-depressed/
Why: I know a number of people who deal with chronic clinical depression. I have dealt with a couple of (non-chronic) bouts of it myself (which, by the way is normal - into each life some rain must fall). I liked this discussion of the effects of depression, and her advice for how to work through the effects. Her list of four work behaviors is a pretty good list of advice. The post is insightful (and entertaining), if a bit meandering.
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What: The New Atlantis, How to Fix Social Media
https://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/how-to-fix-social-media
Why: I don’t agree with the conclusion - I am a fan of Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. I don’t trust politicians to moderate communications, full stop. That’s why we have the 1st Amendment, and Section 230 has its drawbacks, but it has drawbacks that are in the spirit of the 1st Amendment. If anything, it should be strengthened.
But I did like the majority of this article and its historical comparison of various media and how each medium required the evolution of new social institutions. Remember that when War of the Worlds was broadcast during radio’s early days, people actually thought Martians were invading. Talk about fake news! I remember the early days of social media and people shared all sorts of things that they probably regret now. We’re still learning new social norms. The Great Awokening and Trumpism (both social poison) are just two sides of the coin of society learning to deal with the power of social media. In a few years we will stabilize. History shows that to be true.
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What: WaPo, Five points for anger, one for a ‘like’: How Facebook’s formula fostered rage and misinformation
Why: As I said above, I support Section 230, and I generally think we should not be in the business of regulating how social media companies prioritize content. But it’s useful to know what the various social media sites are up to. This is a useful article for that purpose.
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Watch
What: Matt D'Avella, 12 Habits That Changed My Life (17 min)
Why: He shares how he set out to try 12 30-day experiments to create new habits, back-to-back, over the course of a year. It’s kind of entertaining to listen to the different things he tried, but his message at the end is interesting.
I’ve been thinking a lot about habit formation and focus over the last month or so. The video by Laura Vanderkam’s video, How to gain control of your free time that I shared in RWL #241. The important lesson from Vanderkam was about priorities, not time. I think habits are an important part of accomplishing priorities (and having time for cakes from scratch).
This is a fun video. (Boss technique - crank up the playback speed to 1.25x or 1.5x).
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Listen
What: Design Matters, Alisa Cohn (71 min)
https://designobserver.com/feature/alisa-cohn/40484
Why: Cohn is an executive coach who specializes in start-up firms. I loved her personal story - wandering across many disciplines - until she found herself as a coach. I really like the discussion of coaching vs. therapy. Great conversation about leadership techniques and how to teach them. I am thinking seriously about pursuing coaching certification myself. I’ll never be as good as Cohn, but I really like the concept of the training, and I like the idea of teaching at the individual level.
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What: Good Fellows, Fresh Soldiers (63 minutes)
https://goodfellows.podbean.com/e/fresh-soldiers/
Why: This podcast is nominally about Colin Powell, but really they use him as a launching point to talk about education and opportunity. From the description:
The late Colin Powell’s story is one of an immigrant’s son who rose to prominence based on a quality public-school education and enrollment in college ROTC. Hoover senior fellows H. R. McMaster, John Cochrane, and guest Caroline Hoxby discuss whether today’s generation stands to benefit the same as Powell’s, what role teachers play, how elite universities can better connect to lower-income students, plus COVID’s effect on the workplace in terms of remote work and concentrated workforces.
Thanks for reading and see you next week! If you come across any interesting stories, won't you send them my way? I'd love to hear what you think of these suggestions, and I'd love to get suggestions from you. Feel free to drop me a line at mark.bonica@unh.edu , or you can tweet to me at @mbonica .
If you’re looking for a searchable archive, you can see my draft folder here: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1jwGLdjsb1WKtgH_2C-_3VvrYCtqLplFO?usp=sharing
Finally, if you find these links interesting, won’t you tell a friend?
They can subscribe here:
See you next week!
Mark
Mark J. Bonica, Ph.D., MBA, MS
Associate Professor
Department of Health Management and Policy
University of New Hampshire
(603) 862-0598
mark.bonica@unh.edu
Health Leader Forge Podcast:
http://healthleaderforge.org
"Were there none discontented with what they have, the World would never reach anything better." - Florence Nightingale