Ideas

Live for yourself

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Do you crave pleasing others? Do you care what others think? Or are you out for your own success? It all depends on what drives you. Sometimes I think we get a bit conflicted as to who we make our decisions for, many times bending over backwards to make someone happy. Do we do it for them? Do we do it to impress someone else? Or, do we do it for ourselves?

I am someone who craves excellence. I have extremely high expectations and think there is always room for improvement. Do I do it for others? Not really. I want it to be the best because I see the vision of where it can go. So often I think individuals get lazy, quit, or just decide that something is not important. Not me. I want to evolve things so life can be better for me and everyone else. Many call me relentless and it is true. I am relentless. I recently came across this quote:

“When you work to please others you can’t succeed, but the things you do to satisfy yourself stand a chance of catching someone’s interest.”

-Marcel Proust, Pastiches Et Melanges

I thought this quote was interesting. How often do we try to please others? How often do we realize that we are never going to make others happy? I love thinking of the idea that if I am satisfying myself, then that is actually when I am interesting. It is true. We are most fascinating and most interesting when we are living for ourselves and no one else. It is a hard dilemma. How often we make decisions because we are making someone else happy, than doing something because it makes ourselves happy.

Live for yourself and what you want to do.

Random recipe: Warm Chocolate Souffle Cakes

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Sometimes you just need something sweet. It has been a rough week. There have been days this week where by the end of the day I could no longer formulate a complete sentence. In a meeting yesterday I kept starting a thought and was not able to finish it. It was after 5 pm, and someone in the meeting mentioned that it was due to Daylight Savings Time. (I sure hope so.) In any case, sometimes when you just hit your limit you need a bit of warm chocolate to make things better. Like Mary Poppins said: “Just a spoon full of sugar helps the medicine go down.” Last night I needed just a spoon full of warm chocolate to make it through the rest of my day.

Warm Chocolate Souffle Cakes (Found in a recent issue of Portland Monthly Magazine)

(Makes a dozen 6 oz cakes)

15 oz bittersweet chocolate (at least 64 percent cacao)
3/4 cup (1 1/2 sticks) unsalted butter
6 large eggs, separated
1/2 cup and 1/2 cup sugar, separated
1 pinch of salt

1. Preheat oven to 400 degrees. Lightly butter 12 individual baking dishes (6-8 oz) or spray with nonstick vegetable spray. Set a large metal bowl over a saucepan filled with an inch or two of simmering water to create a double boiler. Melt chocolate and butter in bowl over low heat. Set aside and cool to room temperature.

2. Place egg yolks in the bowl of a stand mixer fitted with a whisk attachment. With the mixer on medium speed, add 1/2 cup sugar and a pinch of salt, and mix until yolks are slightly thicker and lighter in color, 2-3 minutes. Then using a spatula, fold the beaten yolks into the chocolate and set aside.

3. Wash and dry mixer bowl. Add egg whites and whisk on low speed, gradually adding half of the remaining 1/2 cup of sugar. Increase speed to medium, and whisk until whites form soft peaks, 3-4 minutes. Slowly add the rest of the sugar, increase speed to medium-high, and whisk until stiff peaks form, 30 seconds to a minute longer. In three additions, fold the whites into the chocolate-yolk mixture until just combined.

4. Fill baking dishes three-quarters full. Bake until just set and a bit jiggly in the center, 12-14 minutes. Serve immediately. (It’s delicious with vanilla ice cream drizzled with honey.)

Not too hard. We actually cut the recipe in half because we did not think we could eat the dozen mini cakes fast enough, so we only made six. They are so worth the time (and really not a complex recipe at all). I love the congealing that happens with warm chocolate cake-like items with cold vanilla ice cream.

Enjoy!

This shit gets real…

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From time to time I write about money. Saving, spending, splurging, and thinking about the future. My childhood and lack of having many things as a child has created a passion inside of me that forces me to make sure that we never have a moment in our life where we have to wonder if there will be food on the table. Chris and I always try to have a back up plan. A Plan A, B, C…Part of the passion I have for living within our means, and saving for the future means that I stay interested in current personal finance trends and different ways of thinking about what you might need to do now to prepare for retirement.

This recent article from LearnVest shows an interesting infographic depicting what giving up a few things can mean for someone thirty years from now. If you scroll down to the middle of the page you will see an image of a pack of gum, with the description that if you cut back on a $2 pack of gum a week you would have $16,652 more for retirement. A $10 glass of wine on the weekend would be to the tune of $83,260 at retirement. The last one is mind-blowing (Chris are you reading this)? If you cut back $100 of your cable bill per month it would be $832,597 at retirement. It makes you think, right?

Thinking about retirement at 20, 25, 30, 35 and up is a very real and crucial aspect of our life. Often though we are barely paying our bills or student loans in our 20’s to 30’s and so retirement is the last thing on our list. I can imagine that many of us could cut back on paying $100 on cable each month, or get rid of it entirely. There are so many online options for entertainment. Regardless of what “thing” you could cut back (or eliminate) from a material consumption standpoint, the key is really to make a focused effort to think about what and how you are preparing for retirement. Have you thought about it? Will you be able to support yourself when you retire? Long gone are the days when your company supported you after you retire. These days a 401(k), IRA, and other options are the basic ways we kickstart our path towards retirement.

While retirement, saving money, and cutting back is not the most glamorous of topics, in 10, 20, or 30 years you may just realize how much you will need to put away each year for retirement and how much time you have lost. A good reminder that pertaining to money: this shit gets real… fast.

Your full attention

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Lately I have been thinking about the idea of asking another person for their full attention. How many times do you go into someone’s office and they do not give you their undivided attention? They might for a few minutes and then maybe they get distracted by their phone or computer and you wonder, is my meeting important to them? On the flip side, I also wonder if I give everyone my full and undivided attention? Are we all in the end just the same? Someone does not give us their attention and we in turn do that to someone else?

What would it look like if we were direct and transparent with everyone about our attention? What if we confronted others when we were not getting what we deserved? What would that look like? Would it mean that we actually called someone out when they stopped focusing on the conversation, tuned out, or got distracted? I am actually getting excited thinking about it. I would love if someone did that to me and held me accountable for when I was getting distracted. In turn I hope I would do that for others that do it to me.

Are our phones and computers, the emails, texts, and whatever other notifications really more important than the person that sits right in front of us? Sometimes they are. Sometimes emergencies happen or are boss alerts us to an urgent need, but many times we get bored, or clearly are easily distracted. I am not exempt from this — I need to focus on where my attention is just the same. Chris and I were just talking about it last night. There are times where I am doing too many things at once and my nature to multi-task means I might miss things along the way. However, in the same conversation we discussed that he had not given the needs of the conversation his clear attention. What he was thinking might not have been what he actually shared aloud and due to the lack of information there were key details that I needed that never got shared.

Our full attention is important in so many interactions. At the deepest level it shows that we care, and that the other person matters. I would say I do give a lot of my life my full attention, but I can see some clear areas that I could work on. Try it. See where you are not giving your full attention. Put your phone down, quit texting, and leave the emails. Be present for the other person, they deserve it.

Taking risks

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Do we take enough risks in life? We take risks everyday. It might be in a meeting where you have to be courageous and say the tough things to another co-worker. It might be with a spouse or loved one, where you might need to be brutally honest with them about something and you know it is going to be a tough conversation. Most of the times when we open our mouth we take risks, it just might depend on how calculated we are before the risk is obvious to us.

You might take a risk by going on the blind date, or walking into a room with hundreds of people and you only know a few of those people. A risk really depends on what scares you, makes you uncomfortable, or maybe a bit squeamish. It means you might just be outside of your comfort zone.

How often do you take risks? Hopefully more often than not. If we do not take risks, we do not move our lives forward. If we remain comfortable, we rarely grow. That is what life is really about — allowing the risks we take to potentially change us and make our lives better. Yet, we do not know if that will happen if we do not put one foot in front of the other and take a risk.

What would a risk look like to you?