We don't waste a lot of food I thought one day as some product on the TeeVee was trying to sell plastic bags or preservatives or some other nonsense. We eat everything, I thought, as I resumed cleaning the living room. But there was nagging feeling of doubt in my mind about how much food we really do throw away. Do we throw away pounds of food? Do we throw away what might add up to an entire meal? For May I decided to find out.

May 5: 1 Cup of broccoli. My kids love broccoli and we are very fortunate to have kids that welcome a green vegetable onto their plate but my wife and I don't care very much for it. What happened was that I made more than the kids would eat for dinner and then forgot to serve it to them before it developed that broccoli smell.

In this gap of ten days I took to heart this challenge and ate everything that was close to getting bad. One night my dinner was half a peanut butter sandwich, a small bowl of chips and salsa, rice with cheese.

The course was more plodding than heroic: I did not strive valiantly against doubters but took incremental steps studded with a few intuitive leaps. I was not naturally talented - I didn't sing, dance, or act - though working around that minor detail made me inventive.

From page 3 of Born Standing Up: A Comic's Life.

It strikes me that while Martin was talking about becoming a stand-up comedian this could be anything. Whenever we begin something we rarely if ever see the end. Throughout graduate school I thought for sure I would be teaching more and really enjoying it but I don't. I use very little what I was taught during those two years but rather I use was I built. The skills and experiences.

This is true for being a parent as well. There are no parent of the year awards, no golden tickets. There are no naturally talented parents, we all work around our faults to get better.

I had largely given up on my kit 18-55mm lens for my Canon camera until I quickly cut up an old chewing-gum container to serve as a flash diffuser, now that lens has new life! If you really wanted to enhance it you could 'gel' it up with different color papers which can easily roll into the container.

No diffuser, harsh light.

Diffuser, warm light.

I'm working on a writing project inspired by James Altucher and his idea that we have four bodies to care for; physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual. This framework has made me reflect on my role as a parent and how I've changed emotionally.

When I first had kids I felt emotionally weak. Like a scrawny thirteen year old (which I was) entering a gym full of weights (which I did) and struggling with weights too heavy (which I tried). As a parent I didn't understand what it took emotionally to raise kids and felt bad when I failed. I was an adult, didn't I know what to do? Shouldn't emotional maturity grow as your kid does? That person had no idea what to do.

Then I found my emotional alter-ego. The Cowboy.

The Cowboy sits high in his seasoned saddle, moving cattle from Tulsa to San Antonio. Over the plains he's seen a hundred times, he feels the change in air pressure as he crosses the hills. The dry breeze. His hat and spirit are both firm but not brittle as they ride along with the cattle.

Suddenly, a calf breaks away from the herd. In the past this was trouble for the young cow-hand. This made his heart race and grip tighten. He became worried and started to mentally run through the list of things that could happen to the animal. The calf could break a leg or run off a cliff. It could crash into a wolf den or impale itself on a hidden danger in the sagebrush. The young cowboy would gallop full steam to return the calf.

Full disclosure, I enjoy most of what David and Goliath author Malcolm Gladwell writes. While there have been some critiques of his newest book, this isn't one of them. Most of those reviews stem from the idea that Gladwell plays too fast and loose with the ideas, but this is his strength. He's not an academic, though he uses their tools. Gladwell is like the architect who dreams up the grand buildings and then passes things on to the engineers to see if they can be built.

David and Goliath is the story about how inherent strengths also have inherent weaknesses. My car seats seven people (strength) but it gets poor gas mileage (weakness). Gladwell pivots from obvious examples like this to the angle of looking at the social sciences and cherry picking ideas that fit within this context, like how your school choice might affect your success.

I wrote about the idea of big fish in a little pond at People Smarter Than Me. Gladwell suggests that going to the best school may be a poor choice. For example, most economic professors at elite institutions were once students at elite institutions. John List is one now, but wasn't one as a student. Instead, he got his Ph.D. at the University of Wyoming and taught at the University of Central Florida. Gladwell's suggestion is that being a big fish and spreading your fins helps you grow more than having tasty - intellectual -food to eat. List may have done this well because he was a big fish in a little pond.

Gladwell also shares the idea that maybe 30% of entrepreneurs are dyslexic. His hypothesis is, because this group had so much trouble learning to read, they adapted and built other skills like listening, summarizing, or negotiating. They developed those skills while their peers worked on becoming better readers. When I reading this, I thought about John Saddington's journey and announcement that he's an autist. If our weaknesses force us to build unique strengths, then we can say our successes are driven - in part - by those weaknesses?

There are many examples like these in the book, the personal ones about specific Hollywood executives and lawyers fit better than the larger ideas like the IRA and civil rights movements and the book tends to deflate a bit in the latter third.

My year of reading more books than ever continues to plow along unabated like the winter winds of Ohio. Neither the turning of the pages or falling of the snowflakes can be stopped by mortal forces. Except that the seasons will change and kids will vomit. Other than that my reading can not be stopped.

In all serious though, reading has become habitual this year, if I'm ready to read. That is, when I have a good book queued up on my Kindle or I sit down with a good hardback. I've also taken Stephen King's approach of reading in grocery store lines and parking lots when a spare ten minutes presents itself. My default, hey I've got a few minutes is now to read. And one of those books is about parenting

The full quote from the post title is, "Ninety percent of married couples expect a decline in marital satisfaction after the birth of their first child" and comes from All Joy and No Fun by Jennifer Senior, a book that I drooled over when first seeing it.

This book was it. It looked like the book that would answer all my questions about parenting. It would be a page turning panacea that would help me figure out the maze of parenting. Except that it wasn't.

It turns out that parents expectations are often true. Kids rob you of your sleep, deep hair color, and peace of mind. Senior reports that 80 percent of mothers think they don't have enough friends and 67 percent say they are multitasking most of the time. I can anecdotally support both of those figures.

This is from my morning drive, one my car thermometer said was -18.

I can't only read something. I need to read something and then read it again and then tie it to another idea like a boat moored to a dock. All this happens through taking notes and my notes wind up in Evernote.

Jamie Rubin had another wonderful post about taking notes without marking up books, but his method isn't for me. For one, I have a free account that I don't want to fill up with photos and secondly, I don't like the way photos look. I want a single note with all the ideas from a book in a summary view that I can read easily.

The books I read fall into two camps and I use my notes differently with each. For hard copies, most of the books I'm reading are borrowed copies. I take the Mr. Money Mustache approach of viewing the public library as one we all share and can't mark them up, and I often don't want to, so what do I do.

My method involves paper and pencil. As I read a book, I'll write down ideas and page numbers on paper and then after a bundle of pages are sticking out the end of a book like arrows from a quiver, I'll transcribe them to Evernote. This is not an easy or quick process. It takes time to do this and I'm writing the same notes twice. But this second time is important.

The repetition matters because the more I play with this information, the more often I run through the words mentally, the more I remember them. If I'm reading the words, then writing the words, then typing the words I get exposed to them three times. Once They are in Evernote I also note the page I found them on.

You know what they say about real estate, location, location, location. See what I did there? Clark's suggestion is that the most powerful words should be at the beginning or end of our sentences and paragraphs. In that sentence it's the most important thing, location.

That sentence could read, The most important part of real estate is where you locate. Not the same for sure. Some of the reason is because we've lived with the first location expression for so long it's become familiar, but upon Clark's guidance, I would argue its familiar because of the structure. Clark suggests that the period acts as a stop sign, making you pause on the word before. My Disney princess daughters understand this when they say "Best. Day. Ever."

Cal Newport is another favorite writer of mine. A great example of how blogging with focus helps you develop a writing niche. In So Good They Can't Ignore You he writes.