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Chopping Onions

By Brendan O’Meara

Watching “Chopped” several years ago, I remember one young chef talk about his time coming up in the kitchen. He obviously had skill. He was on Chopped.

But I suspect like most prestigious schools and the entitlement that comes with having graduated with what amounts to a worthless piece of paper, there’s a tendency even in the chef ranks to think you’re above a certain task.

Not this guy. I wish I knew his name.

In one of his testimonials, and I’m paraphrasing, he said, “If there was a pile of onions I had to chop, I was going to be the best damn chopper of onions.”

Man, I loved that sentiment. He wasn’t “above” cutting onions. How many thousands of onions had he chopped to that point? This was a job the dishwasher could do in a pinch. Here’s a trained chef being put on onion duty and he embraced it. The mundanity of chopping hundreds of onions in a shift, hunched over a pile, trying to make them as uniform slices and dices as possible, no doubt eyes burning the entire time.

In our work, no matter our experience, our privilege, our education, how can we embrace chopping onions? How can we get lost in the most banal of tasks that have overreaching implications?

He wasn’t really chopping onions. He was become more skilled with his knife. In the meditative trance of cutting onions, he was writing recipes. He was dreaming. He was developing rigor.

Again, he wasn’t really chopping onions. Not the winners, not the people seeking to make change, anyway.

Killing Yourself (Artistically) in Order to Live

By Brendan O’Meara

There’s a certain artistic suicide and artistic murder that takes place when you reach a certain level.

My case study is Metallica, my favorite band, my home team, as I like to say.

Their first four records were very heavy, thrash, genre-defining. They could have ridden that wave for their entire careers and done OK for themselves.

Instead, for their fifth album, they pivot by writing shorter songs, cleaner-sounding songs, still heavy, but you wouldn’t necessarily call them heavy metal anymore.

They committed a kind of artistic suicide in order to live. It was more of a murder suicide, because they knew they’d be killing off much of the audience it took them ten years to build, too.

On Rob Harvilla’s podcast about the songs of the 90s that define us, he had a conversation with the chef David Chang about The Black Album. Here’s a long quote from Chang:

I love growth in artistry. I love the fact that they were able to kill themselves in order to reach a new audience. They knew if they wanted to reach a different level, to push themselves out of their comfort zone. The hardest thing for them to do wasn’t to be more hard core and play it faster. It was how do I make someone that hates heavy metal, love heavy metal. That to me was a wildly difficult challenge and I admire that tremendously. I love when anybody tries to shoot for the moon and it could have really been just terrible. It wasn’t. I love that when you can grow and do something different and I don’t know if they get enough credit for doing that. The Black Album to me is what I always explain to someone who’s becoming a chef for the first time and they’re like getting out of the just trying to be cool phase.
The hard thing isn’t to make five people happy. The hard thing is how do you make as many people as possible simultaneously.
60 Songs That Explain the 90s

And that’s the balance. How much to you scratch your own itch vs. creating art with the empathy of an end user, a listener, a reader in mind?

Again, David Chang says:

The hardest thing is to kill yourself, metaphorically speaking as an artist and you don’t have to, but that’s part of the word I resonate with, how do you tell new stories, when you don’t it hurts like hell. I think we should celebrate more things like the Black Album. I hope we have more of them.
Ibid

What Metallica did was they played to edges at first, way out on the fringe. They went super narrow, and it was only then that they could reel in a bit and become more generalists. It can never be the other way around where you try to appease the masses then get granular. The key to growing any audience is by going way out there, building trust, building true fans because you see them out on the edge, too.

Then you can backpedal into broader reach.

Episode 243: Claire McNear of The Ringer Talks All Things Writing, Jeopardy!, and the Late Great Alex Trebek

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By Brendan OMeara

Claire McNear is a staff writer for The Ringer and the author of Answers in the Form of Questions (Twelve).

“The times that I write best, the times that I’m able to write a lot are the times that I’ve got a fire under me. And that is what happens with a deadline. That is what happens when it’s 10 p.m. and you’ve written like, 150 words that day,” Claire says on the podcast.

Episode 242: ‘How Are You Going to Change the World?’ asks Damon Brown

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By Brendan O’Meara

Damon Brown returns!

Had a great time talking about his new book Build from Now: Know Your Power, See Your Abundance and Change the World.

Damon’s all over the place. He’s talkin’ TED, he’s coaching, he’s almost written thirty books, he’s the primary caretaker of his two young boys, all of that and he’s one of the most generous people I’ve ever met. I think you’ll agree.

Sit Under the Tallest Tree

In a recent conversation I had with the writer, coach, and entrepreneur Damon Brown, we talked about how the muse doesn’t exist. That there’s no substitute for putting the butt in the chair and doing the work.

This is true.

But the muse can exist, but we mustn’t wait for it.

If it shows at all, it’ll be because we were at the right place at the right time doing the work, like a bolt of lightning.

In a sense, we need to anticipate the storm and plant our work station under the tallest tree so that, should the muse strike from the clouds (or does lightning strike up from the ground?), we are there. We are always there because the work is the reward. We write to find the muse. We don’t wait for the muse in order to write.

Also, if there’s a storm, please don’t sit under the tallest tree. This is merely a metaphor.

Episode 241: Carolyn Holbrook and the Indispensable Nature of Writing and Teaching

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By Brendan O’Meara

“I do a lot of encouraging people to journal and to just write it out, sing it out, dance it out, whatever you need to do,” says Carolyn Holbrook, author of Tell Me Your Names and I Will Testify: Essays (University of Minnesota Press).

Running Hills

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By Brendan O’Meara

Most people don’t like running hills.

They see the hill as this massive impediment, this thing that is so hard to climb, to run over.

That’s the mindset of the masses of runners.

What if you saw the hill not as difficult, unbearable obstacle, but as an opportunity.

While everybody else sees the oncoming hill with dread, you speed up, lead, attack that hill with rigor.

You embraced the obstacle that everybody faces, but you did it with energy.

Now tell me. Who is better prepared for the other side of the hill?

Productivity Hangovers

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By Brendan O’Meara

I don’t know about you, but I tend to have really productive Mondays.

I don’t check social media. I’m clearing tasks. From dawn to dusk I’m feeling good. I get my lifts in. I get my 15,000 steps. Check check check.

But then Tuesdays and Wednesdays tend to be a drag and I never feel good. In fact, I feel sluggish and don’t get much of anything done compared to Monday. Then the shame cycle kicks in and I can’t believe how little I’ve gotten done.

What’s the answer?

My guess is two things.

One, social media isn’t much worth the time. When I abstain, I feel better emotionally and I’m more productive and more energized.

Two, doing too much on one day leaves you “sore” for the next day or two. Probably better to spread the tasks over a few days and get more “workouts” in.

Similar to my riff on load management, maybe spreading the workload over more days instead going so hard on one will lead to greater gains over the course of a year.

Something to chew on. What do YOU think?

Take the ‘Me’ Out of Memoir

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By Brendan O’Meara

But what do you mean? A memoir is defined by it being MY story. How can you possibly expect to take myself out of the memoir?

That’s a different question, but here’s what many of the best memoirs have in common: The “me” is a narrator, but the narrator is looking outward while telling her story.

For example, though it is a novel, The Great Gatsby is a perfect example of a memoir that focuses on a scene and a central figure beyond the narrator. A Christmas Story, though grounded in Ralphie’s boyhood takes moments to shine light on his father, his mother, his brother, his peers.

Sarah Einstein’s Mot looks more outward than inward.

Certain navel-gazing memoirs, or memoirs that are so grounded in the interiority of the writer, have become famous and this sets up many writers to think that in order to write memoir, it must be about them at all costs. Me. Me. Me.

In the end, a reader doesn’t care about you. She cares about you as the conduit onto which she can overlay her own experience. If you’ve done your job, you dissolve away and the truth of your story sweeps the reader into her own.

That’s taking the me out of memoir.

Nothing to Say

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By Brendan O’Meara

David Duchovny, the author, actor, musician, recently said about himself when he was young, “I had a way with words with nothing to say.”

There are any number of people who can write a nice sentence, maybe even in the MFA programs where they think beauty or lyricism can carry the day.

Fact is, if you don’t live a life on which to make art, you won’t have anything to say.

And you don’t need trauma in your life to have something to say. Someone recently told me that they were writing an essay and they said it wasn’t going to be personal since there wasn’t any trauma in the piece.

I resisted saying that a piece does not have to be traumatic to be a personal story. In fact, I appreciate the skill it takes to make something seemingly innocuous into a compelling story.

That isn’t to devalue the trauma, but you don’t need to trauma to make things interesting.

The technique will come. All you need is to live a life worth writing about.

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