Cake and Cumin

I just have to keep looking at this… at least once per day! Should be the prescription for every entrepreneur.

A few days ago I posted a Bill Cosby quote that said “Decide that you want it more than you are afraid of it”. I thought, since I haven’t done a 6 list in a little while, that I would do one on starting something new which can be both exciting and invigorating but also challenging and a bit terrifying.

1. All the fun, inspiring quotes actually become motivational instead of cliché
2. You get to think about a whole new set of challenges and solutions
3. You realize that you can do something completely new and different
4. You enjoy failure and know that every time you fail, it will lead you to a better result
5. You learn and learn and learn some more
6. You meet new people. Whenever you are starting something new there are always new people to meet at events, happy hours, meetups, and other places.

Some of you may have noticed that recently blog posts have been a little further apart than in the past. Well, there’s a reason… I’ve been working on a new idea, a company called Neighborsations. When day when cooking, I realized that the only neighbor I know (and can therefore feed often) is my downstairs neighbor… 1 out of probably 15 people in my building. I thought about that for a little while and tried to figure out why that was the case and finally, I stumbled upon the answer… he and I are both Michigan fans (Go Blue!) and we learned that one of the first times we met. Because we knew we had something in common, we had something to talk about and gradually became friends. Neighborsations exists to enable that to happen more often. The company connects neighbors based on common interests to enable more meaningful offline interactions. As most people working on new ideas (either inside or outside of an existing company) can tell you, the process is both exciting and terrifying. However, even when I have days where I’m not sure what to do next, the 6 things listed above still excite me about starting something new. Please sign up at www.neighborsations.com and like us on Facebook and follow us on twitter… and obviously, let others know about it as well.

An exciting announcement for me! I have officially created a space to work on Neighborsations. Check out the website here to learn more!

The Back of the Napkin: Solving problems and selling ideas with pictures by Dan Roam

Anyone who has been in my office knows that I am a visual thinker. I have 2 whiteboards and over a dozen large white pieces of paper with post-it notes all over them. OK, to be really honest, this book was not as useful or fun as I thought it would be but it was a good read that provides a different perspective for thinking out problems and finding solutions.

An interesting box this week… spring onions, garlic scapes, raspberries, basil, potatoes, beets, cabbage, rhubarb, and romaine.

To be honest, I haven’t thought through the plan fully yet but last night we made tofu stir fry with a few of the garlic scapes and spring onions coupled with the asparagus from last week.

The raspberries were literally eaten before I could even come up with an idea for what to do with them.

The rhubarb will be turned into strawberry rhubarb crisp.

I think with the potatoes, we’ll do mashed potatoes with spring onion, garlic scapes (the remainder of them) and maybe some of the basil as well which was a suggestion from Eric Smucker from Smucker Farms and use them in some vege burgers.

We’ll use the romaine for salad greens (although I also may try to do lettuce wraps to mix it up a bit).

Finally, the cabbage… I’m not very well-versed in cabbage recipes but I think I’m going to attempt some sort of slaw to go along-side some spring vege burgers that will be attempted this week.