Back in January, I was gifted with a juicer by a UK company that sells washing machines, among other things. Their "Fairy Hobmother" sent it as a gift for commenting on a friend's blog (who knew?). I unpacked it and started using it right away. The marketing genius behind what they did is a topic for a future post (on my other blog). Today, I want to talk about the juicer.
Apparently, there are different kinds of juicers. I had no idea. I first started lusting after one when my friend Judi hosted me at her delicious B&B in Atlanta last Fall. She had a "masticating" juicer. I thought it was pretty cool. But I had no idea there are actually three types of juicers: centrifugal, masticating, and triturating (twin gear). The more I learned about juicers, the more I recognized a parallel to life that I now share with my clients.
Centrifugal juicers are fast, relatively inexpensive, and easy to clean. It's the kind I have. There are dozens of tiny blade points spinning around on a metal mesh basket that shred up the pulp. Centrifugal force squeezes the juice through the mesh and tosses the pulp into a catch-all container. A bit of juice remains in the shredded fruits and veggies and sometimes I'll run them through twice to get about half again as much juice out of them. The juice can be a bit frothy, but it's quick and gets the job done.
Masticating juicers, like Judi's, behave in much the same way as our own teeth: grinding the pulp with a single gear that presses the pulp against a mesh screen and forces the pulp out using the drive mechanism and gravity, versus flinging it centrfugally. The resulting juice is more "juicy", as the pulp has been thoroughly squeezed, and less foamy, since the speed is a bit slower. It takes a little longer than my juicer, both to prepare and clean up, but you don't have to run the pulp through twice.
Finally, twin gear juicers run even slower, crushing the pulp between two gears and expelling the pulp from the juice. The result is a "healthier" juice, because cellular structures aren't damaged the way centrifugal juicers do. There's also less waste, which means more of the juice actually gets into your glass. It's cumbersome, a bit bulkier than the others, and more difficult to clean, but it's so powerful, it can also be used as a food mill (you could make peanut butter, I'm told), so it's a more versatile machine.
Often times, we as creators find ourselves in a bind.
Okay, bind is not the right word. Neither is stuck. It's more like being trapped in a building that's collapsed.
We're gasping for oxygen, battling with ourselves over whether we should scream out for help or conserve what little oxygen we have. (more…)
Seth Godin shared this video in a recent post about his TEDx talk. While it's geared to the transformation of the education system (and specifically, his "what is school for?" manifesto he wrote earlier this year), it has a LOT of juicy tidbits for creative entrepreneurs to get us thinking about art vs. work.
What I love about Seth is his willingness to say what so many of us already fear, but won't say aloud: as a culture, we've been programmed for decades to comply to a system that was broken before, but now is decaying, dying, and actually harming artists. Our children are paying the price now, but those of us working in creative professions (or trying to) are also feeling the crushing blow that's hit us hard.
The artificial "system" we created to manage people and industrialize society left us without useful spaces to create, innovate, and inspire - unless we forcibly (more…)
For years, I thought I was a horrible entrepreneur and an even worse mother.
I knew how to make money, but it always seemed to come at a cost. I either made money, or I spent time with my family, but rarely did I get to do both.
There was a lot of talk about work-life "balance". Trying to get all your competing demands to even out - like the scales of justice or something.
I've mentioned before that work-life balance is a myth - at least in that form. But something still tugs at that emotional string that tells us we can have it all, doesn't it?
It did for me. (more…)
Self-sabotage is a mis-nomer. We don't set out to actually sabotage ourselves. Often, in fact, it's quite the opposite. The thing we've opted to do instead of what we originally planned was supposed to make life easier for us. Unfortunately, things didn't quite turn out that way.
Sometimes there is truly a deep-seated issue, and I'm not a doctor, so I won't pretend to diagnose a serious psychological issue from your ancient past (but my friend Sydney might be able to assist). Most creatives, though, use "self-sabotage" as an excuse to resign themselves to mediocrity. Here are three quick and easy steps to get over yourself fast. (more…)
Building a Noble Empire isn't always easy.
For most of my years as an entrepreneur, I've also been a parent. Handling multiple responsibilities at one time has pretty much been the norm for me from day one. At one point, I was working 40+ hours per week in my day job, attending college full time, and raising my pre-schooler (he's now a teenager). There was very little time for sleep. I remember the morning I was supposed to be up early for a special presentation with all the big wigs at work. That's when my son decided he wanted to re-paint the bathroom - at 3 o'clock in the morning.
I'm still not sure what exactly woke me from my sleep, but I heard a noise in the bathroom, went to check it out, and there was paint pooling on the floor. There was blue paint everywhere. He looked like a smurf. (more…)
I'm learning that many of my best posts come out of a convergence of three moments in my life. This post is no different.
The first is a piece of my long lost past.
When I was a kid, the mother of a very good friend (who nearly committed suicide after his dad died), told me a story - about crawdads in a bucket. They just keep pulling each other back down. If there's only one in the bucket, it's really easy to escape, but when you add just a couple, they sabotage each other's success, in an effort to keep everyone at the same level of "existence."
The lesson I walked away with was the idea that it only takes one or two insidious crawdads to really impede your rise to the top. You have to be very careful about who you let into your bucket. (more…)
"Living in your passion makes it easier to live."
The words came out of her mouth as if it was a truth she had always known. Yet she was saying it in reference to something I had shared with her only five minutes before. During part of the weekend intensive with my coach, each of the participants got five minutes to share "what's up" with them. And well, a LOT is going on with me right now that's pretty freaking awesome.
I just re-launched this website with a kick-ass new design, I've re-launched The PEACE System, and I've got several songs ready for the new album, plus I'm involved in writing/directing/performing a Christmas musical, and I'm doing some other performing as Fall rolls around.
And... my new book is almost done! I'm hard pressed to call it a labor of love. I didn't really labor over it much. The hard part for me was the waiting - the inbetween times when someone else was reviewing/editing/commenting, etc.
Patience may be a virtue, but I don't feel very virtuous exercising it. (more…)
I've had a fairly open calendar today, as I'm prepping for a trip that will take me out of town for five days. The day was pretty calm, but this evening is bustling.
It's almost a whirlwind of activities: reviewing the schoolwork that needs to be done, trusting my husband to feed and care for the kids, and all the last minute "mommy stuff" that has to happen before I can confidently get in the car and make the 12 hour drive to Minnesota.
But what I really want to do is... (more…)
In my conversations about building a noble empire, one of the regular questions I get is "how do you build a noble empire?"
This used to be a difficult question to answer. When we talk about the Five Tenets of a Noble Empire, we know that it takes a community to build an empire. We know that it is built on service, not servitude, and that we need connections to make that happen. But HOW do we get there? Other than letting nature run its course, which admittedly takes time, could there be a faster way to build your noble empire?
According to Sarah Robinson, there is. (more…)