Building excellent small restaurants in towns that need them. If in your town, someone opened a restaurant that served ONLY spicy chicken wings and cheeseburgers, would that pique your interest?

What if they made the most delicious wings and cheeseburgers that you have ever tasted? What if they focused on the smallest little tweaks to continue to make those two products better and better and better?

I proposed this question to someone yesterday and they took it even farther. What would that do for the restaurant? Think about the relationship that you could build with sellers of chicken and beef. Think about inventory control. Think about the freedom of having that discipline. You would be saying to your neighborhood, “we made this for you. If you want something else, you should go somewhere else. But for people who care about chicken wings and cheeseburgers (people like us) and quality and hospitality, this is your spot.

Is anyone talking about the downside to hydration?

Do you know how inconvenient it can be to be hydrated? Let’s say I start my day with coach’s recommended dose of water, lemon, and salt and I chase that with coffee.

I have now guaranteed that I will need to be near a restroom for the next few hours. Long car ride will now be many connected short car rides.

If I am walking around the city between meetings, I will have to duck into a starbucks to pee. Plus I have to go to the counter to get the code. If I am less hydrated I can go hours without using the men’s room. I can stay locked on a task.

Maybe some planning would be more beneficial. If I know I will be in a place where it will be inconvenient to be hydrated, maybe scale it back for that day. This feels stupid typing this out, but I want to build the writing habit. My apologies.

What is the recipe for blue cheese dressing at an immigrant run sub shop? I can’t seem to get anything off the shelf that gets me anywhere near the experience.

Wisconsin Style from Kens was an improvement over the standard stuff, but still not there. I have an odd feeling that I will be let down by the recipe, so don’t actually tell me.

If you walk into an empty men’s room, how do you pick a stand-up?

For me, it is 2 things.

1. How much piss is on the floor that I have to stand in?
2. How many pubic hairs do I have to look at and endure for the duration of my visit.

This changes at a sporting event or airport. These are some of the things I notice.

Picked this up on Audible over the weekend and have started to listen. If you haven’t read The War of Art yet, that’s great also. His ideas of amateur vs. professional and “the resistance” are well worth spending some time examining.

His work resonates with me because I feel like an amateur masquerading as a professional. I have big plans to make a splash in the professional ranks in the short term. Stay tuned.

Famous book by Seth Godin. I find that it lends itself well to Audible on the road. I did a similar listen to Zero to One by Peter Thiel.

If you click the chapters button, you can bounce around and mix and match sections. Doesn’t work well for fiction or anything that needs to be read from start to finish.

I have found that I am getting deeper into books that I may have quit sooner. Instead of running out of gas during the time when you say “ok, I get it, do I really need to go further,” you can jump ahead of the part that has you bogged down and keep moving. There are probable gems in there that you would have otherwise missed.

This is a rollercoaster. Highs and lows everyday. One second you feel like you just fell into the next billion dollar idea and later on, you feel like what you are working on is worthless. Rinse and repeat.

These are potential names for the new venture that we are staring. Do any of these grab you? Maybe with some context…a story…

I started a company a few years ago, and we have gained some traction. We are a professional group and have raised a couple of small rounds. We have been working out of a WeWork space since our inception. We think it is time to “graduate” into a proper space of our own. Since we are still a smaller team, we do not have a facilities or HR person who owns this process. As CEO, this is my job.

Once we settle on a building and a space that suits our needs for the next 3-5 years, what happens next? The space is outdated and we want to start fresh. The space will need to be demo’d and rebuilt from the studs. I know very little about building and do not have time to be running a construction project. My choices?

I can devote a large portion of my day to day to making sure this project hits our budget and we get in on time. This is an important step in our history. It is important that the new space serves us well. How will this impact our current business? Are we set up in a way that I can step out of the business for 12 weeks? What’s the alternative?

We can engage Blacksmith. Their tools allow us to select from a library of optimized designs. They have done the work to understand best practices in office design and have listened to how we intend to use the space. I can select designs from their menu and know what they will cost and how long they will take to install. Then…I can step aside and go back to work. The design gets done in a fraction of the time and the next person in the chain (the Construction Manager) picks up a stack of documents that they can build from.

Which sounds better?

It’s funny how late to the party you can be when there is so much noise available, good and bad.

Gimlet Media shows

• Startup (early eps from their first few shows)
• Reply All (well done storytelling. great for passing the time in the car)
• Pitch (just started this one. Stay tuned)

The usuals

• Spittin Chics
• Meateater
• The Moment

I took 8 full weeks off from chugging booze and smoking pot. My drinking had a peculiar pattern over the last year or two. I had been having a glass of wine on 2 week nights and then 8-10 drinks scattered over a weekend. On weekend trips, the one that comes to mind is a Nashville trip, I would have about 15 drinks a day for 3 straight days. That trip prompted a break.

On the pot front, I have bouts of very casual use. 2 nights a week, I would have 2 tokes from a joint and watch TV for 30 minutes and then stand in front of the fridge in the dark and combine odd foods and eat until I was ill.

This past weekend, I went on a journey north. I had 2 beers at a group dinner, and three beers at the mountain. Normally, I would drink all day and night on a weekend like that just hanging by the fire.

What’s happened? I don’t miss drinking. Once in a while (home improvement projects, particularly stressful work week) I do crave a drink, but I passed. I have not been hungover in a few months, which is lovely. It also seems like I can more fully enjoy things. Maybe there are a couple fewer laughs without the lubricant, but time seems to slow down a bit, there are no gaps in memory, and I wake up with a clear head.