Car Talk was a show on National Public Radio for 35 years. People would call Tom and Ray Magliozzi - Click and Clack, the Tappet Brothers - because their transmission was making a strange noise, their car wouldn't start when it rained, or their mechanic had just told them they needed a $2,000 repair and they wanted to know if he was full of crap. And the brothers would try to figure it out. Sort of. Because it usually didn't take very long before the conversation wandered as far away from the car as they could get. They'd start asking about the caller's spouse. Or their job. Or why they bought the car in the first place. Tom and Ray would eventually get around to trying to solve the problem, and often, neither of them really knew the answer. They would proudly announce that they were proceeding "unencumbered by the thought process." That meant that anything was fair game. What if we tried this? What if we turned that upside down? What if we just hit it with a ...

I learned to cook from my Nana.  And my Mom and D ad, too. They taught me recipes. They taught me technique. "A  little more of this." "A little less of that." " Cook it until it looks right.  You'll know when it's done."  But I learned how to be a chef from Alton Brown.  And no, I don't mean that in any professional sense. Nobody is going to confuse my kitchen with a Michelin-starred restaurant.  Especially Jacob.  We'll get to Jacob a little later. Alton's show  Good Eats wasn't just a cooking show. Sure there were actual recipes. But he  used a unique teaching style - he could take something that was complicated and make you curious about it rather than being intimidated by it.  He didn't talk down to you - he brought you into the process and explained the  science of why things worked the way they did. And once we understood the "why" we could move from memorization to experimentation. Learning to cook by watching ...

I'm currently enrolled in a leadership program, and we were challenged to develop our "leadership brand." I'm a straightforward person. "What you see is what you get."  So I found the task incredibly difficult.  I felt like I was trying to make an infomercial about myself.  It felt fake.  I felt fake. A couple days later, I was driving and my mind started to wander.  I think a lot when I drive.   I thought about who I was - and who I wanted to be - as a person. It finally hit me.  It's not about leadership.  It's about working to become the kind of person you want in your own corner... everything else falls into place from there. So, who would I want in my corner? Someone who would: Think like MacGyver. Teach like Alton Brown. Show up like Alan Shore. If you read that out loud, you might think it sounds crazy.  Hear me out. MacGyver  thinks outside of the box. Alton Brown  teaches the "why" behind things . Alan Shore - a chara...