Brian's Reviews > Kinfolk Volume 15: The Entrepreneurs Issue

I don't really have any kind of entrepreneurial spirit at all. And I'm not even talking about a formal business endeavor, either. Even on juvenile efforts like selling hoagies for the band fundraiser every year, my performance was below average at best, so I wasn't sure how much I would find of interest in this issue. And it's true that I didn't find as much as I have in some past issues, such as issue #8, but there was still plenty of interest to me.

"The Psychology of List Making" (no link) really resonated with me, because I have a habit of making lists for everything. I mean, start with my list of books to read here, and then I have TV shows to watch, video games to play, chores to do, groceries to buy, tasks to accomplish for planned events, and on and on. If there's a possibility to keep track of it, I do. And while this runs afoul of Thoreau's advice to keep lists to a thumbnail's size, it certainly does help me to get things done. Or at the very least, to know what I'm putting off until tomorrow.

I don't like coffee at all, but I have been known to like the occasional coffee-flavored treat. I love tiramisu, for example, so when I saw the recipe for chocolate-covered espresso bean brownies my ears perked right up. Desserts, especially chocolate ones, seem to be the place where I can best get the taste of coffee without actually having to taste it, and anything with a 1.25:1:1 ratio of flour to butter to chocolate has to be great. I'm definitely going to have to try these.

I do a lot of creating, mostly in the concept of fictional worldbuilding, and the article about creative constraints is definitely something I've encountered myself. As any writer knows, a blank page is one of the most intimidating things in the world. Even when I come to a page with an idea of what I want to write, it can still be very difficult to find a starting place. I'm always surprised at people who ask writers where they get their ideas, because ideas are easy. I have dozens of them! Most of them are a single-line concept in my head, or maybe a couple paragraphs, and if I had to actually try to expand on them to any great degree it would take an enormous amount of work. As it mentions, generally it's better to try for incremental work. Don't try to come up with the totality of a work at once. Work on a small part and expand from there. Don't try to write the entire novel, write a single scene very well. Start small, and expand. That works for businesses too, even with the focus to be "the Uber of [...]"

I really wish we had Mochi Kitchen in Chicago. There doesn't seem to be any bakeries that make it in the city (though Mitsuwa has some), and while the Midwest Buddhist Temple has a 餅つき event next weekend, that's not going to help for the rest of the year. If I could get fresh mochi to make 善哉 with, and eat it the weekend after the new year the way I did in 千代田...いいな。。。

And now I'm doing that thing I complain about other people doing, so let's move on.

The interview with Carl Honoré was very interesting. I haven't heard of him before and have never read any of his books, but I'm very familiar with the research about how crunch time in software development is actively counterproductive, how much knowledge workers' productivity tops out at around six hours of work per day (or how workers spend a quarter of their day slacking off, if you prefer), and so on. I've turned down several possible promotions before because they'd require me to spend more time at work and I just don't care. I make enough money, my wife makes the rest of the money, and we have enough for our needs. I'm lucky in that I still have a defined work time, though. I have a lot of friends who freelance, and I know there's a huge temptation to think that every moment you're not working is actively stealing money from your future self. And there are people out there who will work insane hours to make that money, so it's all a lovely race to the bottom. Capitalism!

Depave is another company that I wish was located in Chicago. Not just because the winters are already doing a great job of destroying our pavement so their workload would be cut down enormously, but because as an inveterate pedestrian and mass-transit user, every road out there is a obstacle to me that only serves to bar my path. And yes, I know that even if everyone walked everywhere we'd still need roads to ship goods to places so I could eat, but we could do with better mass transit and narrower roads so we could stop destroying the planet. Or "bringing nature into urban environments." That's cool too.

I know I complained a bit about the new format in my review of issue #14, but the bits in here like the interviews show that allowing for a greater variety of article lengths actually leads to a better overall experience. I was worried that I wouldn't like the new Kinfolk, but it seems I don't need to worry. Which is good, because I have three more issues that I need to read.