Tag: here read this

Here’s a piece from The Ringer’s Katie Baker about a Facebook group called “Rootitoot Instant Pot Recipes & Help,” started by a 63-year-old Canadian woman named Ruth McCusker, about the Instant Pot — a group that, in two years, grew to more than 92,000 members. As Baker explains:

For as influential as Rootitoot is, though, what always differentiated McCusker most was that she was no influencer. Besides her books, she didn’t hawk merch. She didn’t seek engagement on Twitter. There were no YouTube tutorials with her face on them, or Alison Roman–style hashtagged viral recipes and Instagram story Q&As. I have thousands of friends on Facebook and exactly zero of them follow Rootitoot, which practically seems like it would be an algorithmic impossibility. But I love it that way: It has the effect of making this group feel like my important little secret, like all the ones I once got to have on the increasingly distant internet of my youth, the one that enabled me to indulge in weird enthusiasms (DMB, hockey) with like-minded users without my friends and coworkers getting notifications about my dorky activity.

The whole thing is a fantastic tribute to a woman who started an amazing community online. Read the piece here.

I got the question for the hundredth time the other day: Why would you leave The New Yorker now?

And what I keep saying: Right now, I have an opportunity to help a larger community — news organizations, non-profits, brands — with email. The moment exists right now for me to help, and I don’t know how long this moment will last. So if I want to help, I need to do it right now.

I was thinking of that while reading the story of JamesOn Curry, a former basketball player whose NBA career lasted all of 3.9 seconds. He was a high school star, a college star, and dominated the NBA’s minor leagues, but his actual NBA career never took off. His is a Moonlight Graham story — the athlete who made it the big leagues, but never got more than that one chance. It’s a reminder: Enjoy the moment. You never know when that might be the only one.

Read Curry’s story, “Gone in 3.9 seconds,” here on ESPN.com.

The Washington Post profiled eight women who’ve done amazing things in their careers after age 50, and it’s a story absolutely worth reading:

When women turn 50, the world starts to tune them out. Employers see them as less valuable and are more likely to discriminate against them, according to research. Hollywood disproportionately portrays them as unattractive, unfriendly and stupid. Many women describe a sense of invisibility.

But something else happens as women leave their 40s behind. “[For] everyone I know around my age, there’s this major energy shift in being able to ask the question: Well, what do I want now?” writer and cultural critic Heather Havrilesky, 49, told The Washington Post. “Without feeling totally cowed by what you should want, what seems selfish.” The world may tend to forget older women, but they feel freer than ever.

For American women in middle age and later, that might mean returning to ambitions set aside years ago to raise a family or follow a spouse’s career. It might mean finding ambitions they never had before or reaping long-overdue success. “Our culture tells us a story that we’ll lose and lose and lose as we get older,” says Havrilesky. “And it’s not true.”

Read the entire piece here — it’s a great reminder that it’s never too late to chase that big dream.

I loved this post from First Round Review highlighting six pieces of career wisdom — aimed mostly at new grads, but useful for anyone in their career. Their six pieces of advice are:

1.) Picture your career as a painting, not a ladder.

2.) Nurture your rookie spirit. It will serve you for your entire career.

3.) When you make tenacity a part of your identity, it can help you tune out the naysayers.

4.) Before you reach out to a potential mentor, be specific about what you want out of mentorship.

5.) Take ownership of your career by proactively managing your manager.

6.) You’re allowed to quit when you’re unhappy. But make sure you’re not quitting because you’re impatient.

Take a few minutes and read the whole post here.

I’ve written before that no matter where you are in your career, you’re not behind. Here’s another perspective on that idea, from author and former Forbes publisher Rich Karlgaard:

How we evaluate young people places needless emotional burdens on families and has helped to spur an epidemic of anxiety and depression among teens and young adults. The effort to forge young people into wunderkinds is making them fragile and filling them with self-doubt: It suggests that if you haven’t become famous, reinvented an industry or banked seven figures while you’re still in you’re twenties, you’ve somehow off track. But the basic premise is wrong: Early blooming is not a requirement for lifelong accomplishment and fulfillment.

Read the whole essay here.

Ever since “Moneyball,” baseball’s gotten smarter about statistics. And I loved this story about how one pitcher on the New York Yankees is using stats to improve his performance:

James Paxton is a starting pitcher for the Yankees, not a statistics innovator. But during the 2018 season with the Seattle Mariners, before his off-season trade to New York, he found a novel way to measure his efficiency and aggressiveness on the mound.

Paxton, 30, asked the Mariners’ analytics department to give him a printout of a statistic he was tracking himself: the percentage of at-bats that, after three pitches, were either in a 1-2 count or already completed. He named the statistic A3P— After 3 Pitches — and monitors it often, rather than relying on more conventional statistics such as earned run average or wins and losses.

During a recent spring training meeting, Yankees coaches stressed the need to be aggressive. Paxton takes this to heart: He is among the best in baseball at throwing strikes. In addition to his A3P statistic, Paxton checks on the percentage of first pitches in each plate appearance that were strikes. His goal is to reach at least 70 percent; he was at 66 percent last season, according to Baseball-Reference.com.

“By thinking about this often, and if I can do it consistently, I’m putting myself in a good spot to have success,” he said.

This is fantastic. By giving Paxton the bigger picture — the team wants you to be more aggressive in the way you pitch — and then the stats to match it, they’re putting him in a position to succeed in 2019. And here’s the most important thing: These are stats that he can act on. If he sees his numbers dropping for A3P or first pitch strikes, he’ll know what he needs to do to improve his numbers. (Data that leads to specific action is the best kind of data.)

Read the entire piece here.

I’ve written before about the power of thank you notes. Here’s a survey that suggests that they really do have an impact:

There is one old-time tradition that seems to be holding on: the thank-you note.

To some it may seem laughably archaic to hand-write a note, drop it in snail mail and hope the recipient gets it a few days later. One study by staffing firm Accountemps found that only 24 percent of job applicants bother to send thank-you notes these days.

But here is the rub: 80 percent of human resources managers surveyed felt those messages were useful in evaluating potential hires.

Read the whole story here.