Sample Post Category: Craft

The bullet journal community has developed genuinely useful systems and I want to be respectful of them, because the discipline they show is real. What I am about to describe is not one of those systems. It is the anti-system: what happens when you accept that you will never keep up an index or a monthly log, and you just write in the notebook chronologically until it is full.

The setup: one A5 hardcover notebook, one fountain pen, dot grid pages. Everything goes in the notebook. Meeting notes, book quotes, to-do lists, phone numbers, birthday-gift ideas, half-formed essays. Each page starts with the date and the location (kitchen table / airport / office). That is the entire organisational scheme.

What this trades off: retrieval. If I want to find something specific I wrote three months ago, I have to flip through the notebook. This is slower than any digital system. What I gain in exchange: I actually keep the notebook. The friction of maintaining an elaborate system is exactly what kills the habit for most people. My anti-system has zero friction. I have filled 14 notebooks this way in four years. They live on a shelf. About once a year I skim through the oldest one and delete pages I would never miss, and the useful ones migrate into a shorter reference notebook. That is the whole workflow.

For most of my adult life I hated cooking on Tuesdays and Wednesdays. Weekends I was fine — I had time, energy, a clear head. But after 10 hours of work I would look at the kitchen, feel the whole weight of chopping and pans and cleanup, and order Chinese. Three or four times a week.

The change: I bought a second Dutch oven. I already had a big Le Creuset for weekend cooking. I bought a small 3-quart from Lodge (they make the good cast iron for a fraction of the price of the fancy French brands) and left it on the stove. Not stored in a cabinet. On the stove, always. That specific piece of visual real estate started doing all the work.

What happens now: I come home, I see the pan, and the first thing I make on a Tuesday is a one-pot meal. Rice and beans, or pasta and greens, or eggs and potatoes. All of them start and end in the same pan. Nothing gets chopped that could be crushed with a fist. Nothing gets pre-heated except the pan. The whole cognitive weight of “what am I making for dinner” got compressed into “what goes in the pan tonight”. It sounds ridiculous. It changed my week.

I started drawing at 30 for a specific reason that had nothing to do with wanting to make art. I had noticed that people who could draw — even badly — described the world in more specific ways than people who could not. They noticed things about faces, buildings, negative space. It was the noticing I wanted, not the drawing itself.

Three years in, I still draw badly by any objective measure. My proportions are off, my hands are terrible, most of what I make would not survive a peer review from a real illustrator. But the noticing has arrived, and it has been worth the whole exercise on its own. When I sit somewhere with my sketchbook out I actually look at what is in front of me — the angle of a person’s shoulders, the specific way a chair leg tapers, the shape of a shadow — in a way that I did not do before I started drawing.

The one rule that has kept me going: I never share what I draw. It is a private practice. That removed the entire pressure to be good, which turns out to be the pressure that had kept me from starting for a decade. The book that helped me most was Betty Edwards’s Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain, which is old and slightly dated and still the best thing on the topic. If you have ever wanted to draw and quietly decided you could not, try that book with the shared-nothing rule. See what happens in three months.

I live in a one-bedroom apartment in Brooklyn. I have made a coffee table, four picture frames, a small bookshelf and two cutting boards in the last three years. I do not own a table saw or a workshop. Apartment woodworking is a specific discipline and I want to make the case for it here, because most articles about woodworking assume a garage that most Americans in cities do not have.

The key move: hand tools only. A Japanese pull saw, a good block plane, a set of chisels, a coping saw, a mallet. No powered anything. Hand tools produce less sawdust, less noise, and force you to work slowly enough that the mistakes stay small. Yes, it takes six times as long as a table saw. That is a feature, not a bug. My coffee table took a month of weekends. I still use it every day and it is more mine than any furniture I have ever bought.

Finishing happens in the bathroom. I put a cheap plastic tarp in the bathtub, wax the piece with a soft cloth, wipe it down. The tub is the biggest flat surface in my apartment and it drains. That is my finishing station. The neighbours have never complained because I run the saw only during the day and there are no loud tools. Woodwork does not need a shop. It needs patience and a specific willingness to buy tools slowly.

I stopped going to the gym in 2020 for the reason everyone did. I did not go back. I bought a pair of Bowflex SelectTech 552 adjustable dumbbells, which go from 5 to 52 pounds each by turning a dial, and I put them in the corner of the living room next to a yoga mat. That is the entire home gym.

What worked about this specific setup, which no online guru told me: the friction of getting to the gym had been higher than I thought. Sixteen minutes of subway plus locker plus small talk before you actually pick anything up. When the equipment is 12 feet from where you drink coffee, the workout starts before you have overthought it. I lift more days per week than I ever did with a gym membership, and I do fewer minutes per session, and I am in better shape than I was at 30.

The catch: two dumbbells cover about 80% of a good strength routine, but not all of it. I miss squats and deadlifts. I compensate with heavier goblet squats and Romanian deadlifts using the dumbbells, and I accept that I will not build the same kind of raw strength as a barbell would give me. What I get in exchange is consistency. Consistency wins on a five-year timeframe. It really does.

You do not need an expensive kitchen knife. You need one specific chef’s knife, kept sharp, and everything else in the block is a distraction. If you buy nothing else, buy a Victorinox Fibrox 8-inch chef’s knife. It is $60. It is used in professional kitchens all over America because it is unpretentious, holds an edge, comfortable in most hands, and if you drop it and chip the tip you have not ruined your month.

The next knife to add, only after you have used the chef’s knife for a year: a small paring knife for peeling and detail work. The next knife to add after that: a serrated bread knife. That is a complete set. You will not need more.

The important thing that fancy knives cannot fix: you need to sharpen it. A whetstone once a year, or a honing rod every couple of weeks. A dull expensive knife is more dangerous and less useful than a sharp cheap one. Beginners always overbuy on the knife and underbuy on the sharpening habit. Reverse that ratio. The $60 knife plus $30 of maintenance kit is a better cook than the $300 knife left to rot.

The received wisdom is that adults cannot learn music like children, that the window closes at 12, that the best you can do at 32 is play a few chords passably. This is broadly wrong, and specifically wrong in a way that says more about how children are taught than about neuroscience.

Children learn slowly because they cannot yet articulate what they need to learn, and because their teachers cannot ask them questions. Adults can. In two years I have progressed further than most childhood-lessons adults I know, and the reason is I can tell my teacher exactly what I do not understand and she can address it directly. There is no ego-management, no gold-star hunting, no parental disappointment in the picture. Just weekly practice and slow, real improvement.

What surprises me is not the improvement. It is the feeling. Adult beginners are frequently promised that learning music “grows your brain,” which is true and boring. What nobody told me is that at 32 you can experience the specific joy of being genuinely bad at something, which is a feeling you lose access to somewhere in your twenties. Being a beginner is a state I had not visited in a long time, and it turns out I missed it more than I knew.

The cycle is: I get obsessed for six months, I buy too much gear, I plateau, I get sick of the gear, I quit, I sell the gear, six to eighteen months pass, and then I see one specific photo somewhere — usually taken by someone who is worse than I was — and I feel envious, and I buy a used camera on eBay, and I am back.

This has happened four times. I used to feel bad about it — the abandonment felt like a character flaw. What I have come to accept is that it is not one long project with breaks; it is four separate projects with the same medium. Every return I bring a slightly different attention. In my twenties I chased sharp landscapes. In my late twenties I got interested in street. In my early thirties I switched to film, entirely. This time (the fourth) I only shoot people I know.

The pattern probably applies to more than one thing. Some interests are meant to be intermittent. Not everything you love needs to be a continuous practice. Some things are seasonal for a lifetime, and each return you visit a slightly different version of yourself with the same tool. That is fine. The gear can be re-bought. The half-year at the beginning of each return is not lost time. It is the entrance fee.

The bet was about football and I lost badly. The cost was a homemade loaf, delivered to the winner every Sunday, for a month. I did not know how to make bread. I bought a starter, followed the Chad Robertson recipe from Tartine, and produced four loaves that were technically bread and nutritionally bricks.

Then something happened that I did not expect: I got interested in the failure. Why were my loaves dense? Why did the crust look right and the interior look wrong? What was I doing that the video I was watching did not tell me? I started keeping a small notebook next to the oven with hydration percentages and fermentation times. I ran experiments. I discovered that the flour I was buying was too soft. I switched. Loaves 8 and 9 were suddenly bread.

Two years later I make one or two loaves a week. I do not photograph them. I do not have a bread Instagram. It is the one thing I do in my kitchen that I would call practice, not performance. And the failure at the start was the whole point — if the first loaves had been good I would have stopped. Because they were bad and I could see why, I kept going.

Every meaningful thought I have had at work in the last three years was first written down in a Muji A5 notebook with a Kaweco fountain pen. Not in Obsidian. Not in Notion. Not in a Google Doc. On paper. And I write software professionally, so this is not the flex of a person who avoids screens for a living. It is the compensation of a person who spends 10 hours a day looking at them.

The digital tools are excellent at storage and retrieval. They are terrible at thinking. What thinking wants is friction — a slow input speed, a limited character set, a page that cannot be undone, a shape that cannot be reorganised without effort. All of these are properties of paper and all of them are actively resisted by digital tools.

The workflow: I think on paper, then I transcribe the useful bits into digital when I need to share them or store them long-term. The transcription is doing work — it is a second pass, an editing step, a chance to notice which thoughts were actually good. About 40% of what I write in the notebook never makes it to the computer. That is by design. That is where the notebook is doing its job.