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In late September I was lucky enough to be able to hear Ferran Adria speak at Google, and also get a copy of his new cookbook. Ferran is one of the most famous chefs in the world; though lesser known in the US/UK since he doesn’t speak English and doesn’t have TV shows. His restaurant (elBulli) was named the best restaurant in the world for four years straight.

What Ferran is really known for is his creativity. He pioneered “molecular gastronomy”, where chefs do absolutely crazy stuff to create new flavors and textures. But unlike other chefs, he did this not just with the food but with the entire restaurant! In order to have the time available to be creative, he shut the restaurant down for half the year. In order to have time to be creative even when they were open, they shut for lunch.

His talk was all about creativity, and was recorded below. It’s pretty slow to watch, since he’s speaking Spanish and everything is translated live. But if you’re interested at all in food, cooking and creativity, he has a thought-provoking perspective on creativity.

https://www.youtube.com/embed/RFQg-UiGJ5s

I sat next to a woman who practices “visual notetaking” and grabbed her notes from the talk from Flickr. (Click image to get to the original) Ferran’s talk is the bottom part of the page, under the dotted line.:

The points from her notes are clear. His definition of creativity is simple: not copying. Some forms of creativity are more simple, such as new ingredients in an omelette. Others are more complex, like re-defining what an omelette can be.

Another key perspective is that creativity depends on production. If you can’t breathe life into your idea (or at least give it a go!), then it’s debatable if you were ever creative at all.

Finally, we all got/bought copies of his newest book, “The Family Meal.” I heartily recommend it. The recipes are what the staff at elBulli restaurant would eat before restaurant service.

There are a few awesome things about this book:

• The recipes are laid out as 31 complete 3-course meals (starter, main, dessert). One month of meals, with a lot of variety amongst them.
• Each meal gives you ingredient portions for 2 people (yay! for couple portions), 6 people, 20 people, or 75 people.
• It’s a picture book; each recipe is on two pages; ~15 photos for each recipe showing what it should look like at each step of preparation
• Each three-course meal has an outline of when you need to start each major step of preparation (2 hours before, 30 minutes before, night before, etc.
• Each three-course meal also has a condensed list of ingredients, and what should be bought fresh, what you should fine in the cupboard, and what you should find in the refrigerator.
• There’s some great advice on different preparation techniques that’s invaluable for home chefs (like me) that don’t have a formal cooking education

Again, I highly recommend his book and the video above; Ferran thinks about creativity on a different level from nearly anyone else.

Ten years ago, I was Engineering Duty Officer on the USS Hartford (SSN-768), in port in Groton, Connecticut. We were due to leave on a six-month deployment, and were doing last-minute maintenance checks. That day was extraordinary; within hours we had closed out all the maintenance and were effectively ready to go. (And security on the base changed incredibly quickly.)

For the rest of the week, we didn’t know if would be sent to sea that day, the next day, or on our originally scheduled date. In the end, we left about a week after 9/11 for our six months at sea.

I have a strange relationship with 9/11 because of all of this. The Hartford left just after 9/11, and we got back to the US it was the end of March, 2002. We got very little news during that period, we missed all of the memorial events, the unity of the country, and the invasion into Afghanistan. (Though we were in the Gulf during the invasion, our boat didn’t directly participate.) By the time we got back, we saw all the flags on the interstate overpasses, the yellow ribbons everywhere, and all of the other signs. The country had moved in and done a lot of healing in those six months, and I hadn’t been involved.

I was fortunate enough not to know anyone that was killed in any of the attacks. And with time, my experiences feel like they’ve gotten closer to everyone else’s. But a six-month hole between my experiences and the country’s collective consciousness is still a strange gulf to bridge.

It always strikes me that the University of Michigan does a great job of promoting more distant famous alumni, but not always the more recent famous alumni. (I was an undergraduate there, so I’m interested in this.)

Advertising / Google

One thing that most people don’t know is that the two largest online advertising companies were both founded by University of Michigan graduates. And not only that, they were both UofM College of Engineering students! Who am I speaking of?

Larry Page — CEO/co-founder, Google

Kevin O’Connor — co-founder/ex-CEO, Doubleclick

And of course, Doubleclick was purchased by Google for ~$3billion back in 2008. I’m curious how much the two of them spoke during/after the negotiations about their common history back in Ann Arbor!

Groupon — a story

I’m not a big fan of Groupon… at all. I signed up in London for a while, but the offers were crap, and it took me ages to get off of all their different lists they had added me to. It’s not the daily deal format I hate; I like Keynoir which is a similar site here in London because they tend to have offers that I actually want to buy.

Another reason I don’t like Groupon is the way they run their business. Despite the fact they’re still not profitable, the founders got massive cash payments last year. So while Groupon was raising close to $1billion to keep the business going (because it wasn’t profitable), the founders were taking hundreds of millions of dollars of the funding investors were giving them. This is just WRONG, even if the investors were greedy enough for a part of Groupon that they didn’t argue. If you haven’t built a business to profitability, you should be able to cash out anything more than a token amount… ever.

I recently learned that one of the founders of Groupon (Eric Lefkofsky) was behind one of the worst student activism campaigns ever at the University of Michigan: trying to adopt a cute, cuddly mascot for the Michigan Wolverine sports teams. Michigan had previously toyed with mascots; back in the 1920’s the University brought a live wolverine in a cage to football games. But since wolverines are actually mean, vicious creatures, that only lasted a year or two.

But in the late 1980’s Eric Lefkofsky was part of a trio of students that came close to adopting “Willy the Wolverine” as a University mascot. Luckily they managed to piss the University off by infringing on official trademarks and doing similar stupid stuff that after they graduated the effort lost momentum. But this was the final nail in the Groupon coffin for me; even if they grow into the biggest company on earth, I’ll never have respect for them.

(If you want to learn more about the Michigan mascot (that rarely existed), check out the Alumni Association story “The Wolverine that wasn’t.”)

Whether or not you like Paul Simon’s music, I think everyone can agree he’s a hugely accomplished musician, songwriter, and performer. I still can’t believe it’s been 25 years since his legendary album “Graceland” was completed.

But what made him a real legend in my eyes was the news about a concert last month in Canada. In between a couple of songs, some people in the audience cried out asking him to play “Duncan”, a song from an album he released in 1972. He agreed to, even though he was throwing his setlist out the window. But then the most amazing thing happened.

A woman right up front yelled out that she had learned to play guitar by playing “Duncan.” Paul Simon motioned for her to come up on stage. The next thing you know, he was not only throwing his setlist out the window, but putting his guitar in her hands! She played the entire song, right up front, on Paul Simon’s guitar. And of course, it was all caught on YouTube:

https://www.youtube.com/embed/AXBlY5CImUU

Paul Simon has to be a true legend and gentleman to stand back and give a completely unknown fan the spotlight. A real heartwarming experience, and I’m just glad it was caught on video so the rest of us could enjoy it, too!

[more on the CBC, which has an interview with Rayna, the woman in the video]