🥞 The Nouns of October 18, 2024

1. NEW IDEA: Potentially on purpose.

2. NEW QUOTE: Adam Grant thinks you should change your mind.

3. NEW TOOL: The nerds already figured it out.

I’m a flathead screwdriver.

Sometimes, making pancakes makes you rethink your purpose.

My 951 day old daughter is home from preschool with one of the generic-brand stomach bugs that seem to come preinstalled in little immune systems.

Naturally that means this morning is one of Bluey and pancakes.

I make pancakes a lot.

Enough at least to have found a pretty consistent way to get decent, fluffy, golden brown pancakes, in a short amount of time, with limited dishes. They aren’t the BEST pancakes in the world. Obviously. But they are perfectly balanced between easy to make and yummy.

Allow me to pause for a second to outline the right way to make pancakes.

Pancakes

1. Get readily available ‘just add water’ pancake mix. I think Krusteaz is the best for normal-ass pancakes and you can get a giant bag of it at Costco. Yes, I make pancakes from scratch sometimes, but for kids-are-screaming-that-they-want-pancakes pancakes, you can’t beat the mix.

2. Get a non-stick pan. Like REALLY nonstick. I like these from Misen.

3. Get a 4 cup measuring cup, a fork, and a small, THIN spatula. This is far and away the best flipper.

4. Put the pan on the stove on medium heat. DRY. No butter or oil.

5. While the pan heats up, put roughly how much pancake mix you want to make into the measuring cup. Don’t measure anything, just estimate. Yes I see the irony.

6. Stand at the sink and add water, mixing with the fork, a little at a time until you reach the point of pourable but not runny. Don’t beat or over mix, a little lumpy is just fine.

7. Pour your pancake mix directly into the pan to your preferred flack jack diameter.

8. Flip when they are bubbly and brown on the bottom

9. When you run out of mix, put the measuring cup and fork immediately in the sink and rinse them before that shit hardens into glue.

10. Profit.

If you do this right you should have two very easy to clean dishes in the sink and a virtually spotless pan left on the stove.

Zach, why tf are you talking about pancakes?

Because this morning I made them differently.

You see, while my daughter was demanding pancakes, I happened to be drinking my morning protein powder/athletic greens sludge out of a gym rat blender bottle. (Is that cultural appropriation?)

And I had an epiphany.

My sludge is just powder and water.

Pancake mix is just powder and water.

This worked great.

Altogether, about the same amount of dishes, but the blender didn’t drip as much as the measuring cup usually does, and the kid could shake it herself without making a mess.

Again, if you’re a parent, you understand the balance of involving the 2-year-old and still accomplishing the task at hand.

Zach, stop talking about f*cking pancakes. This is email. It’s very important, and you’re wasting my precious business time.

Okay, let’s get there.

I think we get too stuck on finding our ✨purpose✨, and forget to explore our potential.

We ask what are we supposed to do instead of what could we do.

The funny thing is, we’re great at seeing higher potential in tools.

Take the flathead screwdriver. 🪛

How often do you use one to actually drive a screw?

Rarely.

Instead, they are pry bars, paint can openers, and package tape slicers. My grandpa used to keep a giant one in his car door for self defense.

We’ve taken what was once designed to be a tool with a distinct purpose and broken it down to its core elements. It’s long, flat, pointy, heavy, metal, and readily available.

I think the idea that we are born for something, or have some higher purpose is frankly bs.

We are here on Earth for a while, collecting skills, relationships, and interests. Hopefully, we can apply those skills to areas of interest to improve our relationships. But to think that we are on a mission to find a singular purpose is somehow completely uninspiring. To me, at least.

Once, we did have a purpose. Survive long enough to make more humans.

Now, like a flathead screwdriver, our original purpose isn’t quite enough. We’ve elevated beyond our original purpose to a higher state of potential.

I think it’s time we stopped asking ‘what am I supposed to do with my life’ to ‘how can I use the tools I have to make the changes I want to see’.

Are you a blender bottle destined to only make protein shakes? Or are you willing to go for the pancakes?

This one got a little esoteric, but I think you get the point.

I love finding weird uses for things. I’ve dropped another just like the blender bottle pancakes below. Have one to share? Let me know over on LinkedIn → join the conversation

If you need to organize something, look to the nerds.

Between dice, trading card games, action figures, and everything else, there is simply no group more adept at organizing a whole lot of little things in a way that makes them useful.

I was recently watching a video of Ryan Holiday talking about his notation system for books and writing. He uses a simple 5x7 card system to organize quotes, concepts and thoughts to structure his future content and books. Since this email is all about using things for unintended purposes, it’s worth calling out that the organizer boxes he uses are for 5x7 photographs.

I read a ton, and am constantly struggling to find a good system to keep track of my favorite quotes from books and content.

As much as I like a digital system (I use Notion for most things), there is something special about physically sorting through ideas.

The problem is, 5x7 is just too big for me.

I needed something smaller.

Fortunately, as a person who owns tens of thousands of Magic the Gathering cards, I can tell you the nerds already figured this one out. All I needed were the right size cards.

A quick Amazon search for blank playing cards later, I set up a great little desk system to capture quotes and concepts that I want to remember.

They fit perfectly in deck boxes, binders, sleeves and card organizers.

Because the nerds already figured this out.

For a slightly less specific example, my wife and I recently started keeping gift cards that we had floating around in one of these. Now we can actually find them so they get used.