Category Archives: leadership

Feed Your Starter!

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NaBloPoMo 2021:  Do Good, Kid

Friends, this is SO exciting, I’m growing a successful sourdough starter!! 

I scoffed at the pandemic sourdough craze for two reasons:  1. I hate fads, and 2. I hate labor intensive cooking.  Then this summer I binged Michael Pollan’s works, and got inspired to make bread from the “Air” episode of his Netflix docuseries Cooked, based on his book of the same title.  He made bread making, such an intimidating undertaking, feel accessible and rewarding.  I started experimenting, throwing together flour, water or soymilk, lots of baking powder, and then whatever else moved me.  Early attempts included coriander muffins, ginger-maple-buckwheat pan bread, cornbread, and pumpkin loaf.  No yeast and slack measurements resulted in varying levels of rise and density, and overall happily edible success (mostly)!

I started thinking maybe a sourdough starter would be a fun, next-level project.  It’s only flour and water, so failure would at least be inexpensive, and success could open up a whole new world of home cooking!  Wouldn’t it be awesome to make something of us, our family, including the microbes that inhabit our house, namely those under the kitchen sink?  And then have that something feed us and others, perhaps for years or even generations?

Ta-daaaah, I’m so happy to report that as of Day 7, it’s alive!  Sven, as Daughter named it, reliably doubles in volume between twice daily feedings, and emanates a sweet, fruity fragrance.  Scooping out a portion every day to ‘discard’ (save in fridge), then mixing in more flour and water, is a messy proposition (I really dislike messy).  But it makes me so happy to see it growing and thriving–giving. 

This week, in a flash of cosmic inspiration, I apprehended a greater meaning for ‘Feed Your Starter’ as a life action mantra!  Sourdough starter is a natural leaven—something that makes dough rise.  Oxford Languages also defines leaven (n.) as “a pervasive influence that modifies something or transforms it for the better.”  A simple internet search of ‘sourdough recipes’ yields pages and pages of baked foods that this humble slurry of flour, water, and microorganisms transforms, into foods transcendent to just flour and water alone.  Sourdough bakers, I’m learning, are an ardent and dedicated tribe, always seeking the perfect crumb or ear.  They are passionate.

Sometimes people ask, “What really gets your motor running?” or, “What gets you up in the morning?”  In other words, what starts you?  What boosts you, helps you rise, gives your life more complexity, aroma, flavor, and texture?  And how do you keep it, this starter of yours, alive?  What’s your feeding schedule and routine?

Starters are such great metaphors!  Let’s say it’s your WHY.  It is unique to you, its creator; a product of everything about you.  You tend it, nurture it, protect it.  Feed it often and well, give it a hospitable environment, and it grows—bigger, faster, stronger.   If life gets such that you need to cool the growth, shelve it for a while, it’s okay with that, too.  It can happily relax in the back of your fridge for months until you take it out again. Then, when you’re ready, a little time and attention reawakens the bubbly fervor as if nothing happened.  It can endure for generations, inspiring people you may never meet to keep making delicious, beautiful things for all to enjoy, that benefit all.

A sourdough starter can activate and enhance so much more than a loaf of bread—just as your WHY can inform, inspire, and elevate any number of Hows and Whats in your life and others’. 

And you can share it! In this way, it resembles Simon Sinek’s idea of the Just Cause. One of the five criteria to have a just cause is inclusiveness—everybody can participate. Whenever you feed your starter, you take a portion off. You can throw it away (it’s actually called the ‘discard’) or use it; books of sourdough cooking include myriad ‘discard recipes’. But how much better to give it away? Invite someone else to join in this beautifully messy and loving labor of making something? They can take it home—feed it, nuture it, protect it, grow it—make it their own. And now you’re connected.

I think that’s why I’m so excited about my starter.  To me it represents abundance, growth, progress, and connection.  The thing I love most is that in another week or so, I can confidently give some to my mom and my sisters, and we’ll all share something really special, something that brings us close in yet another way.  I’ll make things with it to share with my friends, and if they wish to adopt their own descendant, I will be more than happy to oblige.  So I’ll keep feeding Sven joyfully, just in case.

Choose Your Cohorts Wisely

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Who do you want in your boat out at sea?

NaBloPoMo 2021:  Do Good, Kid

Who are or have been the most influential people in your life?  Did you choose them for that purpose, or did they just happen to you?

Looking back on clinical rotations throughout medical school and residency, I still smile or shudder.  We had fun and learned eagerly on my general pediatrics team, when the attending regularly took us outside for teaching rounds.  On another rotation, we missed teaching conferences for hospital rounds all month, and every day was moral drudgery.  The culture, explicit and implicit, of any group, large or small, determines the bulk of the experiences among the people in it.

We do not choose our families of origin, nor our acquaintances of proximity early in life.  In adolescence, forces beyond our comprehension push us in and out of social groups, often at high mental and emotional cost.  If we are lucky, we find and can stick with people who stimulate us, challenge us to think and learn, and help us discover our best selves.  Who did you have growing up who did this for you?

At some point as adults, we need to take responsibility for our social contacts.  If I hang out with people who overeat and overdrink when I really want to lose weight and get healthy, I need to ask myself some important questions. It’s not that they intend to sabotage my efforts at self-care.  They are who they are and do what they do for their own reasons.  But I cannot underestimate their influence on me when I’m with them.  The human need for acceptance and belonging is primal, and manifests primarily in group norms.  No matter our fervent intentions and strong core values, given enough time and exposure, we are all at risk for succumbing to the pressures of conformity.  So when we have an opportunity to select our tribal membership(s), such as for work, it’s better to be clear about what kind of culture we value, and whether our choices align with that standard.

The older I get, the less energy I have to waste. How will I spend this precious resource—my time and attention? What value can I bring to my relationships, and how will they feed me in return? Straight up social reciprocity is a natural human trait, but I’m aiming higher. I want to be my best self and make a meaningful contribution, and I seek others who want the same. Once we find each other and recognize that shared, greater goal—that higher ethos—our mutual return on investment in relationship becomes synergistic and exponential, and benefits more than just ourselves. We are better, together, for society at large.

Focus, goals, and personalities evolve over a lifetime.  Mutually enriching relationships in a previous life phase may wane in significance over time.  Or we may grow closer with age, flourishing in parallel rather than divergence.  I think either is okay, if it’s done with awareness, intention, and grace.  Cultivating meaningful relationships is a lifelong practice in these three skills.  If we find and run with others committed to this lifelong training, then we may all realize the fruits of its mastery–or at least of progress–faster, and hopefully with a little less suffering and a lot more fulfillment.

Judge Judiciously

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NaBloPoMo 2021:  Do Good, Kid

The person who cuts you off in traffic is not (necessarily) an a**hole; nor is the person who voted for the other candidate (necessarily) stupid, evil, or out to destroy the country.  These are judgments we make, knowing nothing else about people, driven too often by a toxic cocktail of negative emotion and prejudice.  I wrote a few days ago about resisting early closure and asking more and better questions, in order to come to better conclusions—to make better judgments.

What good does it do us to judge quickly?  It feels decisive and righteous, for one thing.  It can make our decisions easier and faster when we don’t stop and question our assumptions and biases, or examine the influence of our own emotional baggage.  We get to dwell in the comfortable, if somewhat distorted, status quo of our own worldview, perhaps oblivious to the unintended impact of all that we ignore and dismiss.  This works for a while, maybe.

But we’ve probably all experienced that humbling moment when we realize how a snap judgment led us seriously astray.  What did it cost us?  Perhaps we lost a great job opportunity, or damaged a relationship that we care about.  Did we ruin a negotiation?  Maybe we lost someone’s trust, which we may never fully earn back. 

I’m not saying we should never make judgments.  Decisions must be made, after all.  Hiring, firing, mergers and acquisitions, voting, marriage—all human relationships and collaborations require us to dance, sometimes in elaborate steps of give and take, call and response, and iterative, reciprocal disclosures and choices. I think drawing premature, oversimplified conclusions closes more doors than it opens, especially in our minds.

So when is judgment required and important?  What makes judgment ‘good’?  I think it’s when our core values are at stake and at play.  I witness someone lying because telling the truth is costly or painful.  I know that another person says they believe one thing, and yet their actions speak differently, for whatever reason(s).  Does a given decision before me align with my core values of honesty, integrity, fairness, inclusion, kindness, and generosity?  If not, I can judge the action, and not necessarily the person who makes it, as dishonest, lacking integrity, unfair, exclusionary, unkind, or selfish.  If I make a judgment, I should be willing to defend it with conviction.  In my mind that means employing both evidence and sound reason, not just escalating emotions—unless, of course, I am aware that my judgment comes from exactly the latter.

This is an all too human foible that we would all do well to recognize.  When we see someone judging suddenly and severely, we can ask, ‘What core value, belief, or identity do they feel being violated here?’  This type of judgment can rarely be reasoned away with evidence to its contrary.  Read The Culture Puzzle by Moussa, Newberry, and Urban, Why We’re Polarized by Ezra Klein, and The Power of Us by Van Bavel and Packer, to see how our various strongly held identities trigger intense emotional hijack when we feel them to be threatened.  Under such conditions we slide into tribalist survival mode, aggressively attacking our perceived attacker, elephants loose, operating in fixed rationalization the whole way. 

If we can take a few deep breaths and withhold our own judgment for a moment, exercise some curiosity, empathy, and compassion, and not take their words and attitude personally (especially if they are judging and attacking us), perhaps we could see them as a fellow human, get a glimpse of what really matters to them, and appreciate why they’re so riled up. Maybe we could even learn something new. We can de-escalate. And once we do that, we can render wholly unnecessary our need to judge in return. How liberating.