Blog | The Work of Jarrett Fuller

My friend Sarah Handelman publishes an interesting zine called Not French Cooking. In her words, Not French Cooking is:

[A] zine published by Sarah Handelman that explores relationships with and through food. Inspired by Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking, the series addresses ideas surrounding health, nourishment and culinary-based relationships. Each themed issue explores and shares many diverse experiences with cuisine. Everyone is welcome at the table.

In celebration of the holidays, Sarah put together a special issue called Serving Forth which centers around the idea of gift-giving (a favorite subject of mine) and I was fortunate enough to be asked to contribute an essay. The idea behind the issue is that each contributor would submit a recipe that would be “given” to someone else. Once the issue is assembled, each contributor has a full cookbook to give to that loved-one.

I wrote a little piece about drinking whiskey sours with my college roommates that turned into a metaphor for craving deeper relationships. Here’s a part of it:

The table brings people together. There is an open chair pulled out for you to sit and take a break from the world you carry on your shoulders. Share a meal, split a drink, break some bread. Share your life with those around you. Share your joys and your sorrows. The world is falling apart faster than we can fix it. Maybe if we all gather around the table together, the world won’t feel so heavy.

I wrote it in honor of good friends but feel like it was actually a gift to myself. It feels like something I needed to write. We have friends on Facebook, followers on Twitter, and contacts on Google+, but these things don’t make me feel any less alone. We need deeper, more meaningful relationships in our lives. Some of my happiest moments were spent with good friends, good conversations, and good drinks. This essay is about that.

So, thanks to Sarah for asking me to participate and I hope you go read my entire piece and check out the entire issue (even if it’s just to try the amazing digital unwrapping). There are some great holiday recipes.

Seth Godin:

You can’t be merry by yourself.

Sure, you can be content, happy, possibly even delirious. But merriment requires a group, and that group is almost always a group you can see and touch, one that’s sharing the same molecules of air, face to face.

The digital revolution continues to get deeper, wider and more important. But it has made no progress at all at increasing merriment. That’s up to us.

Merry Christmas, everyone. I’m disconnecting for a few days to spend time with the people I love. I wish the same for you and hope you find merriment this season.

I absolutely devoured this profile of Teller (of Penn and Teller fame) from 2008 that John Gruber posted on Daring Fireball earlier this week. There is so much to glean about craftsmanship, the creative process, collaboration, and respecting your audience—just the things I think about most!

The profile centers around Teller’s exploration of a 100 year old trick called involving a simple red ball and they actually reveal how it’s done, yet still surprise people. I love how hard and how long Teller worked to perfect it; he’ll spend hours on an empty stage after a show getting it just right. He says:

When the theater is empty I like to go out on stage. It’s lonely and beautiful. I look at your empty seat and think about you being in it. … Then I practice. I often practice stuff you’ll never see. For the past few weeks I’ve been working on a hundred-year-old trick called the David P. Abbott Ball. It is a very, very hard trick, almost like juggling. I put in an hour almost every day. I try to get the tricky moves so deeply into my muscles and brain that I can forget I’m doing a trick. Soon I’ll know whether the ideas I have for this trick are possible. But I won’t know that till I learn all the moves and invent my own. If the trick doesn’t work out, you’ll never see it, and I won’t be sad. I had fun every second I was working. I love the stuff you never see.

This obsession with his craft makes it obvious how he became one of the masters in the field, yet he is never satisfied and is always thinking about how to improve, perfect, and add to:

[R]ather such total dedication to craft and art in a Las Vegas show causes me to admire the incredible focus Teller still has on improving, revising, thinking over this one brief trick. More than two years since he first began playing with the Abbott ball, he is still professionally obsessed with it and he loves every moment spent practicing and pondering improvements. How long will this last? Near the end of his lecture he says, “In six months or a year, it will start to settle into my bones. … In 10 years it’ll be perfect.”

And then the piece ends with a great quote from Teller that made me want to jump right out of me seat:

I am never bored. I never understand people who say they are bored. I wish they could just wrap up those hours and give them to me.

Me too, Teller. Me too.

Khoi Vinh looks back at the design studio he co-founded ten years ago and the lessons he learned in the process. These are valuable insights for any designer looking to strike out on their own, but I especially enjoyed this last bit of wisdom:

Even then, what I had already learned running that business was that saying “no,” was incredibly important, that turning down bad clients and bad projects — the ones that were outside of our expertise, outside of our budget, outside of the kind of work that would make us happy — was the only way to avoid the trap of working long and hard on miserable projects. This doesn’t just go for ‘established’ studios; due to the time, effort and opportunity cost of saying yes to bad projects, I believe it’s also a surefire way to make sure young studios never get to say yes to good projects. In the services business, sometimes “no” is the most powerful, effective and beneficial tool that you have.

Terrific essay from Liz Danzico using salt as a metaphor to give some insight into work and life:

Today, I still think of salt as enormously instructive. Think about the classic white shaker on every restaurant table. Most of the time we look right past it or ignore the invisible flavor in the small packets stacked next to the pepper. But stop for a moment, and consider salt’s history and presence — how far it traveled, what form it originally started in, how many people were involved just to get it to your table. It gets more interesting. Salt has inspired wars, funded the Great Wall of China, its been considered divine, its the name of cities, it has been used as currency. Today, it has over 14,000 uses and is considered a luxury in some parts of the world, while Americans just consume about a teaspoon and a half a day.