286: Slow-Cooked vs. Pressure Cooker

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What's next? This is a question we're all having to ask and answer more frequently. I'm Jenny Blake, your host of the Pivot Podcast and author of the only move that Matters is your next one.

For show notes from this episode, visit pivotmethod.com podcast if Change is the only constant, then let's get better at it. Here we go.

Hello hello my friends. Welcome back. Before we dive into today's episode, I want to give a special thank you to a brand new review from in 0909-many-many- more09s. I don't know if that's your lucky number. Pretty cool or if that's a random username, but thank you. 5 stars this person said Inspirational Approach to Work and Life I started listening in 2019. Every time I listened to an episode, I had some spark of inspiration encouraging me to take a new approach to my career and life. When the pandemic hit, I decided to listen to every episode, starting from number one. I didn't want to miss a single nugget of insight. This podcast is truly amazing. It's been a real game changer for me. Thanks Jenny and thank you to the person who wrote this. I love hearing that each episode has sparked one insight or one action. One next step. That's always my threshold when I read a book. If I learn one thing, it's worth the cost of admission. That's what I live for is not just collecting those moments myself and I even have virtual and digital collection buckets where I put those nuggets of inspiration. But knowing that this show and anything that I can help create can help spark inspiration and change and a sense of relief for you. That just makes my day. So thank you so much for this incredible feedback and if you're listening and you enjoy this show, I would be so grateful. You can tell me in a review, special requests, or what topics resonate most and share this episode with a friend. The best way that I've been sharing podcast episodes lately are going to Pod Link pivotmethod. That way the person you send the Link to can open in their favorite podcast player rather than trying to cross wires. If you listen to Apple podcasts and they listen to Overcast, it can get kind of muddled and a little difficult to share. So if you listen to any episodes and you want to share them with a friend, I encourage you to go to Pod Link Pivotmethod and you can do that really easily.

One of my all time favorite meals is slow cooked ribs. The kind where the meat is so soft and tender it falls right off the bone. Sorry to my vegetarian and vegan friends who might not appreciate today's metaphor. There's this restaurant that I used to go to every time I was visiting back home or for a special occasion called Los Altos Grill. My mom and I, or sometimes my dad and I, my brother, we would go and they just had this incredible wood fired oven and you could see the ribs kind of rotating slow cooked ribs, especially two day ribs where they're marinated for a day or two and then they're slow cooked and they're just such a treat. I don't really cook or eat meat when I'm at home on a day to day basis, but every now and then this kind of meal just fills me to the brim with joy and a sense of just real nourishment for my body. At least I'm O blood type. Some people think blood type diet is a complete myth and a hoax. I don't know if there's truth to it or not, but I will never turn down slow cooked wood fired oven ribs.

On the other hand, consider the instant pot. This is a marvel of technology. It's this big honking silver and black metal plastic orb that sits on the countertop. It's got this digital screen in the front and you put in your ingredients and then voila, seven or sometimes 70 minutes later you have potatoes or maybe a nice brisket. I have to say the instant pot people had raved about it and it seemed like such a trend. Michael and I could not figure this thing out. We learned so many meals the hard way of what to do, what not to do. I find the instant pot the food is good, but it's not necessarily great. Taste and quality wise it's fast, low hassle, but there's also the risk of too much pressure. So I can't tell you how many times we put in potatoes. We didn't know how many minutes to put. The whole interface is a little bit confusing and they would just come out mashed. They were definitely not baked potatoes. These were just instantified into mush. Contrast that with the slow cooked ribs that I was talking about. Those take planning, preparation, patience. I've been reflecting a lot lately on pivoting and when do you pivot? When do you persevere, thinking about creative projects, how much nourishment do you give? How much time do you give to them, how much energy and attention? If you're in a job, how do you know when it's time to stay or when to go? So if you're wondering why I'm talking about slow cooked ribs and the instant pot is, I think it's important not to put too much pressure on ourselves and to know what energy you want to put where. So, for example, don't put your most meaningful career and creative projects in the equivalent of an instant pot. Can you imagine if I did that with this podcast where you kind of shove a bunch of resources at something, you hope to press a few buttons and you ratchet up the pressure all the way up as high as it can go, and then what gets spit out, it's like, it's okay. But the pressure was so high that it might not actually be the ideal conditions for that project or that part of your career to truly thrive. In contrast, those slow cooked projects bear with me for this metaphor. They taste better over time. And as they're slow cooking, your skill and taste improves over time. In parallel, something like this podcast, I mean, it's actually a good example. Cause I want to make this tangible for you, that maybe this episode, I did in fact throw it in the instant pot. Because I am dog sitting. I'm solo with Ryder on today, this day of this recording. And I've been kind of running around juggling. I'm conducting podcast interviews at home. I was on a podcast. I'm trying to play with Ryder enough, get him tired, feed him, do a quick yoga class. It's been one of those crazy days. If anything, maybe I'm like making an instant pot stew or something. There's just all kinds of ingredients flying around. I knew I had about a six stop subway ride to get to Midtown where I'm going to conduct an in person interview and that I would have about 20, 25 minutes to myself in the studio to try to see if I could actually do a solo episode. I had no idea if I could fit that in, but it's like I'm paying for the studio times. I didn't necessarily want to twiddle my thumbs for half an hour either while waiting. So I kind of set Myself a challenge, the instant pot episode, if you will. I went into my digital collection bucket. I talk about those on the free time podcast in some of the episodes. 30, I believe, 32, 34 on how I use notion. And I was scrolling through while I was on the subway train and I found a note to myself, the slow cooker metaphor. And while I'm on the subway, I'm furiously typing on my iPhone and I start building out this metaphor. The slow cooker versus the instant pot. Now, I already had that little nugget. Slow cooker versus the instant pot. I already had that, but that was all I had. Just two sentences of a note to self and I started drafting the content for this while I was on the subway train. By the time I got out, went stopped into Cafe Grumpy, got myself an iced oat latte, got to the studio, and here we are, I'm 10 minutes in and I actually had the content. Now, if I tried to throw the entire project of the podcast into the instant pot, it would be way too much pressure, too fast, too relentless. It wouldn't be sustainable. I would completely burn out. So the podcast project itself needs to be in the slow cooker. It needs to marinate slowly. It's going to improve slowly over time. It's not going to be instant. It's going to take patience and perseverance. Like I mentioned, it's going to take planning and it's just not going to be instant. And I have to remind myself of that because as with so many things, and I think sometimes, you know, it's easy to look at what other people are doing. It's easy to compare. It's easy to put pressure and say I should be doing more or I should be farther along or, you know, all the shoulds that come with doing anything at all.

We'll be right back just after this.

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I mentioned at the start. You know, knowing when to pivot and when to persevere. Sometimes I think it's also about asking, is this decision point, which path do you want to take? What's more appropriate? Is it time to throw something in the instant pot, where something is better than nothing, where it's going to be good but not great and doesn't need to be your best work ever? Or do you need to nurture something more slowly over time and give yourself grace and patience? I've also been thinking about the metaphor. And one of the metaphors that I saw in my collection Bucket as I was scrolling through was the glass half full or half empty. But when we say that, when we use that little aphorism, you know, of optimism, pessimism, do you see the glass half full, half empty? What about the glass itself? I don't know how often we stop and think, is the container that the milk or the water is even sitting in the correct container? I talk about this in Pivot in the little sidebar where I say, sometimes the grass really is greener. You can look at your career and actually try to determine is the macro container around your career and your creative projects the right one for you? So I know for me, I can just tell, I can feel the difference of working within a large company versus working for myself and being self employed. And I know that the macro container of being self employed is truly for me, like, as long as I have the privilege of doing this, I will. Anything can change. Of course, there's no guarantees in life. And I know that, you know, make plans and God laughs, that kind of thing. But I feel that the grass really is greener for me and my personality and my innate strengths and energy in running my own business. So that macro container fits. Then within that, I can experiment. I can run pilots, little experiments. I can be tweaking, adjusting. Right now I'm in a big process of simplifying, streamlining, focusing, trying to remove as much extraneous activity from my calendar, from my projects as I possibly can underneath this macro container of being self employed. Let's say you're at a pivot point in your career and is the glass half full or half empty? Are you happy and want to double down or is it kind of half empty and you're feeling drained and you're feeling burnt out and you feel that there's friction. And I think you can know when something's not working because there's no amount of effort that is working. You don't feel any sense of progress or traction, that by you doubling down, things are shifting and improving. That's how I know when it's time to leave something. When my energy is getting drained, it feels actively uncomfortable. The steps that I'm taking to turn things around or ameliorate the situation just aren't working. Then I know it's time to shift. So think about that. Like, what is the container that you're in? Sometimes the grass really is greener. Although I'll be the first one to always try to look for what's good in the situation. What's the silver lining? Because we're not guaranteed that just because you pivot and you shift in a new direction that all your problems go away. In fact, the irony and the great sense of humor of the universe is that often you bring all those same problems with you, whether it's to a job, a business, a client, a relationship, until you resolve that blueprint within you that's creating them. So I'm mixing all my restaurant metaphors today. I know we're talking about the glass half empty, half full, and the container. But that container brings me full circle back to what aspects of your life and career and projects do you want to put into the slow cooker where you really need to give yourself patience and grace so that the taste develops and unfurls over time and that the quality and essence and just exquisite aspects of what you're doing really come to the surface. And then where do you have room to kind of throw things in the instant pot and let something be better than nothing and let speed be almost a game that you play with yourself? How quickly can I come up with a new idea or 10 new ideas? How quickly can I create something? How quickly can I edit it, hit publish, get it out into the world? If you're in a company, how quickly can you raise your hand and say that there's a problem to be solved and set up a micro experiment and be the one to solve it and then solve it again and again? I can't tell you how many people I've seen create entirely new roles for themselves within very big established companies by starting and solving a problem on a small scale where they could get somebody to say yes, proving the value and then snowballing that over time. The last thing I want to point out as we wrap up this episode, I mentioned the Collection Bucket earlier and that that really helped with creating even this content that I'm saying right now think about it like an idea pantry. So a way that you can help things along is just be an observer, collect things. Again, I'm a big fan of collection buckets. If you have an idea pantry, it means that when it is time to prepare a meal, you have the ingredients that you need. And those ingredients are ideas, quotes, snippets that you've read. Insights just like that podcast review that I read at the start of this episode. Little things that you're collecting as you go through your day, as you're listening to podcast episodes like this one, so that when it is time to sit down and make a proverbial meal, you already have the ingredients ready at your hand. It's really hard to think and innovate and ideate at the same moment that you're trying to create. There are two totally separate ways of being and ways of thinking. So my dad helped me identify these different buckets when we were working on Pivot. That there's a process of harvesting ideas and just collecting in your environment. There's thinking, what's your spin? What's your take on those things that you've harvested? Then there might be writing, editing, publishing, marketing. The list of ings goes on. But if you can just separate out collecting and harvesting from the thinking from the actual writing and creating, you might find that you're able to throw things into an instant pot and get things done in mere minutes that would have taken much longer otherwise. That can allow you to put more energy and attention into that slow unfurling of the bigger projects that you're putting into the slow cooker. Just like those yummy, yummy, slow cooked, fall off the bone ribs. I don't know if I made you hungry or for my veggie friends, you probably stopped listening to this one long ago. Thank you all so much for being here listening again. If you enjoyed this episode, you can go to Pod Link pivotmethod to share it with a friend. Thanks so much everybody. Have a beautiful rest of your day.

Thanks so much for listening to this episode of the Pivot Puzzle podcast. Make sure you don't miss an episode or my insider tips and templates by signing up for Pivot List, a curated twice monthly newsletter where I share the inside scoop on what I'm reading, watching, listening to and the latest tools I'm geeking out on. Sign up@pivotmethod.com pivotlist get show notes from this episode@pivotmethod.com podcast and connect with me on Twitter at jennyblake.

Remember, build first, then your courage will follow. Hasn't it always?