I love trying new things, especially if I get to try them with someone I love and respect. When I find something I like, I throw myself into it headlong. Here are some of the things I’ve thrown myself into recently:
TED Talks: TED stand for “Technology, Entertainment, and Design,” three of my favorite parts of life. TED’s mission is simple: Ideas worth spreading. Every year, TED has conferences around the world where they invite the best of the best in the fields of technology, entertainment and design to come give 20-minute lectures about basically whatever they want. Malcolm Gladwell gives a talk about what we can learn from spaghetti sauce, Dan Gilbert lectures about how we are deceived by our miscalculations of the future, and John Hodgeman describes his close encounters with aliens from Mars. Now, if you’re like me, you can’t physically go to these talks because they’re expensive and in exotic locales that you can’t get to by bicycle, but never you fear, because every single TED talk is available to you FOR FREE! I try to watch one every morning before I go to work (at Patagonia) because it puts me in a creative, “If they can do it, why can’t I?”, type mood that makes me want to take the world by storm so I can one day give my own TED talk.
Rock Climbing: I just got into rock climbing about a year and a half ago and have sadly not been able to go for the past month or so because I sprained my ankle running into the ocean on Memorial Day. Rock climbing combines two of my favorite things: Problem solving, and finding a way to exercise without going to the gym. The feeling when I finally send (a rock climbing term I’ve picked up) a problem after I’ve worked on it for days gives me the same feeling I get when I do something I’m really scared of and find out I’m still alive afterwards.