Every Friday, I share other great content (with some added context) to dive into over the weekend.

68 Bits of Unsolicited Advice

Kevin Kelly, the Founding Executive Editor at Wired, turned 68 and wanted to share some advice. With age comes wisdom. Here are my five favorite bits:

“Always demand a deadline. A deadline weeds out the extraneous and the ordinary. It prevents you from trying to make it perfect, so you have to make it different. Different is better.”

“The purpose of a habit is to remove that action from self-negotiation. You no longer expend energy deciding whether to do it. You just do it. Good habits can range from telling the truth, to flossing."

“Separate the processes of creation from improving. You can’t write and edit, or sculpt and polish, or make and analyze at the same time. If you do, the editor stops the creator. While you invent, don’t select. While you sketch, don’t inspect. While you write the first draft, don’t reflect. At the start, the creator mind must be unleashed from judgement.”

“Over the long term, the future is decided by optimists. To be an optimist you don’t have to ignore all the many problems we create; you just have to imagine improving our capacity to solve problems.”

“Friends are better than money. Almost anything money can do, friends can do better. In so many ways a friend with a boat is better than owning a boat.”

Uncle Roger DISGUSTED by this Egg Fried Rice Video (BBC Food)

This video touched my soul and is a must watch. It’ worth the 7 minutes and 55 seconds of your life. Please never do your rice like this.

[YouTube]

The “invention” of the flat iron steak

I never knew that learning about the many cuts of a steak could be so interesting. A deep dive into how a new cut of meat was “found” and marketed across the world.

In 1998, the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association — the industry’ largest trade group — gave a pair of meat scientists $1.5m in grant money and a seemingly impossible mandate: Find a new cut of meat that centuries of professional butchers had missed.

Three years later, the world was introduced to the flat iron steak.

In its first several years of life, the flat iron steak — a very thin, very tender cut from beneath the shoulder blade of the cow — topped 92m pounds per year in sales, about as much as the porterhouse and the T-bone steak combined.

Back then, it was rare to see a new steak enter the market. The flat iron became a proof-of-concept for the industry — and it left the beef titans craving more new cuts.

Cows have been around for millenia. How, exactly, do you discover a new steak? And once you discover it, how do you convince the world to give it a shot?

To understand how this process works, we traced the journey of the flat iron steak from lab to table.