On Tremendous Gifts

Seth Godin, the wonder of college, radical living + Mississippi Roasts

Seth Godin is a marketer and author and someone who has been writing a blog for over twenty years¹. That’s a long time to be writing online. Talk about dedication.

Coming off a week where I spent a lot of time sitting in a tree waiting for deer², I had this great idea to write a post today in the style of Seth Godin. He writes short posts, pithy posts. The title of the post is often the first line, the text begins in titular res³. His style, now that I think about it, reminds me of that of Rick Rubin’s — blurring the line between prose and poetry. Many translations of the Tao Te Ching read the same way.

I’m a sucker for it.

When I went to confirm how long Seth has been writing online, I clicked on his archives and scrolled back to the oldest posts available, ones from 2002⁴. Skimming through these posts, trying to see if the style has remained consistent, I read this bit from “The power (and the fear) of self determination:”

[At] Yale… [as] I drove through the amazingly beautiful campus, I passed the center for Asian Studies. It reminded me of my days as an undergrad (at a lesser school, natch), browsing through the catalog, realizing I could learn whatever I wanted. That not only could I take classes but I could start a business, organize a protest movement, live in a garret off campus, whatever. It was a tremendous gift, this ability to choose.

Yet most of my classmates refused to choose. Instead, they treated college like an extension of high school. They took the most mainstream courses, did the minimum amount they needed to get an A, tried not to get into “trouble” with the professor or face the uncertainty of the unknowable. They were the ones who spent six hours a day in the library, reading their textbooks.

The best part of college is that you could become whatever you wanted to become, but most people just do what they think they must.

At an event the other night, I was chatting with the director of the summer undergraduate program of an Ivy League business school. She was remarking about how she felt like her son, a middle-schooler, was already on a fast-track to checking off boxes. How he was already — and, subsequently, how she was already — thinking about how the choices he made would affect his future educational and career prospects. How she saw the same thing in the college students she spoke with, who stressed over choosing “the right” major as high schoolers. When she asked me what I majored in, and I told her English, she asked me why. And I answered, truthfully, that it was because I liked reading and I liked writing, and I thought it would be fun to do that for four years.

She laughed.

“How refreshing!⁵”

This isn’t meant to be a disparagement of those who make “the right” choices. Heaven knows I do that often enough myself⁶. And it’s good, in many cases, to make safe decisions, not to take an entirely cavalier attitude towards life. But when Seth opined that the best part about college was that you could be become whatever you wanted, he meant that more broadly. You can still do it now.

If you get nothing else out of reading this newsletter, take that to heart. Wherever you are in life, you can still take the opportunity now to live radically. Start cooking more meals at home. Go to the farmer’s market. Buy meat from a local farmer, make friends with a hunter. Take your old fishing pole out of storage. Stop buying bottled water and use fewer paper towels⁷. Sign up for a 5K or an ultramarathon or The Norseman. Call your mom, visit your friends, invite your neighbors over for lunch. There are innumerable choices you can make right now to change your life for the better. And what a tremendous gift that is.

This time of year, as the weather gets cooler, the most tremendous gift in the kitchen is probably a slow cooker. As soon as the temperatures dip below 70 with any regularity, we break ours out, relishing the opportunity to braise enormous cuts of meat and have meals for two or three nights. One of our favorites is this take on the internet-famous “Mississippi Roast,” as adapted from an adaptation by one of my perennial favorite food writers, Sam Sifton.

Here’s how you can do it.

Liberally salt and pepper⁸ a 4-6 pound chuck roast (or similar meaty cut) and set out for up to thirty minutes⁹. Heat up a large knob of butter, tallow, or ghee in the biggest cast iron pan you own and sear the roast on all sides until well-browned. Dump that into a slow cooker and set to low.

Deglaze the pan with bone broth if you have it, and then dump that into the slow cooker. Top with a jar of sliced pepperoncinis (including their brine). In a small bowl, mix together a tablespoon or so of mayonnaise, a good glub of apple cider vinegar, dill, paprika, and a dash of buttermilk. When emulsified, dump that on the meat, too. Then, for good measure add a half stick of butter, cubed. Cover, and let this ride for most of the day (at least 6-8 hours) until the meat is fall apart tender. Serve it over egg noodles or in a sandwich.

So there you go, folks. Mississippi Roast. It’s delicious, even if the ingredient list might seem a little crazy. Make it once and I bet you’ll make it again.

With that, I’ll leave you to your weekends. I’ll be decamping up to Maine for a few days to learn “The Spirit of the Hunt,” and hopefully improve my woodsmanship skills¹⁰. I’d also like to try and bag a Maine Big Woods Buck while I’m there — but that’s secondary to learning¹¹. I’m thankful for the tremendous gift of Mrs. CWD for holding down the fort with our two little savages while I’m off galivanting in the woods.

Whether you spend your weekend improving your tracking or just touching fire trucks, I hope you spend it well. Take advantage of all that your life has to offer and maybe even take a minute to reflect on the wonder of it all. I know I will.

See you back here next week.

1. He’s also a Tufts grad — go Jumbos!

2. I saw five, harvested none. Also saw one fox, innumerable squirrels and chipmunks, dozens of crows, a white-breasted nuthatch (on successive days), three dogs, two trail runners, and one hiker.

3. I think the technical term for this might be “incipit run on” based on a cursory google, but maybe someone who paid more attention in their AP English Language class might be able to confirm.

4. Kids born in 2002, by the way, have now graduated college. I taught some of them. A few probably have kids of their own.

5. I also told her I probably could have taken my academics a little more seriously in college, as opposed to, like Seth suggests, taking random classes, well above my qualification levels, just because they sounded interesting. Oh well.

6. Even when I tell myself I’m a renegade, a pirate, and a maverick.

7. I told Mrs. CWD that my exorbitant paper towel use is probably my greatest fault.

8. Or use something like "“Holy Cow” from Meat Church.

9. You can also do this the night before and leave it uncovered in the fridge for a poor man’s dry brine.

10. How’s that for a radical opportunity?

11. I’d settle for a turkey, if we’re being honest.