Hey friends,

What do you call a small pepper in late autumn?

A little chili 🌶️🥶

Thinking Too Hard 🤔

Trying new things can be tough.

My wife has a tradition of creating custom birthday cakes for everyone's special day. So this year, my daughters and I will make her a custom cake of our own.

We did a practice run this weekend and... things didn't go as expected. The cake was MUCH flatter than we anticipated, the icing much runnier, the colors hard to mix correctly, and the icing techniques we thought would work produced different results than expected.

It's easy to perceive this schism between plans and reality as failures—to be hard on ourselves that we didn't get it right. But halfway through trying to perform icing surgery on some piped flowers my youngest looks up and says, "The value of the cake was in the learning, not how it looks. We'll do it better next time."

Though the cake was not what we planned — as a learning exercise it was a great success!

How are you framing your efforts? Is your fear of perceived failure keeping you from trying new things?

Interesting Web Bits 🍿

• Hat tip to my wonderful coworker Aubrey for this fascinating talk from Cabel Sasser on the work of Wes Cook.
• Seems like the new M4 Mac Minis are incredibly efficient.
• Julia Evan's TIL microblog idea is probably the best microblog idea I've heard of. Interesting, short, and relevant. I would totally subscribe to whole feeds of TIL's.
• Talk about a bug, Josh Tumath writes how the BBC's navigation bar would break on VERY specific monitor arrangments...
• A poignant photo series on leaving and waving.