“From Scratch”: Radio Show and Podcast

Review by Ingrid Sparrow, PT

In both health care and business we are being challenged to adapt to new technologies and to innovate to improve our care and our business. This is both exciting and exhausting. When I am looking for inspiration, I can count on the weekly radio show and podcast “From Scratch” to pique my curiosity and lift my spirits.

The low-key host of “From Scratch,” Jessica Harris, engages entrepreneurs from a wide range of medical and science innovation, business, social media, and the arts. Their open conversations illustrate the often unusual sources of inspiration, successes and failures of ideas and products, and the ups and downs in the process of discovery.

I was hooked from the first episode, the story of how four recent graduates from the Wharton School of Business started up the prescription glasses retailer, Warby Parker, out of a New York City apartment. While their glasses are now in brick and mortar shops, their original sales model involved shoppers choosing from frame models shipped to their home with the added BOGO (buy one get one) that for each pair of glasses bought, a pair is donated to the 15 percent of the world’s population that needs but cannot afford glasses.

I have subsequently exercised and gardened while listening to the creative scientists of Bolt Threads who have created a leatherlike material using the mycelium of mushroom, how the creator of Essie Nail Polish hand delivered her product and thus met the Queen of England, and how we come to have Lyft, Wikipedia, Shutterstock, Coravin, Bob’s Red Mill, and Seventh Generation to name only a few of the amazing talent represented on the show.

Each of these stories combines the wisdom of the well-known Thomas Edison quotes “Genius is one percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent perspiration” and “To have a great idea, have a lot of them” with “Success consists of getting up just one more time than you fall down” to inspire you to look at your lemons as potential lemonade, again and again.

Ingrid Sparrow, PT, is the owner of Sound Physical Therapy in Seattle, Washington. She can be reached at Ingridsparrow@soundpt.com.