Brian Ballan
Social jet lag is an interesting concept that may explain some of the excess stress of being a cook working nights. Turns out, I may be an early chronotype. I would not have guessed that.
Study break: 6 minutes of stuff blowing up. Courtesy of the Danish.
5. Do the most important thing first in the morning and you’ll never have an unproductive day. Most of us have the highest energy early in the day, and the fewest distractions. By focusing for a designated period of time, without interruption, on the highest value task for no more than 90 minutes, it’s possible to get an extraordinary amount of work accomplished in a short time.
6. It’s possible to be excellent at anything, but nothing valuable comes easy and discomfort is part of growth. Getting better at something depends far less on inborn talent than it does the willingness to practice the activity over and over, and to seek out regular feedback, the more precise the better.
7. The more behaviors you intentionally make automatic in your life, the more you’ll get done. If you have to think about doing something each time you do it, you probably won’t do it for very long. The trick is to get more things done using less energy and conscious self-control. How often do you forget to brush your teeth?
8. Slow down. Speed is the enemy of nearly everything in life that really matters. It’s addictive and it undermines quality, compassion, depth, creativity, appreciation and real relationship.
9. The feeling of having enough is magical. It rarely depends on how much you’ve got. More is rarely better. Too much of anything eventually becomes toxic.
10. Do the right thing because it’s the right thing to do, and don’t expect anything in return. Your values are one of the only possessions you have that no one can take away from you. Doing the right thing may not always get you what you think you want in the moment, but it will almost always leave you feeling better about yourself in the long run. When in doubt, default to calm and kind.
I got this response from my former chef to my last post about being the worst: “You were never as bad as we made you think you were.”
So, I’m going to jump straight into part 3, rather than bore you with part 2. Part 3 is about feedback. Click here if you missed Part I on how it feels to be The Worst
A lot has been researched and written about when and how to give feedback. The truth is giving feedback is hard. Accepting feedback can also be hard.
As a cook, feedback is easy to come by. It’s easy to see, feel and taste whether you’ve done something right or wrong. There’s no shortage of people telling you that you did it wrong (apparently, they overdo it on purpose) and no shortage of people acting surprised when you do something right. I’m not sure the “expect the worst” approach is the best, but it has some positive benefits on certain types of employees. It can be very motivating to the right people. And the opposite for the wrong people. (Leaving aside the proper implementation of this approach for another time.)
The most important part about the process is that there is feedback. Even better that the feedback is immediate and actionable. You and your employees may need a tough skin to take it, but better to be learning and adjusting than flying blind.
Think about large company feedback methods. They often go a whole year without saying much of anything. Then the outcome is a passive review that lacks actionable feedback. Newsflash: if it’s not actionable its not helpful.
It’s unfair to blame the people for giving useless feedback. The system is the problem. It is hard to remember what people worked on. It’s hard to know immediately what the outcome of some project will be. It’s hard to have time to talk thoughtfully about what can be done better.
That’s why it should be a priority to seek out negative feedback. Personally, I do what I can to make people feel comfortable giving that to me. I ask questions and encourage questions to be asked. I’ll ask specifically what is suboptimal about what I’m doing and I’ll do it as privately and immediately as possible. If you make it easy and safe for someone to feel they can be honest and direct with you, they are more likely to share. This is true for peers, managers, and subordinates. Saying negative things about the work someone has done is hard, but it is valuable.
Teams that feel comfortable giving and receiving negative feedback when its warranted are the same kinds of teams that accomplish big things. That is the kind of environment where I want to be.
There’s a lot to write about this subject. I’m thinking this will be 3 posts. Today, Part I. Later, the rest. This one is focused specifically on the feeling of being The Worst.
I’ve said this before, but when I started at Buddakan, I had no training. Not that you need formal training to become a decent cook, but it helps. Though, much more important than training is motivation. By far the number one reason I was able to survive in the kitchen was because I was motivated to hustle. But, this is not a post about how to become a passable cook. This is about the difficulty of being The Worst.
Being The Worst is not easy. Sure, when you first start, it’s pretty easy to play that part. After all, you know nothing. Everyone around you is rolling through their work routine. And, to them, that’s exactly what this is: routine. Easy peasy, lemon squeezy, japanesey. Not for you. When you’re The Worst, every task is a challenge. If you’re me, then you ask a ton of questions. The answers aren’t always satisfactory. They don’t always help. So, you do what you can and “fake it ‘til you make it.” Only, it’s not clear that you will ever “make it.”
That’s not terrible. But, now, spend 40 minutes cutting up apples for a salad. It should probably take 15 minutes. Those extra 25 minutes are minutes someone else on your team will have to make up. Now, these apples should all be the same size. You know what that means, but your eye is not trained to see it easily. You can spend time actually putting the cut pieces next to each other and checking. That makes you even slower and more of a drag on your teammates, who are very nicely putting up with your incompetence, for now.
It’s obvious that your knife work is slow and imprecise. Everyone knows and expects that kind of bullshit work from you, especially the Chef. You, as The Worst, are in a constant state of fear. If Chef comes to inspect your work, you know he’s throwing it out and you are starting over. That’s another 40 minutes wasted. Your teammates are starting to curse through their smiles.
For me, this was the worst thing ever. I’ve never been The Worst. In some cases, I could do a decent job of approximating The Best. The Worst is constantly in fear that something was done wrong. There is very tangible evidence (actual food cut into horrifying slices). You cannot talk your way out of a terrible brunoise. It’s right there, staring back at you. Screaming to Chef to put it out of its misery. There is a certain horror of those poor carrots that had to die for you to butcher them, banished to lowly family meal with the other scraps. The poor farmer who wasted all his time growing those carrots. The women in the morning who get paid to pre-peel the carrots so that you can save time during dinner service. And, you, The Worst, you selfish asshole. You just wasted all of that. All of that and your time and your team’s time.
I thought I went in with no ego. I didn’t know how much I would hate being The Worst. My ego was crushed. It leads to a lot of self-reflection and a lot of searching for any kind of positive reinforcement.
One thing I learned is that these responses, the stress and anger and fear, are good responses. These are negative emotions, no doubt. They wear you down. They make it hard to get out of bed. They make it hard to get to sleep. But, they mean that you care. When you get better, all the negative of being The Worst flips to positive. With a ton of hard work, I stopped being The Worst. I got some shifts on more exciting stations and I had actual pride my work. That was the best.
Creativity is just connecting things.
“Until now, it has been illegal to invest as little as $100 at a time into a new startup without first being an accredited investor. If you don’t have $1 million in assets or $200,000 in annual income, you don’t qualify and can’t invest. Until now, venture capital has been a game only for the…
I’ve made this point before. Glad someone has more initiative than me and is making a real move on this issue.
