Too Many Cooks
Please take what I tell you today with a grain of salt.
I say that because I am going to dish out some well-intended suggestions… but as is often the case when you get advice, it won’t be based on your experiences or observations; it will be based on mine.
‘Taking something with a grain of salt,’ by the way, means thinking about it for a while before deciding if it’s valid for you. Quite often, it won’t be, because most advice involves people telling you to do certain things the way they do them.
But we all have different strengths and weaknesses, so what works for others may not work for you. I’ve seen three examples of that recently that all have something to do with food. The first was the grand finale of last year’s Master Chef Australia.
Those of you who have seen the tv series know professional chefs set cooking challenges each week to stretch the contestants’ skill and their ability to stay calm, and the final cook was the toughest of the lot.
Two of the three finalists were close to panic for most of the five-hour cook as they ran around the kitchen preparing two complicated dishes they had never attempted or seen before. But the third managed to keep calm as he strolled through his tasks ignoring the judges’ advice to ‘get a move on and work faster.’
The experts seemed certain he wouldn’t complete the dishes. But he did… and he finished with the highest scores, so he walked off with the P2 million prize. That’s my example of the fact that ignoring advice can sometimes be the best thing to do.
But quite often we need and even seek
out advice when we are trying to learn how to do something new. And the contestant who won the cooking prize obviously learned a great deal during the series by listening to expert advice.
The reason I often find myself watching Master Chef at dinner time is that my daughter enjoys cooking and baking shows. She also enjoys the practical side of those things and she is currently learning, on the job, how to make pizzas at a big city restaurant.
The place serves a lot of pies every night so the main chef wants the pizza bases churned out quickly and consistently to his exacting standards. And at first, he wanted her to make them using the same techniques he uses. But he is stronger and has larger hands than Maggie, so they both struggled for a while to accept she needs to do things differently to come up with the desired result.
The final example is probably the trickiest one, because my partner not only asked for advice on how best to apply for a nutrition and exercise counselling job, she asked for it from relatives. And then when some of the suggestions conflicted with each other or went against what she already knew she wanted to do, she had a family relations problem.
I tried to give that last issue a miss, but I did suggest she take all advice with a grain of salt… which, of course, is what I am advising for you.