Are you a Chef or a Cook?
Good morning and welcome to the very another week in April. It was my birthday yesterday and I am just grateful for life and well-being, so much more to do, and I cannot wait to get started. Thank you for your kind wishes and prayers. They were pretty warm and blissful.
I am asking you a question again today, just like last week.
Are you a cook or a chef?
You would be right if you your answer is none, but permit me to shed more light on the question and then I will ask again. Deal? Sounds like a plan! Leggo
“To simply answer this question, a chef is an individual who is trained to understand flavors, and cooking techniques, create recipes from scratch with fresh ingredients, and have a high level of responsibility within a kitchen. A cook is an individual who follows established recipes to prepare food” (Source: CulinaryLabSchool)
Just like the definition above, a chef uses his understanding of ingredients and flavours to invent a recipe, while a cook just reproduces a laid-down recipe to bring about a desired food result.
Getting clearer? Let us look beyond the professions now as they are both fantastic professions and have their use cases well spelt out. The Chef is an inventor, whilst the cook is an implementer.
Good? A cook can get stuck in the box as he knows what to do as long as it is in the recipe book, there is no chance for much exploration, just the right amount of salt, the exact amount of onions will make the best meal, that is his goal. He reasons from analogy. Whereas the chef has an open table, equipped with all the information needed as to why each ingredient is important and why there is a need to put a certain amount of one flavour over another, he can easily come up with something probably never seen before, a new recipe, which if becomes really good, can now also be implet=mented by the cook.
The Chef asks questions about his cooking techniques, his ingredients, why he should include this flavour or not, and why he should use a type of pepper or not, a cook simply just follows the manual(recipe).
Again, I ask the question:
Are you a chef or you are a cook?
To succeed in life, you require more than know-how. You need to become a chef and dig deep into real knowledge as to why what is, in your life, and career, is what it is.
This is termed reasoning from first principles. It is simply taking a situation in your life and breaking it into the smallest part asking the right questions, by so doing you have reduced that challenge to just ingredients and flavours and then you can now begin to work your way up as the Chef would and get yourself a new recipe.
People who change the world are those who don’t stop at, “That is how it has always been done“ World-beaters dig deeper.
How do you think like a Chef?
Clarify your ideas. Understand why you are thinking the way you are. Are you being influenced by some ready-made knowledge?
Challenge the status quo. Do they really have to be done this way? If yes, why? If not, what other ways can it be done?
Examine the consequences of actions. What if I am wrong? What if I am correct as well?
Thinking like a chef does not require much more than you already do, it is just asking yourself more questions that will make you dig deep into the problem. It reduces a recipe problem down to when it was still ordinary flavours and ingredients.
When next you are at crossroads in your life, think like a chef! It takes you a level higher than gut feeling or emotional response to problems.
Are you a Chef or a cook?
Flourish and Thrive,
Oluwasegun