by Dan Charnas
In our society we’ve come to see speed and urgency as antithetical to quality. For the chef, the deadline is integral to quality. Without delivery, there’s no feedback, severing the improvement loop that creates excellence. Excellence is quality delivered.
Deadlines compel excellence. Lorne Michaels, who has been delivering 90 minutes of influential TV comedy for more than 40 years with Saturday Night Live, has said: “We don’t go on because we’re ready. We go on because it’s 11:30.” And while SNL has produced plenty of less than perfect moments, a comedy sketch still needs to be ready by 11:30 p.m. to have a chance to be perfect. Don’t let perfectionism make you miss your moment.
CHUNKING TIME
Try to break large projects into chunks that are finishable in the time you allot for them. Set benchmarks. For example, I know I can usually write 500 words in 1 to 2 hours. So I break writing projects down into chunks of that size, and try not to assign myself more than that amount so I can actually finish what I’ve started. Smaller goals lift the spirits because they make it easier for us to see the end. To recap:
1.Figure out the discrete parts of each project.
2.Build your pause points with intentionality.
3.Work intently toward those points.
INTENTIONAL BREAKS
When so many of us beg the Universe for a chance to just get some work done, why is it that when that time finally arrives, we often do anything we can to escape it?
Here’s why: The process tasks we complain about are often easier to do than immersive work, and we get a little endorphin rush every time we deliver on one of those process tasks. Immersive work is harder. It doesn’t yield those little rushes as often. Because it’s creative and thus a reflection of ourselves, it puts our own demands and emotions front and center. Is it any wonder, then, why we abandon our creative work to chat on social media or browse the Internet?
Creativity—what we do when our hands are shaping something, whether words or numbers or designs or images or music—isn’t linear. Booking yourself into some immersive time and then treating it like a 2-hour prison to attempt to squeeze every second out of it is a huge mistake. Our creative sessions need to breathe, as we do. We need mental, physical, and social breaks. Working clean with obligations and expectations means that we should strive to make breaks intentional ones.
The rules:
1.Any time you enter a creative session, take as many breaks as you like within it.
2.On a piece of paper or a spreadsheet, begin an intentional break log.
3.At the top, write down your start time.
4.For each break, log your in and out times on a new line.
5.Beside each break, put the reason for the break.
■Mental (e.g., when you want to chat, browse, or when you just can’t think)
■Physical (e.g., bathroom breaks, snack breaks, stretching, or walking around)
■Social (e.g., interruptions, chats with friends or colleagues)
■Work (e.g., other projects)
INTENTIONAL BREAKS
Time in: 10:00 AM Time out: 1:00 PM
6.When you are finished with your creative session, log your end time.
7.Calculate the time between your start and end times, and subtract the amount of time you took for breaks.
You could also use a time-tracker app for this habit. For my own creative sessions, I’ve created a spreadsheet that automatically calculates the percentage of my time I’ve spent working within that session. And I know that if my number is below 75 percent, the session has been a difficult one.
The point is not to get that percentage up! The point is that we understand why and when we need breaks, so we can better know how to schedule and encourage our creative process.
A chef’s reprise: A strong finish
When Charlene Johnson-Hadley left the restaurant each evening, she returned to a home teeming with her 11-year-old daughter Chloe’s colorful art projects—paintings, drawings, sculptures—all of them unfinished.
Charlene’s training as a chef made Chloe’s creative process difficult to watch. For each of these objects, Chloe had a plan, yet another addition or improvement she was going to make. But the incomplete projects only seemed to accumulate. Finally, in a quiet moment, Charlene decided to say something.
“Chloe, you are a very smart girl, but you have a problem focusing.”
“I know, Mommy,” Chloe replied. Charlene’s jaw dropped.
“But,” Chloe continued, “sometimes I have to do more than one thing at a time.”
“That’s fine,” Charlene replied. “There are times you have to multitask. But you can’t start five things and then have five things not finished. You can’t have 70 percent done, 80 percent done, 20 percent done, 30 percent done, 90 percent done. Even 90 percent finished is still unfinished. So if you need to do more than one thing at a time, do two things, and don’t go on to that third thing until you’re done. If you do that, by the time you’re 14, you’ll be able to do five things and then you will complete them. The key is completing.”
Charlene watched Chloe, hoping she’d take it in. If Chloe could deliver, she’d have a powerful life skill. She might not be a chef like her mommy, but she’d be the chef of her own life.
A few months later summer came. On the morning of her Brooklyn neighborhood’s annual block party, Charlene walked outside and saw Chloe, who had set up a table on which she displayed a number of finished paintings. Beside them she had written a price list with a Sharpie. Chloe had done it all by herself.
She sold all her pieces by the end of the day.
Recipe for Success
Commit to delivering. When a task is nearly done, finish it. Always be unblocking.
THE SIXTH INGREDIENT
SLOWING DOWN TO SPEED UP
A chef’s story: The base runner
Angelo Sosa, center fielder for his high school baseball team, the Xavier Falcons, looked for a head start. He was halfway between second and third base before the opposing pitcher noticed, and Sosa tagged third milliseconds before the ball hit the third baseman’s glove. Sosa stole a lot of bases.
Sosa, while shy in social situations, competed fiercely on the field. His father—a Dominican US Army captain-turned-psychiatrist—ran Angelo and his six siblings like a troop around their rural Connecticut home and corrected them with a hard hand. When Angelo did his chores, he ran. When he left home, he kept running.
After high school—when he had traded his pro baseball aspirations for a culinary career—Sosa spent his first days at the CIA like, he says, a dubiously trained rookie cop looking for action: trying out for the school’s Olympic team and demanding a meeting with the president of the college, Ferdinand Metz.
Metz’s assistant stared at the first-year student. “The only time students meet with Dr. Metz is at graduation,” she sniffed. Sosa persisted. One morning he found himself on the doorstep of President Metz’s campus residence. What was Sosa so desperate to say?
“President Metz, I’m Angelo Sosa. I want you to remember my name, because I’m going to be one of the most famous chefs in the world. Thank you for your time.”
Sosa graduated from the CIA with a fellowship that propelled him into the kitchens of Christian Bertrand, where he rose to sous-chef. After 3 years, in 1999, Bertrand asked Sosa if he’d like to meet the one chef whom every young culinarian in New York seemed to want to work for: Jean-Georges Vongerichten, who had just opened his latest four-star restaurant, Jean Georges, in a hotel off Central Park.
Sosa remembers that meeting in a corona of white: gleaming ivory-colored tiles in a spotless kitchen; Jean-Georges himself in his white chef’s jacket, reading the New York Times. When Vongerichten spoke, Sosa understood only half of what he said, but the chef’s voice sounded like liquid silver. Jean-Georges motioned for Sosa to come with him, leading the young apprentice to a new Bonnet oven from France as if showing him a Ferrari, placing Sosa’s fingers on the handle so that he could feel the
weight of the door. Jean-Georges smiled. You see? Sosa, blinded by the light, accepted the chef’s offer of $6.25 an hour to take a demotion to the entremetier station. Sosa floated all the way to Grand Central Terminal. Only at the end of his commute to Stanford, Connecticut, did Sosa realize he would now make less than half of his current salary; and that his new weekly paycheck would barely cover his monthly Metro North train pass, let alone his rent. Sosa debarked, walked past his house and into a nearby bank, and talked his way out of there with a loan for $13,000 to fund his shortfall.
Later that week, Sosa asked to speak with Jean-Georges. “This is the biggest investment of my life,” Sosa informed him. “And I want you to know that I’m going to be the best chef who has ever worked for you.” Jean-Georges bumped him up to $12 an hour just for having the balls.
Back when he played baseball, Sosa figured he could make it to the minors. Now here he was, in the majors of a different league. As he had both on the field and in previous kitchens, Sosa relied on speed for advantage. He fancied himself a martial artist, a ninja, exploding on his station and leaving others dazzled.
Except they weren’t.
Vongerichten liked to put his cooks in the shit; he’d drop a new lunch menu 1 hour before service just to watch his brigade scramble. Sosa ran, but in his mad dash, he got sloppy. Much of what he cooked did not meet Vongerichten’s or his sous-chef Jacques Qualin’s exacting standards. He forgot simple things, like seasoning the water in which he blanched asparagus. Throw it out, do it again. He cut his vegetables in inconsistent widths. Throw it out, do it again. He panicked, and panic made him rush even more. The more he rushed, the more he fell behind. The more he fell behind, the more hell he caught.
The crew began to tease him. Josh “Shorty” Eden gave Angelo a nickname: Hurry-Up-and-Make-It-Twice Sosa. Qualin would toss Sosa’s mise-en-place every evening. Sosa started coming in earlier in the morning, sometimes sleeping in his uniform, when he could sleep at all, trying to regain that head start. One day during service, after Qualin reamed him for another underseasoned dish, Sosa’s entremetier partner piled on: Your station is shit, dude. You don’t even deserve to be here. You are the worst partner.
That’s it, Sosa thought. In rage and frustration, he ran through the kitchen, past the coffee station, toward the door. His wallet and street clothes were still in the locker room behind him. Fuck it, Sosa thought. The wallet was empty anyway. But right below that red exit sign, Sosa felt as if he had walked into an invisible wall. He couldn’t leave. Instead, he walked back to his station, grabbed his partner, and said: “Don’t ever fuck with me again.”
The mere act of talking tough ended Sosa’s hazing period, which in turn relaxed him. As he relaxed, he began to behave in a way that didn’t come naturally to him: He slowed down. As he slowed down, he made fewer mistakes. As he made fewer mistakes, he regained the finesse he needed to compete in the kitchen of Jean Georges. Sosa acquired what he refers to as equilibrium—an elegant balance of speed and refinement. Now his movements were becoming ninja-worthy: less lurching, more smooth. When he caught a mistake, he didn’t panic. If he didn’t cut the carrots correctly, Sosa stopped, took a breath, cleaned up, and began again, cutting them to perfection.
One day Jean-Georges walked past Sosa’s station right before service. While everyone else scurried, there was Angelo Sosa, serene, polishing a set of copper pots. Jean-Georges’s mouth twisted into a smile.
“Okay, Chef,” Vongerichten said, and walked away.
WHAT CHEFS DO, WHAT CHEFS KNOW
Chefs don’t run
Chefs have a paradoxical relationship to time. Every day they race the clock, but at other times they seem to be able to stop it. Time is rigid until it’s malleable, finite until it’s infinite. Chefs know some moments count more than others. And they know that one’s perception of time has a lot to do with one’s relationship to space. Those concepts of time and space merge in the almost quantum notion of slowing down to speed up.
Angelo Sosa didn’t learn that principle until well after he had left the CIA. Melissa Gray began learning it while she was still there, dashing around the kitchen of her High-Quantity Food Production class while Chef David McCue watched.
Finally he spoke: “Chefs never run.”
Gray stopped and looked at him.
“Do you ever see any of the chefs here run?” he asked her.
Gray thought for a moment. In her 4 years, not once.
“Chefs never run because they’re always in the right place at the right time,” he said.
The implication was clear: If you’re running, it’s because you aren’t prepared. If you’re running, you’re wasting energy. If you’re running, you’re not thinking. If you’re running, you’re acting like a cook.
Many professional chefs wear the title of “cook” with humble pride and abhor the honorific “chef”—which Gray herself believes is a title earned by mastery and not by declaration or diploma. But among Gray’s classmates, “cook” was a shame word, as in the insult, “Stop acting like a cook!” At the CIA the difference between “chef” and “cook” measured a culinary student’s mastery of physical and mental mise-en-place: Chefs plan, cooks don’t. Chefs see the whole kitchen, cooks zone in on their own station. Chefs move calmly and smoothly, cooks rush.
Gray remembered what her skills instructor, Rudy Speckamp, counseled before her first big practical exam, the test that determines whether students can move forward.
“Pretend that you are calm,” he said.
Chefs don’t panic
The basic concept is this: The natural human tendency in the face of imminent deadline is to rush or panic. Don’t rush; when you rush, your movements become sloppy. Don’t panic; when you panic, you forget things. When you find yourself rushing or panicking or both, just stop. Breathe. If your anxiety compels you to move, then clean. The act of cleaning, of wiping down your station, will force you to take some breaths. Look around you. Think about where you are and where you need to be. Think of the next step to get you there and take that step, slowly.
Chef Sam Henderson recalls a panic in her early days at wd-50. The restaurant had just initiated its first lunch service, and Dufresne put everyone in the weeds. The kitchen crew worked two shifts. “We were all tired and grumpy,” Henderson remembers. Distracted by some family problems, she went to the farmers’ market to pick up strawberries and got the wrong ones. Then she had to create an amuse-bouche, and nothing she tried was working. The clock ticked. In her rush to cook family meal for the entire staff, she burned the cauliflower she intended to use. With almost no time left, Henderson broke down and ran outside. A minute or two later, Dufresne appeared by her side—“Sammie, what’s wrong?”—alerted by her fellow cook J.J. Basil. “Let’s focus,” he said. “I’ll help you with family meal. We’ll sort through the amuse together.” Dufresne deconstructed her tasks, and he guided her through them. They made it through service just fine. Sometimes it’s the panic about the work that’s in your way, not the work itself.
Chefs put precision before speed
Slowing down does two important things for a cook. It steadies the body, allowing for smoother, more precise movements. And it helps the mind break down a series of movements into their constituent parts. Those two elements give slowing down its ultimate value: Slowness is the only way a cook can access quality velocity. The wiring of our brain makes this so.
All human movement and thought result from neurons—our brain cells—communicating in synchrony with each other. That communication happens through physical pathways called axons, which signal other neurons, and dendrites, which receive those signals. The brain creates a substance called myelin that quickens that transmission. The more a particular connection “fires,” the more myelin “wires” that connection by adhering to the firing axon. This process, called myelinization, is the physiological result of repeated motion, repeated thought, repeated practice. It is how we learn and how we achieve mastery.
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nbsp; Here’s the interesting part: Myelinization “wires” the quality of our movement, thought, and practice. So if you’re repeating an action sloppily, that sloppiness will be what myelinization preserves. And if you’re repeating an action precisely, that precision will be what myelinization enshrines instead. Adding speed to the “precise” movement may compromise that precision, but adding speed to the “sloppy” movement won’t make that movement any more precise. In the duality between speed and precision, precision must always precede speed, like that adage attributed to football titan Vince Lombardi: “Practice does not make perfect. Only perfect practice makes perfect.”
Chefs slow their bodies to slow time
Chefs believe that the state of their physical space not only has an effect on their minds, but on their perception of time. If your station is dirty, your day itself becomes compressed. If your station is clean, your day springs open. If you’re worried about time, that worry will show up in your physical space. If you’re calm about time, your workspace will be clear.
Chefs are practical people. But when they talk about the principles of mise-en-place, they often wax metaphysical. Remember Chef LiPuma? When he talks about the benefits of planning, he invokes peace: “You want to greet the day.” When he holds forth on the wages of working clean, he alludes to life force: “I breathe beautifully and cook fantastic.”
Chefs need every second they can get. But they don’t wonder, as we do, whether planning and organizing take valuable time away from their real work. They know the wisdom of taking a moment to clear their spaces. They know how to save time and make time. Slowing down and moving smoothly, for chefs, is a behavior of the highest order.
