I’m a culinary school drop-out. It’s true.
During the first weeks of the program, I would look around the classrooms and wonder who would drop out; it was well-established that an average of half the entering students would. I asked my budding comrades, who do you think will go before graduation?
I did not expect it to be me.
And yet halfway into my very first semester, I walked out with my knife roll and flea market chef’s coat and never went back, instead deciding to launch straight into my first business, a personal chef service called Dining with Ease.
After two years (give or take – I did keep one client for about four), I closed that business. It was growing but very slowly, and my interest in cooking professionally was waning at a much quicker rate.
All of my high school and college jobs were in food service. And while I was deeply engaged in my college education, getting that degree was, on some level, meant to be due diligence so that I could return to food with what we then thought of as a collegiate safety net. (We could debate whether that’s still true… another time.)
And then it was gone. After years of certainty that this was my true calling, I had exhausted my interest. The chapter had closed itself.
There’s something deeply uncomfortable about not bringing things fully to fruition. In fact, it’s what we tend to call failure.
And yet, were those failed experiences? I took from them things like:
- Great knife skills
- A deeper understanding of both food and the food industry
- All of my foundational knowledge about starting and owning a business from bookkeeping and legalities to networking and customer development
Most importantly, though, I took away a deeper understanding of myself. Culinary school and Dining with Ease taught me more about the impact I want to make in the world and more about the people I’d like to affect.
In her Compassion Cards, Pema Chodron says:
Abandon any hope of fruition.
“The key instruction is to stay in the present,” she wrote. “Don’t get caught up in the hopes of what you’ll achieve and how good your situation will be some day in the future. What you do right now is what matters.”
You might also consider what you find more inspiring and motivating:
The hopes of an outcome that may or may not come to fruition and therefore brings the possibility of (bum-bum-buuuuum!) failure…
or
The certainty that each successive here-and-now brings with it the opportunity to learn, grow, and put good stuff out into the world?
A little, er, food for thought?