The recipe isn't everything
...there is always a missing element.
I am not Chef Gordon Ramsay. I’m not a world renowned chef. I don’t have television shows. I’m not rich. I’m not famous.
But we have one thing in common.
We both know how to cook.
In saying that, I don’t mean that our cooking is the same. Or that our food quality is the same. Only that we both engage in cooking food for ourselves or others to eat.
Why am I bringing up Gordon Ramsay? It’s to illustrate a simple point.
Chefs give away their recipes. They happily show other people how to cook food like they do.
Yet, all it takes is watching one episode of Hell’s Kitchen or Kitchen Nightmares to see that even if Gordon Ramsay gives another trained chef a recipe, it doesn’t mean they can cook like Gordon Ramsay.
The recipe is not the skill. It’s just a recipe.
In every skill there are a million subtle techniques, choices, and ideas that are unconscious acts. We have no idea we are even doing them. At some point “it just happens”.
That point of unconscious competence we call mastery arrives after a lifetime of practice. And that practice might not even look like practice. You just do the thing over and over again because that’s what you do.
No matter how good of a recipe, it always leaves out the most key ingredient - experience. Knowledge and wisdom gained from trial and error.
That part can’t be transferred. It must be earned.
I had a neighbor growing up who made amazing chocolate chip cookies. For years I begged for her recipe. She never gave it to me. Instead she explained that even if she gave me her recipe the cookies wouldn’t turn out the same. Other people had tried, and their cookies never turned out right.
Did she have a secret that wasn’t in the recipe? Yes, I believe she did. And nearly thirty years later, her secret is obvious to me now.
-Brian