Happy Spring everybody! I hope this letter finds you well. Lately, I’ve been embracing how lucky I am to have found two intertwined careers that allow you to continue learning in nearly infinite ways: cooking and teaching. In these two disciplines, it would be truly impossible to know everything.
With cooking, there is no way that you could learn everything there is to know about every ingredient, every culture, and every cuisine. There are always people innovating, changing, and creating. And, no matter how hard we chase it, we never catch perfection. It’s always the goal that’s just out of reach, almost teasing you into believing that maybe someday you’ll get there, and then it drifts away again, taunting you from afar. Yet, we never stop chasing it. Our craft cannot be perfected. There is always room to grow, always something that could be improved, always something new to learn.
Teaching is fascinating in many of those aspects as well. When I teach Basics 1 and 2, I follow the same curriculum every time. Of course, every time you teach a class, you’d like to think you get a little better at teaching the material, but the bulk of the content is still the same. You make minor tweaks here and there to a recipe, or the verbiage you use to relay the content, or the way you demonstrate a cooking technique, but session after session, the curriculum is the same. So, you would think that the results of the class would be the same every time too, right? But, the students sitting in your classroom are the variable each time, and it’s endlessly fascinating to me to witness all the different ways that the information I attempt to teach is received by my students, how they interpret it, and then what their results are.
I guess in the end, I find it encouraging to know that I will never know it all. Not even close. The opportunities for growth are endless. I feel humbled by my own ignorance and yet tirelessly motivated to learn more. I hope that if you ever find yourself in a position of feeling that you have mastered this craft, you quickly realize how little you truly know. Don’t let your ego prevent you from saying, “I don’t know”. Make mistakes. Grow. Learn. Do better. Chase the unattainable goal. Keep up the great work out there. We’re proud of you. Go cook something awesome.