By: Ana Margarita A. Olar| Foodfindsasia.com
Being a chef is not like a regular employee job. It takes passion, commitment, and perseverance. Here are some great lessons in life that we can learn from chefs:
1. Practice and practice and if you fail, try again.
No one goes at the top of the game overnight, including chefs. It needs a lot of perseverance, patience, and artistic mind to create an excellent dish. What about life’s failure? Well for all we know there are a number of recipes created out of failure that turns out to be a great dish.
2. Forget your comfort zone and develop a thick skin.
Working in the kitchen where the deadline is here and now would really throw a person out of the comfort zone. And worst, after a lot of stress and sweating on a single dish, they’ll receive words that don’t exactly boost their self-esteem. Life’s lesson? Don’t take things personally. Learn to shake the dust and step on it. Think of negative comments as a challenge that must be faced with positive mind and confidence.
3. Accept that there are things you do not know, seek for knowledge and learn to share your knowledge.
It doesn’t hurt to put the ego aside and ask for things that you don’t understand. Being a chef, it will be more difficult to repair the damage because someone pretended that he or she knows everything than admitting that you don’t know the procedure in the first place. Also, a kitchen should be placed where knowledge should be freely exchanged without being judged. It doesn’t matter if you’re a master chef or just a beginner one can learn a thing or two in life from each other.
4. The show must go on.
No matter what happens to the dish, is it too tender, too mushy, or if it gets overcooked, a chef cannot just back out. Same thing in life, you cannot back out when things go wrong or don’t go exactly according to what you planned. At least, in life, you can retreat a little to organize yourself and plan your action. But, being a chef, you should be quick in decision making and how to solve immediate problems, in the midst of a stressed out teammates and hot-tempered customers.
5. Do not be afraid of failure.
The problem arises not with the failure itself but when we start labeling the negative things that happen to us as “FAILURE”. According to celebrity chef Jerome Brown, “every failure contains a life lesson.”
6. Let your teammates do their work.
Learn to delegate. Chef and food blogger Kim O’ Donnel says: “When you cook with others, everyone has more fun if you’re not a control freak.”
So next time you grabbed a food from your favorite resto- think about it, there’s a life lesson embedded with that piece of food you have in your plate. Bon appetite!!
