Life Flashcards
Read what you love until….
You love to read
The most inspiring people do not show you their superpowers…..
they show you yours
Great quote from the book “Uses for an Obsession”
Finding one’s own creative rhythm takes patience, dedication to practice, and lots of time. As I began to find it, I realized that creative rhythm could be set into forward motion and, like a snowball, it would build. It’s a constant thing, too–nearly anyone can do it for a couple of years, but if you want to innovate continuously, you need to work at it. True innovation requires dead ends, and you have to be willing to walk down them. You’ll lose large parts of your life to it, the pursuit of nothing in the pursuit of everything. The craft becomes like a mania. If it’s personal and really matters, you will be unable to pull yourself away, gripped by an addiction to the creative practice of it. It can cost you a lot, but to me, this is freedom—the freedom to cook by my own rules, the freedom to be ambitious, the freedom to fail and succeed on my own terms.
Take care of your body. It’s the only….
place you have to live.
The only impossible journey…
is the one you never begin.
We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, therefore, is not an act……
but a habit.
We rise by…
lifting others.
Great quote #2 from the book “Uses for an Obsession”
The fight for creative freedom requires you to hold your nerve against the expectations of the market, no matter what your market is. There has been no other way for me, because I am pursuing the think I love. I played the long game, because if I buckled and conceived of a more fashionable menu, I knew this would become a line of work that would slowly kill me. I’ve rolled the dice on my ability to create a market for my own creative freedom. There have been innumerable moments of self-doubt but, in the end, my feeling of self-belief, the belief that I was the expert on what we were cooking, and that eventually our customers would come around- was stronger. Each night that we open our door to welcome guests, we earn the right to do so again.
If fine dining is fitting into a neat box of expectations, a commodity that is easy to digest and describe, and requires little thought or engagement to understand, then fuck that. I don’t care what fine dining is, because it does not fit what I do, and what I do is the best feeling in the world. It’s the pure, can’t-mess-with-us, hard-earned feeling of freedom that comes from pursuing your dreams with unconditional love. If I had any advice, it would be this: be brave, don’t let anyone tear you down, and fight each day to protect your ability to keep your dreams close. Whether that’s in a restaurant or elsewhere, it doesn’t matter. Find your thrilling inner feeling.
Love winning more than you hate..
losing.
