Yes, Chef! No, Chef! I don't know, Chef!

Moving from the Northeast to the Southeast was certainly a culture shock on many levels. One thing that struck me immediately, and has lingered, is the ability of two perfect strangers to strike up a conversation. This struck me, but did not shock me. This easy-conversation style was everywhere around me growing up in NY; so ubiquitous that my father, (a self proclaimed hermit), would strike up conversations with neighbors if they stopped by, or when he was at the local store.

Recently I have been more than a little jealous of this ability, and question whether or not I ever had this ability. When I spend time with childhood friends my storytelling ability is not up to snuff. Of course as I scrutinize my memories, I can recall many instances of stopping in people's driveways and chatting, spending hour upon hour on the phone, indulging people in mindless-directionless discussions...all willfully and gladly.

What the heck happened to me?!

Of course, this didn't take nearly as long to figure out: I started cooking for a living.
(Finding speaking on the phone absolutely detestable and loathsome is the subject of another post for someday in the future).

As a young cook, it was my ability to verbally spar with the chef that actually kept me employed. As I progressed up the ranks, expectations grew, and the tolerance of Beers "the kid who talks a lot" absolutely evaporated. Before too long, your conversations come to a halt.

Chefs want a SITREP, so that they can quickly evaluate the current situation, put out existing fires, and prevent future fires from flaring up. On the line/during service time-is-money and every second you use to tell me extraneous and extemporaneous information is a second that my vegetables are dying, the guest is waiting, the service staff is getting antsy...no bueno! To economize time and words, every question in a good number of kitchens gets answered in one of three ways:

"Yes/Oui, Chef!"

"No, Chef!"

"I don't know, Chef!"

Working in this compressed sense of time has certainly curtailed my verbosity. I have needled many a cook and fellow chef with the admonition, "I don't want a story, I just need an answer." For it seems that my tolerance of the wordy, has been diminished as well. I cannot blame this entirely on being a "chef." Like much of the highlight reel of eyebrow knitting "what was I thinking/that was the exact opposite of what I should have been doing," this gnaws away at me. Primarily because it eroded the part of my mind that generates/tolerates small talk. Parts that I consciously work at improving with every, 'hello."

Knowing now what I should have known then, I would have bailed on the the following philosophy when dealing with my team:

Be bright.
Be brief.
Be gone.

Procrastination and Perfectionism and Creativity (or lack thereof)

I spend a LOT of time in my car, a 2011 Subaru with almost 290,000 miles. I do a LOT of thinking while driving. Much of what I think about is accompanied by the notion that "this is something I should write about."

The end result has been a LOT of thinking and NO writing: ZERO WRITING in almost a year, actually.

In the last couple of weeks, I have found myself referencing a famously quotable passage by Hunter S. Thompson regarding his use of writing to really, deeply-profoundly think about a subject.

That was my "eureka!" moment: I was thinking things through so thoroughly, doing mental rewrites to hone my cranial blogpost, that I was completing the process. The final rewrite was done.

Signed. Sealed. Delivered.

I was exhausting my material, setting it free from my thoughts. Not to be recalled, let alone written about at a later time and place when I was able to put pen to pad.

And then yesterday, I found out there is an actual psychological effect to explain this: The Zeigarnik Effect. In 1927 Bluma Zeigarnik conducted experiments about memory and the ability of people to remember incomplete tasks better than completed ones. She found that people were actually 90% more likely to remember the details of a task that was interrupted than one that was completed.

Adam Grant of the Wharton Business School has actually linked this forced procrastination, and procrastination in general to greater creativity. In fact he cites Da Vinci's 16-years to complete the Mona Lisa and the last minute edits to The Gettysburg Address and the "I Have a Dream" speech as proof positive of the benefits of procrastination.

(It is taking me forever to write this...)

Obviously there is a time and place for everything:
Defusing a bomb? Precrastination will serve you well. Trying to write the next Star Wars prequel for Jar-Jar Binks? Procrastination won't help with that, but procrastination may help you compose your first/next single, or land you an article in the New Yorker, or finish your next script for your television show.

"You call it procrastinating. I call it thinking."
- Aaron Sorkin