A Bit of Optimism - Embracing The Fall with Carla Hall

Episode Date: January 17, 2023

When you show up with love and aim only to give of yourself, everyone you interact with can feel it.Carla Hall has led a life and a career filled with zigs and zags. The two-time Top Chef contestant and current cooking contributor for Good Morning America went from accountant, to model, to author, to chef. She has done it all and shown up with love at every opportunity. She’s living proof that when you make decisions out of love—both for yourself and others—even your falls can be beautiful.This is… A Bit of Optimism.For more on Carla and her work, check out:https://www.carlahall.com/https://linktr.ee/carlahall 

Carla Hall is absolutely beloved. The two-time contestant on Top Chef and contributor on Good Morning America, she has had quite an unconventional career path. But there's one thread that goes through her entire career. She trusted her gut. The question is, how do we know when to trust our guts? How do we know when to reject advice that we are given and how to follow advice that we are given?

It turns out it all has to do with love. This is a bit of optimism. So I loved your podcast and because I have been, you know, secretly listening to you for so long before I interviewed you at Vegas, I kind of know how it works,

which is why I was so excited that you invited me and I was hoping that would happen. I'm like, see, that's something I want to do. Well, I can tell you when we met your energy and I know you've been told this in the past, but your energy is absolutely intoxicating. You're like a fireplace.

Like I just want to be near you. You give up this warmth and generosity and kindness and glow that I just wanted to like not walk away. It was very frustrating for the audience because the clock said zero, but I wanted to just keep talking with you. So I figured the way to prolong this is to invite you here. But this is totally selfish having you on here. No, I love it. Well, there was one moment where I'm like, okay, audience, you have left the building and it was just me and you. And I love that. And my secret power, I tell people, is that I genuinely like people. I don't pretend to like people.

I don't plan conversations. I like people and I have conversations. It's beautiful. But there is one thing I actually do want to talk to you about, which is the idea of advice. You and I have had, we've both had an interesting career paths, which is where we started and what we do now are not the same thing. In fact, they're radically different. I mean, what do you consider yourself? When your parents' friends say, what does your daughter do?

What do you tell your parents to say? I know, right? Because I'm not really a chef, but I mean, I tell them I'm a TV host and a cookbook author. Okay. That's not where you started. No, no. When people ask me about what do I do? I'm like, well, I wanted to be in theater, and then I became an accountant, and then I was in food, and now I'm here. Right. So there's that bumpy path, right? Yes. Which is what I find wonderful.

I did an interview with a woman named Janice Burrell in a previous episode. She was the woman who ran the TSA Instagram account. And I love the TSA Instagram account. So I had her on the podcast because I think it's amazing. But she's also had this fantastic, ridiculously wild career path where what we talked about was interruptions where we interrupt our own career to take a new adventure and what i wanted to talk to you was about advice because when one's career is moving in a direction we have people in our lives some of them are professional relationships and some of them are personal relationships that whether well-intended

or not, give us advice on what we should do. And I think this is, everybody has this. Everybody says, you should ask your boss for a promotion. You should do this. And you have ignored some of the advice that has been given to you by people who were more experienced than you were, and it worked out for the better. First of all, I want to start with, can you tell me some of the times where you ignored the advice, when the advice from the professional said, you should not do this? Oh, let me count the ways. First of all, I'm a Taurus, the bull. And I tell people my stubbornness protects me. Okay, so that's the first thing. I think the first time that I was working as an accountant, and I was thinking about

quitting my job, and a friend said, you're going to do what you have a stable job, and you're going to leave here without really any contacts and go to Paris, hopefully to model, but it's not guaranteed. Why would you do that? He said, I don't think you should go. I'm like, thank you. Yeah. It just went in one ear and out the other. So why did you ignore that advice? So my grandmother's advice to me, she said, it is your job to be happy, not to be rich. And so ever since I was a child, what that means to me is I'm the only person who can really judge my happiness. So I have to listen to my gut to determine what my next move will be. In that job, in that accounting job, I was incredibly unhappy. what that said to me, okay, are you happy? No. What do you have to do? Move. And so I own that. I don't care about failure. Failure doesn't make me unhappy. Stand in a place where I'm not happy makes me miserable. That I will not do. So same thing happened when you were on Top Chef,

right? You were in one of the early seasons. They invited you back for one of the later seasons and all of your professional management agents, PR people, because you're a thing now, right? All of them said, do not do it. So question number one is, what was their rationale as to why you shouldn't go back onto the show? So they said, don't do it. PR people were saying, don't do it because we have spent this time this year, and it was almost two years, building your own brand. As soon as you go back to a larger brand than yours, then you will be associated with that brand. And so it was that. The other thing that they said was, what if you go home first? I was like wait you're my

team and you're taught you're having stinking thinking I'm like what the heck and let me tell you why I said yes so the first time I said yes on season five was because you know I wasn't expecting it it was a personal let me just grow let me see what this is about let me try it when I was saying all of that it was let me try the audition not let me try being. Let me see what this is about. Let me try it. When I was saying all of that, it was, let me try the audition, not let me try being on the show. Cause I didn't think that it would come of anything. The second time I said, yes, I knew that I didn't want to cater. Everyone was associating me with catering. And I was like, well, I really don't want to do that. It was one of those things that made me unhappy. And so I said, well, what is the biggest audience I can go on right now to say,

hey, I don't cater. Enter Top Chef All Stars. I'm like, I'm going to go on with the mindset that this is a business decision. And I can tell people I'm shifting my focus. People give us advice and we'll give them benefit of the doubt that it's well-intentioned. And I can tell you that every big bad decision that I've made in my career was because somebody told me I should do it, even though my gut said don't. And I followed their advice. And the reason I followed their advice is because they are more successful than me, or more experienced than me, or it's a subject that I know nothing about and they're supposedly experts in this subject, the decisions that cost me the most money or the decisions that caused me the most stress, I was following somebody else's advice.

But the point is, we can't just blindly ignore all advice given to us because very often advice that is given to us helps us see a perspective we haven't seen. Or there is somebody who actually does know more than we do and they are genuinely trying to protect us. And so the struggle is you can't just ignore all advice, but you can't just take all advice. How do we know which advice to accept and which advice to reject? You rejected good advice that actually ended up working out. So was that because the advice was bad? Is that because you got lucky? Or is it something else? I have learned to trust my gut. And also,

getting advice is also subjective, and it's akin to a recipe. So when I'm teaching a cooking class and I have my recipes out, I tell people the recipe is only a guide. I am telling you from a professional, this is how this recipe is going to go, but I don't know your taste. I love lemon. You may not. If you don't like lemon, then don't do any of my lemon recipes or pull back on the lemon. And I think that in life, when you're given advice, it's always from the perspective of the person who is talking. They're not giving the advice that I should follow. They're giving the advice that they would follow. Yes. As you're saying this, I'm thinking back, my first entrepreneurial venture,

I had a well-paying job. I had a stable job. I was working in an ad agency and I wanted to go start my own marketing firm. And when I quit, my company offered me what they thought was the deal of the century, which is Simon, go start your own business. You can continue to work for us part-time and you can keep full salary and full benefits and do both. And it sounds amazing. And I didn't take the bait. And one of the partners for the company took me out for lunch to sort of get me to make my decision. And I said, I'm not going to take your offer. I'm going to go do my own thing. And he couldn't understand. He was literally sitting there with his head in his hands going, but I don't understand.

You can go to start your business and you'll have an income and you can work. Like, why would you turn this down? Like, I don't understand. I don't understand. And I said to him, if I say yes to this deal, you've put me in a position where what happens if I have a business trip or a meeting for your client and a meeting for my client on the same day, what do I do? I said, you've created a situation for me where I'm in a lose-lose situation because I will either disappoint you or I'll disappoint myself. The reason he couldn't

see that is because he doesn't have an entrepreneurial bone in his body. is because he doesn't have an entrepreneurial bone in his body. They literally sent the corporate guy to convince me not to quit my job to start my own business. So he was trying to convince me based on his risk profile, not my risk profile. 100%. The advice for me not to do Top Chef was the advice that the PR company has in mind, because they're the one building the brand. Right. When I get out of that, am I going to go back to them?

Will I have outgrown them? I really try to give general advice, but it's hard because you're giving advice based on your experiences. And I think that's what people are asking for. But what they don't realize is it may not be their experience. As I'm thinking about it, I'm realizing that the way I dispense advice is actually a little bit different than most. I've learned over the years to emotionally disconnect myself from the advice that I give. In other words, I actually don't care if they followed my advice or not because it's their

choice and their life. And what I've learned in the past is when I give advice, I'm like, you have to do this. You're crazy if you don't do this. I'm taking all the accountability on my shoulders for the advice that I'm giving. As soon as I switch it and push it on them, I go, listen, this is my perspective. This is my point of view. This is what I would do if I were in your place. But you have to make your own decision.

And I'm just giving you a point of view that you may or may not have considered. But it's your choice. Oh, 100%. You know, another time that I got a piece of advice that I didn't take, I'm not going to say that it was bad advice, but I chose not to take it. I wanted to do a cookbook. It was for my third cookbook. And I wanted to focus on soul food. And I wanted to travel around the country. And my literary agent said, no, you should not do that. You have a large and broad audience. It's not just African Americans. So, okay, as soon as someone tells me not to do something, and I know I feel like I should do it. I get the head tilt. I'm like, okay, okay. So for me, it was,

would you say this to me if I was Italian and I wanted to do Italian food? Would you say, hey, but all of your audience is broad. Would you say it if I was Greek or Korean or Chinese? And so I reminded her of this and I said, all right, so that's my answer. I'm definitely doing this. Yeah. You know, because I knew that I was supposed to do it. And she said, well, this tour is going to be very expensive. I said, it's fine. We're going to figure it out.

And just like in cooking, you cannot make a decision without being involved. All of your senses, you see, you smell, you hear, you touch. And a lot of times people want to ask advice because they want that responsibility to be on your shoulders. Exactly. It's a shifting of accountability. Exactly. And if it goes badly, then you told me blah, blah, blah. And by the way, when I followed the advice that I knew I shouldn't, I have sleepless nights because I beat myself up, even though I wish I would say you told me, but I know I shouldn't have followed the advice. And so I beat myself up for not trusting my gut. And this is where I think we have to distinguish. What's the difference

between following your gut and being stubborn? Because I don't think they're the same thing. I think that goes back to when you talk about blind positivity versus optimism. Just for those who don't know what we're talking about, I think there's a difference between blind positivity and optimism. Optimism is not naive. People keep accusing me of being naive because I declare myself an optimist. Optimism is the undying belief that the future is bright, but I can be totally realistic that I'm in a dark hole right now and everything's really fricking difficult. But I believe that if we work together, that we will get through this and come out of this stronger than we went in. That's optimism. But it's not like everything's fine, everything's good, everything's fine.

They're different things, even though they may both be about the affirmative future. And so to that point, I believe when I take advice that didn't work out well, I believe that I still had that experience for a reason. So I don't lose. I honestly do not lose. And I can look back in my life and probably one of the largest and most public failures I had was a restaurant. And a guy was asking me about to do this restaurant for three years. And I'm like, I don't want to do a restaurant. I don't want to do a restaurant. And then I did the restaurant. It took us longer to plan the restaurant than the restaurant was alive and quote you know, quote unquote successful.

So a year to close, two years to build. And then I'm still holding the bag of the restaurant, you know, financially, but I don't blame my partner because he didn't need that experience. I must have needed that experience. And I have gotten so much out of it. And I see time and time again, where that experience has helped me do something else with my brand that I would have never had, had I not had that restaurant. Yeah. I think what we're talking about, and you and I have actually talked about this, is the infinite game. None of the decisions we make are final. The best example I have of how the infinite game works in a life is a Chinese story. It's told

many ways. This is the way I know it. A young man is born with the amazing talent for riding a horse and everyone in the village says, you're so lucky. And the monk says, we'll see. And he falls off the horse and breaks his leg and his career is over. And everyone in the village says, you're so unlucky. And the monk says, we'll see. And then war breaks out and all the young men are sent to battle, but he can't go because of his busted leg. And everyone in the village says, you're so lucky. And the monk says, we'll see.

And to your point, like there's no such thing as good or bad or right or wrong or even good advice or bad advice. At no point have you and I said we got bad advice or good advice. We just said we got advice that we didn't follow or we got advice that we did follow. And even those decisions that I wish I trusted my gut, I have so much more clarity and awareness now years later that has given me a greater confidence even when I'm feeling insecure in my ability to trust the gut, that I'm immensely glad that those things happen. And wading through the stress of when something blows up in your face, like when the restaurant blows up in your face, to wade through that and learn how to manage that is a skill that you can only learn in reality. There's no classroom that

you can sit in or book that you can read how to get a good night's sleep after your whole life has just collapsed in front of you publicly. Exactly. The response from chefs were like, wow, you actually talked about the experience of that happening. Because no one talks about it. I mean, I'm on television. Why would I talk about how my restaurant failed? I literally had a talk, how my restaurant failed. And I think people don't want to see themselves in a vulnerable position. And I feel like that's where my strength comes from. And I will talk about all day long about when I failed, but the lessons that I learned

from it, because I think that if I can teach somebody to be okay with, I don't even want to use the word fail to learning a lesson. I don't like using the term fail, like use the term fall. You fell. Exactly. And I fall, oh my gosh, I'm so glad you said that because let me tell you, I fall really well. I know I fall a lot. I mean, like physically. And so I am not uncomfortable with falling. You and I have both sat in audiences and listened to extremely successful people dispense well-intended advice to the audience so that we may learn from them and we may equally be successful like them. And their advice is good advice. Clearly, they've made it. And yet they almost always say what they did right. And they very rarely say what they did wrong. And I've seen it happen where somebody will

ask a question of a very, very famous, successful entrepreneur and say, what has been your biggest failure? And they'll answer like, well, I failed many times. But they don't actually get into the grit of, so this is what happened. And I got my ass handed to me and it cost me millions of dollars and it was my mistake. And let me tell you why I made that mistake. I think one of the greatest assets that successful people have is not their success. It's the very, very bumpy road on the way to success. Because the rest of us who are trying to make it work, it seems a lot more difficult than they made it out to be. And it makes us feel stupid or incapable. And when we hear somebody that we admire say, this was really hard, it makes us feel normal and it makes us actually more confident

to realize that they're human and they struggled as well. When you hear somebody successful have a sleepless night because of the stress, well, we've all had sleepless nights because of stress. But we have visions of them that everything's under control. Yeah, thank you. I'm not crazy for feeling this way. And I'm going to go back to another analogy just with cooking. You know why I give cooking analogies? Because we all cook and we all eat, and we've all had that recipe that doesn't work. And things will will go wrong and so when i'm on television and a recipe goes awry i'm like you want me to mess up you want me to mess up in my demo because i have the experience to know how to fix it and i can fix it while you're watching me fix it yeah and all of the

years of experience i'm using right now forget about the recipe that you're excited to see. What you should be thinking about is taking home is when I failed or this recipe messed up and I fixed it in the moment. Yes. You just reminded me of a story and it was an epic fail for me. But you're right. One of the things that life provides is the experience of not know how to succeed, but how to manage the fall. I'll tell you the reason I don't like the word failure is the word failure is like the word cancer, right? If you have a mild melanoma or you have stage four liver cancer, those things are both called cancer. But the problem is they are not the same thing. And failure is the same thing. When we hear people say, fail fast, fail often, it's like, whoa, hold on, hold on, hold on. Failure can be minor and failure can

be catastrophic. The problem is it's the same word. And so we need two different words. Failure, I like to avoid. Falling, I embrace because I can get back up from that, right? Yes. Let's talk about falling, right? And I think one of the things life and experience gives us is not how to make the right choices to succeed, but how to manage and get up when we fall. Can I tell you a time when I physically fell? Yes. Like...

Go on. So I was hosting the James Be beard awards yeah right 3 000 people chefs i'm the host huge stage yeah and i had put on some high heel pumps i am doing the parade of chefs and I decide to run giving a series of high fives to all the chefs when all of a sudden I'm like I had all these thoughts before I hit the ground uh-oh I'm about to fall how do I want to fall engage the core make it big I had all of those thoughts. It was like, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. If you watch it, it's like I'm Superman diving for the floor, complete my entire body in flight. I dove and then I engaged the core. I windmilled my legs. There was a chef who was trying to help me and I'm crawling away from him. And all I could think of was I have to take care of this audience. They can't feel uncomfortable that I am falling. And so I get up and I said, oh, that means this show is going to be amazing. The audience is still in shock. They didn't know what happened. I ran downstage and I said, y'all know that shit was funny. And the audience had a relief. I felt it. It's like

they released, they laughed, and we got on with the show. Later on, when people were coming up to me, the best part was when you fell. That was amazing. My story is almost exactly the same. There is an organization out there. And basically, it's every major person from every major company and industry organization that is responsible for hiring speakers. They have their own industry organization. And to be invited to their conference is a big deal because if you do well, basically everyone who would ever hire you for the rest of your career is in that room. They invited me to speak. Amazing honor. I gave the start with wise speech. It was in the early days. I know my start with wise speech inside and out. I'm freaking good at it. And in the middle of my speech, I completely lost my train of thought. Mind went

completely blank. Now it's okay. I'm a professional. I know how to deal with this. And this is the advice that I give to young speakers. Go quiet. It feels excruciating to you. For the audience, it's a couple seconds. Go completely quiet. Find your place. pick it back up again. So I went quiet, could not find my place. And then the panic sets in. My heart starts pounding. My hands start getting clammy. I am in deep panic now, not only that I can't find my place, but that I'm destroying my career. And I'm literally doing every trick. I'm looking at my, I can't, I've lost it. I'm done. And so I stop and I turn to the audience and I decide to include them to your point, which is I don't want them to be uncomfortable. So I turned to him,

I say, do you ever have that experience where your mind goes completely blank and your heart starts pounding, your hand starts getting clammy and panic sets in? I said, I'm having that experience right now. And let me tell you, I'm loving every second of it because it makes me feel alive. Yes. I said, and they applauded like you have no idea. And then I said, right, can someone please tell me what the last thing I said was? And somebody screamed out what I said. And I'm like, thank you.

That's it. And I picked it up and finished. And I got a louder applause for that than I did for when I was done. And I think what we're talking about here is embracing the fall. When we make it about ourselves, there's going to be no recovery. Oh my God, my career. Oh my God, people are going to think I'm a klutz. And oh my God, this is on national television. When we make it about ourselves, that is when actually things will go wrong. But we didn't. We chose to make it about the audience. We knew that they were uncomfortable with our discomfort and we put our sights, we decided to serve. We decided to serve others rather than be selfish. And that's, I think, what vulnerability is, which is we use our own struggles and tribulations, even if we're in it and going through it, even if we're in the middle of the fall, as a service, oh my God, are they okay? This is going to make them feel so uncomfortable. How can I take care of them?

And that's what I think the great lesson here is, which is the way to recover one's self is concern for others. That service is the solution and that we take full accountability for what we're going through. We didn't blame anyone. We owned it. And it goes right back to where we started with the advice given and the advice received. Whether I followed your advice or ignored your advice, I made the

decision. And I can't blame you or give you credit. I can thank you. I can curse you. you credit. I can thank you. I can curse you. But I am still responsible. And I think this idea of taking accountability and living in service, that those two things are inextricably linked. 100%. And I think that when you are in business, when you remember why you got into business, it was to serve. To serve. Here's my cooking analogy. I've always been perplexed by how when you make food for your family, it tastes different than when you make food at a wedding or for a cafeteria when the proportions of the ingredients are exactly the same. One doesn't taste as good as the other. And the reason is, is because only one of those is made with love. It's a missing ingredient. And so the analogy for cooking versus doing anything

else in our lives is that we cook because we want somebody to enjoy our cooking. The act of cooking is service, right? We make chocolate cake so that other people enjoy eating our chocolate cake. Sometimes, even if we don't like the chocolate cake, I want it more chocolatey, they want it less chocolatey. Like the number of times I have adjusted my chocolate chip cookie recipe, because somebody likes them soft and I like them crunchy. Well, then their batch is coming out early and I'll leave a few in late for myself for later. Love, the ingredient of love is the act of service. And I think when you do something with love, and this is where I think people misuse the word passion, right?

Oh, you have so much passion for cooking. Simon, you have so much passion for your message. Passion could just mean I had a cup of coffee before I went on stage. I think the difference is it's not the word passion. It's I have love for what I'm doing. You have love for what you're doing. And when people say, oh, you have to do what you love, I'm not sure that's entirely a true statement.

If you do something that you love, others will love it too. You have passion when others can feel the love that you're using as the secret ingredient. And when you and I show up on television, show up on a stage, when people read our books, whatever it is, what I hope is they can taste the love. And I think that's the thing here. And when we showed up on that stage, we showed up to give.

I never showed up hoping that they would love me. You never showed up hoping you would get a second gig. You showed up with love and you showed up to give them the most amazing experience that day in that moment. And the fact that we fell, the fact that it went horribly wrong in the moment didn't change our initial motivation from the minute we stepped foot on stage. The motivation remained the same, which was to give. If I showed up to take, that fall would have gone horribly different, but I showed up to give. If I showed up to take, that fall would have gone horribly different, but I showed up to give. And that's what I love about you.

Whether you're offstage or onstage, whether you're in front of a camera or behind a camera, because I've seen both, you are exactly the same human. You're exactly the same personality. And the love oozes out of you. And that's why we love you. That was beautiful. And the fact that you use that analogy of cooking with love, I'm like, what?

Hold on. My first cookbook? Are you kidding me? Your first cookbook was called Cooking with Love? I didn't know that because I'm a terrible researcher before I do these. And look at that. We've now just accidentally promoted Carla Hall's first cookbook. You should check it out, Cooking with Love. No, but I love that. And what I love about it is people forget. Because when someone says to me, what advice do you have

for someone who wants to be on television? And I would say, well, I'm going to tell you that's not enough. What do you do? What do you love? Because people see someone else's outcome and they're looking at the outcome, but they're not looking at the process to get there. People come up to me all the time and they say, Simon, I need your advice. I go, sure, what do you need? They're like, I want to be a speaker. What should I do? I'm like, well, what do you want to speak about?

They're like, well, I don't know yet. I'm like, well, then how do you know you want to be a speaker? You're in it for the wrong things. I never wanted to be a speaker. I still don't want to be a speaker. But I did want to spread a message that I cared and loved desperately. And I think it's the same for you with food, it sounds like. I love food, but I love people more.

Food is simply the mechanism to share love, right? Yes. Yes. And it's the same for me. Like my work is my mechanism to share love. One of the things that I tell people, I am a food whisperer because I can actually taste, in the movie, like water for chocolate, I can taste their emotion. I can also taste when it's just technical.

Yeah. And so when you see me on those shows and I am swooning and sometimes I get teary and sometimes I get mad, it is because I can feel that from that baker. Oh, it's so true. I know speakers who are way more technically perfect than I am. And I know authors who write a lot better than I do. And I write in fragments. I have to like tell the editors, don't change my fragments, leave them.

And I know that when I speak, apparently the experts say you're not supposed to say um or ah. Go watch any video I've ever made. I say um and ah a freaking ton. I misspeak. I say the wrong words. I use the wrong conjugations. I mean, it's amazing how much I bumble if you actually go and watch any of these things. The TED Talk that I did that put me on the map, the original Golden Circle TED Talk, my microphone broke. And the big line, my big one-liner, I screwed it up. I had to correct myself in the middle. But it doesn't matter. Literally nobody cared. Right.

Because the love was more important than the technical perfection. And I think you can hide behind technical perfection when you've lost the love. But when you have love, people have a much, they're way more accepting of everything. Yes. So people don't know that I'm a big foodie, by the way. I'm a big foodie. I love food. I just love the senses. I love art. I love music. To me, food is another one of the senses that can be excited, just like art or music. I would love to be a guest taster on anything you ever do, totally selfishly, not because I want to do a TV show with you. It's just I want to sit in a room and taste other people's food with you.

And eat. I want to eat with you. And taste. And I want to talk about food with you. Yes. Yes. I mean, it is the best. And interestingly enough, when I go to a restaurant, people ask me all the time, am I critical?

I'm like, no. I want to turn my mind off and open my heart. Yeah. I really, I love simple things. Yeah. Because you can't hide behind the simple things. If you want me to cry, give me plain shortbread, a really great French omelet, great biscuits, a salad with enough acid on it to cut through whatever fatty thing I'm having and I want to eat it with my fingers. So those are the things that really make me

excited. Let me see if I can tie a bow on this. Because like our careers, where we started this conversation and where we ended this conversation are not the same. But clearly, it's not random. And even though our careers may look random, if you just looked at a resume, there's actually a string that connects all of us. And we started talking about advice that we've ignored or advice that we followed that ended up going wrong and how you know when to follow advice or ignore advice. And I think what I've learned is when you know what you're in love with, when you know the love you want to share, it is at that point and that point only that you are allowed to be stubborn. You are stubborn so that others may gain.

And you are stubborn because the love you have is clear. And if any advice that you're getting stands in the way of that love being shared, then ignore it. Where we get insecure is when we are unsure of the thing that we love or the thing we're trying to give. And if we make it about ourselves, you've lost. If you're making it about how can I make more or get more, you've already lost. But if you're making about how I can share more and give more, then absolutely listen to that advice. And if it helps you share more or give more, follow that advice. If it in any way form restricts how you can share or give the thing that you have that you love, run far away. Run very far away. I have chills. That's a drop the mic bow.

I love it. Drop the bow. Carla, we call this podcast a bit of optimism. You are a dose of optimism. Just like when we were on stage together, I'd like not to stop the recording here. And I would like to just keep going. And the audience can either listen or not. But I just want to keep going forever. You're magic. Hold on, hold on. Before you go, there's one little addendum we wanted to add. When we were done with the podcast, Carla actually gave me some advice on how to make the perfect popover, the perfect Yorkshire pudding. So if you have any aspirations to make the perfect popover, here's Carla's advice. Turns out it's all about

the flour. Do you cook? I love cooking actually. And I still cannot get my Yorkshire puddings my popovers to rise but you have to understand growing up as a young English boy Yorkshire pudding was my favorite thing in the world I have tried so many times

I followed Christina Tosi's recipe I followed Jamie Oliver's recipe I've done the oil thing I've done the heat my Yorkshire puddings always collapse I cannot get them to be puffy and light. I can't do it. Can I ask you, are you weighing your flour or are you doing it

by cups? Cups. Yeah, that's the problem. Oh. You're welcome. Most people do not aerate their flour first. So all you need to do, pour it into a bowl, whisk it first, and it will be heavy because it's settled or it's absorbed humidity. So whisk it, spoon your flour into the measuring cup, and then level it off. That would be a perfect cup. Most times you end up with two to three, depending on how many cups, more flour than you need, and it changes the dry to wet ratio. So once you do that, I would suggest you weigh that flour and then write it in the recipe. And from that point on, just do that weight.

Okay. So I'm going to weigh the flour and if the recipe works, that's going to be my weight. Yeah. Okay, so I'm going to weigh the flour and if the recipe works, that's going to be my weight. Yeah. If you enjoyed this podcast and would like to hear more, please subscribe wherever you like to listen to podcasts. And if you'd like to learn more about the topic you just heard, please check out the Optimism Library at simonsenik.com, where you can get access to more than 35 Undermann classes

about leadership, culture, purpose, and more. Until then, take care of yourself, take care of each other.