Focused - 193: The Problem with Mise en Place, with Justin Khanna

Episode Date: December 19, 2023

Welcome to Focus, a productivity podcast about more than just cranking widgets. I'm Mike Schmitz, and I'm joined by my fellow co-host, Mr. David Sparks. Hey, David. Hey, Mike. How are you today? I'm doing great. How about you? I have been working my butt off on that new course, Productivity Field Guides, coming down the road. And setting all that aside to stop and just talk and podcast with you about

the focus is something that is a nice break for me. So I'm really looking forward to the show today. And we've got an excellent guest today. Welcome to the show, Justin Kanna. It's a joy to be with you both and to be talking to your audience, you guys. Thanks for having me on. Yeah, absolutely. It's a little bit of context here. I got connected with Justin when I went to the Craft and Commerce Conference. Justin stayed at the house that Mike Vardy got for us. And I was putting together the text message thread before everybody got there and realized that we were fellow Wisconsinites.

So we had that connection right away. But I really enjoyed spending the time with Justin. And one of the highlights of that trip for me was when Justin and his friend in Boise had a pop-up dinner at our place, which was amazing. I didn't recognize anything that I ate, but it was all amazingly delicious. amazingly delicious. And yeah, I, from that moment, started following what Justin was doing. And I really like kind of your whole story. I'll let you kind of explain how you got here. But you were in the food service industry, culinary school, content creator. It's kind of the culinary approach to all the stuff that David and I do. And I feel like there's a lot of productivity lessons that we can glean from your experience here. So I'm excited to have you on the show. And why don't you tell us just a little bit about who you are and how you got here? Yeah, so I like to start my story by just kind of giving context for the audience that I didn't

grow up in a stereotypical food family. I think a lot of chefs who get into the industry and who develop a passion for food have the like, I stood on my grandmother's apron strings and helped her peel potatoes. Like, I grew up with a mom who was very much so a product of, you know, the 70s and 80s, like a lot of convenience food kind of culture. So it was a lot of like frozen dinners and box packaged, you know, stuff for us and our family. And so what really kind of like got me interested in food is one, the idea of I could get people taken care of in a way that I don't think I got necessarily from my family growing up. My grandma was exactly the same when we'd go over to her house for Thanksgiving. It was a lot of like casseroles and typical things that you'll have in the Midwest.

And then you combine that with the fact that my parents divorced when I was three, and my dad had kind of shared custody of my sister and I. And so a way that he really liked to kind of make up for some of that lost time with us kids was taking us on trips. And so that just kind of exposure to food away from home, whether this was like, I remember we did a big East Coast road trip one time where we just went from Wisconsin and then we kind of drove through Ohio and then we went into like Boston, New York,'s so much more to gastronomy, which is really like that process of enjoying eating food and wine, food and beverage. And so that kind of prompted me to want to get the heck out of Wisconsin. Mike, you and I were talking before recording. I still love Wisconsin. I still have family there. I love spending time there. But it wasn't a place where I wanted to be at least kind of like spreading my wings and kind of like getting my professional experience under my belt. And I had a great high

school counselor who basically told me, if you apply to this culinary school, you could get the chance to go to New York. Applied to Culinary Institute of America, which is a really gorgeous campus in Hyde Park, New York. I got accepted there, got my culinary degree from there. And then I went on to basically get obsessed with fine dining. There was a roommate that I had who had a cookbook from this restaurant called Alinea. And the second that I saw that cookbook and the food that Grant Atkins and his team were doing at his restaurant in Chicago, it was like I couldn't put it down. And so I got obsessed with this kind of North Star for myself of I want to have a three Michelin star restaurant in Chicago. And in the context of Focus, maybe for your listeners, like that was an incredibly

helpful North Star for me to have because everything became in the service of like, okay, you're graduating from school. What's your first job going to be? And everything got filtered through the lens of is this going to get me closer to a three Michelin star restaurant in Chicago? And so, yeah, I don't need to maybe belabor the point. You can follow up with further questions if you want to talk about some of my restaurant experience. But I went on to work at Five Nining Restaurants for almost 10 years after that. And at that last restaurant that I was working at, it was on the West Coast of Norway, and I was running the kitchen out there, and I was really starting to think about what does my own concept look like. I had kind of shelved the go in Chicago idea. I knew I wanted to come back to the U.S., and the chef that I was working for basically asked me the question, in your last year working here, because I gave a year notice,

he said, what do you want to learn? And I said, I'd really like to see the books, because there's so many times in my experience where I basically would get frustrated with the financial side of restaurant ownership. And as I was sitting in these meetings, I started to realize, it's not that the restaurant is like hemorrhaging money it was like we were just very very close to break even a little bit too often and and and also he would give us the the pat on the back when we would get eight percent

profit in a quarter eleven percent profit he'd be like guys we're killing it i was like wow this is fascinating i knew all of this to be true but to really see it in a case study context of the restaurant where I was managing the food cost, I was writing the tasting menu in a lot of respects. I was managing the labor costs and when people were coming in and clocking out. And then I, this was right around the time when like Casey Neistat was daily vlogging. Gary Vee was really kind of like pivoting from wine to business content. And I was like, this content creation thing, it's pretty high margin. And it's also something where you can capture what you're kind of already doing and allow for your business to have additional

revenue and opportunities through sponsorships and stuff like that. And so I kind of self-taught myself how to do content creation because I wanted it to be, I will have a restaurant, but then it will also have a content arm. I think a really interesting example of this, if you guys want to dig into it, is this restaurant called Fallow in the UK, where they have a full-scale restaurant. It is, by all intents and purposes, a great restaurant, bistro kind of setup. But they also do wildly cool GoPro strapped to the chest. This is 27 minutes of live streamed service. And so if you really want a sense of what I was going for in, when was this, 2017 when

I moved to Seattle, it was a restaurant like Fallot. Well, there's a couple of things I want to follow up on, actually. First of all, in a prior life, I was a business lawyer for nearly 30 years. And I'll tell you, the, the restaurant business is a tough business site having represented a lot of people in it. I feel like everybody in that business is on the edge and they work super long hours. I, uh, my hat's off to anybody who can make it work. But the bigger thing you had said that really resonated with me was the idea of getting this North Star so early. I think, you know, one of the big questions for focus is how do I decide what to say yes to and what to say no to? And a lot of people don't know the answer to that question.

So they end up saying yes to way too much stuff. And they're always drowning. That's a very common refrain we get from listeners is like i don't even i don't have enough time to think and the the problem is you dig yourself this hole because you don't have that north star i feel like the answer really when you're stuck like that is to figure out what's important so you can start saying yes to that and that gives you the kind of the superpower to say no to other things. And you were so fortunate to find that so early in life.

Well, what's required to set that North Star? It's almost like you're giving yourself the risk that you won't hit it. Like, it was really hard for me to come to terms with the fact that I'm kind of going to give up this dream that I had to have this restaurant. And it's not to say that it'll never happen, but I'll pivot it to be more optimistic for a second. But I do want to talk about the downside because I think it can be beneficial to have that kind of like, there's a reason why people don't set the North Star. It's such a helpful thing to bounce your opportunities off of. I think in a world where everybody's trying to

democratize everything for everybody and the connections are as easy as just sending a DM to somebody and somebody will say, hey, I know this person, he's young and hungry, and he's interested in this. I think that the opportunities can be so plentiful that if you don't have any sort of decision-making framework to run things through, you'll say yes to the first thing that comes across your inbox. And the reason that there's a concept called the inner citadel that I'm a really big fan of, where it's like, if you don't set the bar, you don't set the goal, you're never going to fail in hitting it. And that's really comforting.

And maybe that's why people like shy away from actually setting it, because they'll never have to experience that failure or that letdown. But it was really, really helpful for me. And I tell both my students in my course and just anybody who's interested in getting in the industry and really jumping into it, especially in a time right now where staffing is so needed. It's like you'll get pulled in all sorts of directions. You'll get poached from one job by another chef who's interested in hiring to this restaurant across town. And if you have the ability to say, no, what I'm interested in

is having a artisanal butcher shop in Northern California that has a wine bar in the back. It's like everything can be in service of that because there is no playbook for concept creation. Any chef who comes and opens their own space, tries to pioneer a style of cuisine, tries to fuse one thing from this area that they happen to be passionate about and mix it with this thing from their childhood, it's so human-driven.

And I think that's part of what makes food experiences so magical. But also, you just need the repeat exposure of different ways of doing things. And if you have the ability to get all of that under your belt, you're so much more likely to have a successful concept. to be something where the more of it I get, the better off I'm going to be. When in my experience, it's like the experience that is contextual to what drives you, especially David, you were talking about the long hours. It's like if you are doing an experience stint in your career where you don't happen to be bought in or a hard day is going to just completely beat you down and make you rethink your excitement of being in the industry. Focus is really hard. Showing up and wanting to learn is really, really hard. And actually like creating product that people are genuinely going to want to come back for is really, really hard. And so all of this is kind of like branches off of this core idea, which is if you kind of set that intention, even if you don't

manage to hit it, it's that you'll be much further along in the process than if you kind of set that intention, even if you don't manage to hit it, it's that you'll be much further along in the process than if you were to just be blown around in the wind. Another reason I think people have trouble with the North Star, and I know this is from personal experience, I think I had about 10 or 15 years where I didn't pursue a North Star because of the psychic dread of the experience of figuring it out. It's like, it wasn't that I was afraid of finding out and failing. I was kind of afraid of finding out what it was because I was fully engaged in something else. I had a wife and kids and it's like, maybe I shouldn't go, you know, maybe I shouldn't open that Pandora's box, which is ridiculous in hindsight. But I think it's another reason people can get lost on this. three Michelin star restaurant in Chicago. That's not where you ended up. But all of the decisions that you made while pursuing that North Star, those were not wasted decisions. That was not wasted time. As you were pursuing that North Star and making those decisions,

that kind of opened up the opportunities. And you kind of looked around. I'm putting words in your mouth now, but like this thing that I was chasing, this isn't really the thing, but oh, that tangential thing that's connected kind of over here, like that's really exciting to me. And you go and explore that stuff. And I feel like that's the real perspective we should have. I do this thing with my wife, we're in a cohort right now where we teach people how to craft, I call it a life theme. It's like a personal mission statement. And I tell people that's kind of my version of the North Star. So my version of that is I help people find their why and multiply their time and talent, leave a bigger dent in the universe. And everything gets filtered through, is this in alignment with that life theme, that personal mission statement? That's my North Star. And you make those decisions. And when you make those decisions, it brings motivation to show up

and do the thing. And it also brings the clarity like this other opportunity that I have, this actually isn't the thing. It's not really connected. And regardless of whether you end up exactly where you think you're going to end up, is kind of irrelevant. It's really just the journey. You know, you can't steer a parked car, so you have to start moving, and then you can make the small course corrections. There's probably a litany of analogies we can draw here, but it's the difference between trying to chart the path going forward

and reverse engineering the outcome backwards. Because if I see that someone has achieved something that especially from an objective standpoint is something that gets me excited, gets me motivated, gets me jazzed to show up, it's much easier to say, does this get me closer to that or not? Versus what will this opportunity bring me from a professional development standpoint, fulfillment in my work, whatever it happens to be. And yeah, from looking at other culinary school students that I was graduating with, they were saying, well, I got this job offer here, and it's really cool because I'm going to get this experience, or my salary is going to be

higher than all you other losers, or whatever it happens to be, or I get to travel and go here, or I'm going to actually pursue this other certification. I had so many people in my culinary school who did that where they're like, well, I got my culinary degree and now I'm going to go, you know, get my Psalm certificate, or I'm going to go to Cornell and get my, you know, hospitality management thing. And it's like, it was so clear to me that they didn't, maybe said another way. It was so obvious that I would never, you know, pursue that because it was so much more, you know, advantageous for me to think about, well, that's not going to get me closer to this. So, so, so why would I say yes to that? And even looking back, like, like, like

what you said, it's such a, it's such a cliche, but it's the shoot for the moon. If you land, if you miss, you land among the stars thing. But what quality outcome can you set for yourself that it would be unreasonable for you to get to three years in, five years in, seven years into that thing, and I wouldn't be better off than whatever it is that I'm doing now where I'm just kind of fumbling through decision to decision. This episode of the Focus Podcast is brought to you by ExpressVPN. Go to expressvpn.com slash focus today for high speed, secure and anonymous VPN services and get an extra three months for free. If you're looking for something new to watch during your holiday downtime, this ad is for

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slash focus right now and you can get an extra three months of expressvpn for free that's e-x-p-r-e-s-s-v-p-n.com slash focused. And our thanks to ExpressVPN for their support of the Focus podcast and all of RelayFM. through then kind of how you got to the point where you are now, where you've got the coaching, the courses, the community through the repertoire, and then also like the YouTube stuff and podcasts, all that kind of stuff. Yeah. So I get to Seattle and I'm like, okay, I'm going to start doing pop up dinners. I basically needed to figure out what my food looked like because it was still the goal of I wanted to have this restaurant that instead of having three Michelin stars was maybe going to have a million followers. That was kind of like the goal that I swapped in my brain. And it was still the goal of I wanted to have this restaurant that instead of having three Michelin stars was maybe going to have a million followers. That was kind of like the goal that I swapped in my brain. And it was also going to be hyper profitable because I think I also got it kind of not twisted. But I reset the goalposts in my mind of it's I'm not I'm never going to say it's easy to get three three Michelin stars.

But I think what's harder and what you see, especially now when you're having all of these titanic restaurants closing, is running a longstanding and profitable restaurant. That's harder in a lot of respects. And one can often come with the other. You get the stars and the profits shortly comes after that. But I started to get really into this idea of the content being something that would fuel revenue and ultimately profit for the business. And so I'm doing these pop-up dinners and I'm making seven course tasting menus and I'm coordinating with all of these venues all around Seattle and I'm, you know, sourcing with wine purveyors to get wine pairings happening and doing this kind of underground dining thing in Seattle.

And I hired a videographer before I hired a cook to basically like come and work with me. And I thought that was just like revolutionary at the time. In hindsight, it was actually burning me out. And so, you know, caveat for anybody who's interested in following that path. And as I'm starting to be between pop ups and I'm like, OK, I don't have pop up footage for me to make a video this week. to be between pop-ups and I'm like, okay, I don't have pop-up footage for me to make a video this week. I'm going to just kind of put out this piece of content on this thing. I wish someone would have told me as I was, you know, coming up in the industry. Cause once you kind of break the seal of, I know how to set up a camera. I know how to put a mic on it. I know how to edit. I know how to

upload to YouTube. It's like, oh, there's,, oh, there's no barrier between me and my ideas getting out there in the world. And so I was like, I might as well share this thing because I have three days before I have to source for my next dinner. I might as well make this quick tip video on three things I wish someone would have told me. Or here's how I like to think about packing for a kitchen interview as you're going to go into a new restaurant and hopefully get hired.

And those videos were the real ones that started to get traction. It wasn't my recipe content. It wasn't the things where I was talking about food creativity. It wasn't where it was actually showing me cooking a particular dish or butchering fish or whatever it happened to be. And everybody started to leave those comments, right? Nobody's making content like this for chefs on YouTube. This really helped me get a job in this place. And then I really started to go down the rabbit hole of knowledge workers, people who are putting out their ideas from an education perspective online. And that's when I really started to acknowledge that like, oh, this is way broken. Like this under-resourced-ness that is just so rampant in the hospitality industry. The number I think is 35% of people in a restaurant have any sort of higher level

education. And so what I hear by that is two thirds of the people in that building are just figuring it out as they go. And so I really started to shift in my mind of, okay, one, I'm wanting to settle just from a personal perspective. I want to settle down and have a family soon. I also am seeing this massive, you know, kind of issue in the industry where I'm able to put out this content that's really helping people. And so I started to pivot my thinking to if I were to really zoom out and set another North Star for myself in my career, what would it look like for me to have a restaurant group in my 40s and 50s, in my early 30s now? What would be required for that to be in place? And it's a lot of operations when you really look at like some of the highest level, you know, restaurant groups in the world that have multiple locations that are doing millions in revenue a year, tens of millions, it's like they have such solid systems in their businesses. And so everything kind of flipped when I had that kind of light bulb moment when I was like, education has to be the first thing that I dive into. Because even at baseline, talking about if I don't manage to have a restaurant group later on, I'm going to be the first thing that I dive into. Because even at baseline, talking about if I don't manage

to have a restaurant group later on, I'm gonna able to impact people that are gonna like genuinely go on to do really cool things in the industry. And so that's when I started a company called Repertoire. It's inspired by an old, old French book called Le Repertoire de la Cuisine. And basically the goal is to create educational resources

that make it possible for hospitality creators to build impact and profit in the industry. And I don't shy away from talking about money. I don't shy away from talking about the fact that creativity is hard and you need to operationalize some of that creativity. And our flagship course is called Total Station Nomination. and it's all about what i perceive to be the genuine base set of knowledge that you need to perform in a high caliber kitchen and quite frankly any kitchen because so many people start culinary school with like this is how to hold a knife and this is how to make stock. Not understanding the fact that, I'll just give one quick example. Thomas Keller's three Michelin star restaurant in New York called Per

Se, your first day is not going to be making stock. The AM sous chef at Per Se actually makes the stock because it is such a critical piece of all of the operations of the kitchen that they're not going to let an intern make the stock. It is used in almost every single preparation on the savory side of the chef's tasting menu. And so it's like, why are we starting there? Why are we not talking about how to follow instructions? Why are we not talking about how to set up your station?

Why are we not talking about how to make sure that you have an understanding of the counts that you need for heading into the day? And so that's what total station nomination does as an alternative to culinary school. It's a fraction of the price it's able to be taken anywhere in the world. And so that's what I, that's what I create now because I have this kind of, again, big picture goal of, I want to be able to have a restaurant group that's that, that really does fire on all cylinders later on in my career you know it's interesting to me um that like i'm sure when you were coming up this knowledge was

not as easy to find and i feel like there's this whole thing this transition that's happened partly with youtube and the internet um of like formerly forbidden knowledge is freely available and i see it i another interest of mine is jazz music i grew up in the in the 80s uh playing jazz and there was a lot of forbidden knowledge back in those days where you you had to find a teacher who knew a guy who knew a guy kind of thing to learn about certain concepts and And now it's just all out there. And in the realm of jazz, you see these young kids who are just amazing because they're getting what they need. It's just being fed to them at the point in their life when they're ready to just absorb it like a sponge. It wasn't there for us. And it sounds to me like you're kind of doing

the same thing in the cooking realm. Well, I think there's a difference between forbidden knowledge and knowledge that is just so internalized and maybe baked in and really just part of the hardwiring that someone just does in the process that they can't even articulate what it is that they're doing. So how hard is it to learn from that person? And it's not any bash on the experts or the savants out there. It's the, you don't want Michael Phelps to teach you how to swim analogy. I think that's like an old Tim Ferriss thing where he doesn't want the person who is just world class at this thing who wouldn't even be able to articulate what it is going on

in their mind from a teaching context to be able to break that down. I had to struggle with this myself when I was like, okay, if I'm really thinking about what am I doing when I set up my station, it is so internalized for me that I really have to take a step back and say, how do I create this from a framework perspective? Because otherwise it's just sharing stories, watch me do it, you know, and there is something to that. There is something to sitting there and watching somebody do it, especially as you're on a developmental path where you have enough context to really see, oh, interesting, they're putting that over here.

Or, oh, interesting, they're grouping these two things together when I keep them separate. Or they include that on their station and I don't. But that's what I get so frustrated with. David, to your point, there are so many sources of education out there. And if you don't do the work to really articulate what it is that you're doing so that someone can actually ingest that and make it useful for themselves, that's why I think it's so frustrating. And it's not a bash on anybody. I just genuinely think it's hard. I'm deep in the dirt of this right now. It's really hard. Yeah, the experts frequently do not make the best teachers or coaches. I forget

what book I just read that in. And it's not necessarily just the curse of knowledge, like you forget what it was like to be a beginner, but the skills that help you do the thing don't necessarily mean that they're the skills that help you do the thing don't necessarily mean that they're the skills that help you teach it to others. And one of the things I really like about your model, and I see this in Total Station Domination, you shared with us that wheel in the three different sections, but I also kind of see this just in you talking through your career path. You've got the prepare piece where you set up and then the perform piece where you actually do the thing. But then there's like a reflection piece. You call it

problem solving. And that's really what you're doing is you're figuring out what went wrong and you're tweaking the systems. I was a former integrator. So operations in a digital marketing agency, like that's my thing. I love systems. And I feel like you can apply that mindset a lot of different ways. I love that you're applying it to the kitchen and applying it to your personal career journey. But you can do that in just about any scenario. And the key question, I think, is that last piece. That's the part that most people don't stop and really think about, well, what happened? Okay, this is the result. Is it good or bad? Not, you know, what could we do about it and achieve a better result?

I intentionally made it to one third of the wheel because it's the meme that I kind of encountered as I was like coming out of culinary school where everybody was saying, well, you have this culinary degree, but like you still kind of suck from a like, you're going to come into my kitchen and I'm going to ask you to set up or I'm going to ask you to do this thing. And you might know how to do it, but you can do two of them. Like our practical exams to graduate culinary school was making, I'm almost positive it was one plate up. They'd give you a protein, they'd give you a sauce, they'd give you a starch and a veg, and you'd have to do the preparation, start to finish, and plate it up and give it to the chef evaluator to taste it.

That is so far off from the 45 covers that you're going to have to be responsible for when you get your first line cook job. That is so far off from the 300-person catering thing that you're going to have to prepare for. And it's not that you can't do the thing, whether that's butchering the chicken or making the beet puree or making the Parmesan tuile. It is the when all of a sudden the purveyor comes to the back door and says, you know, hey, I need you to I need you to sign for this. And I got taken away from my station for 10 minutes and I was counting on this taking, you know, 40 minutes and now I only have 30. How do you problem solve in those moments? What happens when the guest sends something back for some completely arbitrary reason? Like maybe it didn't even make sense,

but the guest sent something back and you actually need to fire another one. Do you have the ability to adapt and think on your feet? And that's why I call it the problem solve section, because that doesn't get taught. And a lot of people throw up their hands and they say, well, you just have to learn that. And it's like, well, actually, all it is, it's like it's stimulus and response. You're encountered with maybe this negative piece of feedback from your sous chef. It's like you can change how you respond to that situation over time, over time, over time. Same thing with like your station partner doesn't happen to pass up

their veg at the same time that you're ready to pass up your fish to the person on the pass that's ready for plating. It's like, how do you respond in that situation? And if you can train that, I truly believe so much in all of our lives is trainable. And if you can train that, it's like, I put so much weight on it. That's why I say it's like actually over, I would argue over a third because I actually like sprinkle other problem solving things in some of those other modules just because I think it's so, so, so important

because that's the type of worker that you want. Like when you hire a chef to work a station in your restaurant, you don't want the person who can just nail the cooking temperature on the protein. You want the person that when problems arise, one, they're able to potentially solve them in the moment. And two, what I talk about in my program is like,

if it really ends up being like a crap day, you don't want to dwell on it for a week. You want to be able to bounce back from that moment and be able to actually like jump back in and be a valuable member of the team. I love that. One of my favorite quotes is by Winston Churchill. I may be misattributing this a little bit, the specific words, but in essence, it's, if you're going through hell, keep going. I love that. So if you have a bad day, keep it a bad day. Don't make it a bad week like you were talking about. And then I also like what you said about the training.

You know, I feel like that's something that kind of happens by default, but maybe without any intention or direction. So like one of the things that I know comes up when you talk about productivity specifically, but also focus in the culinary world is this whole concept of mise en place, which I don't know, maybe you can chime in and help us get a better understanding of that. But my understanding comes from the book Work Clean by Dan Charnas. And he talks about how basically it's a place for everything. So you know exactly where stuff is when it's time to do the thing. And that's obviously something that gets trained, but maybe at the expense of some of the other stuff that you were kind of talking about. Yeah. I'll add just one other quick dot point there because it's, yes, a place for everything. So, you know, do your chopped

onions have a place to live on your station or are they just kind of like strewn about just maybe on the top corner of your cutting board? And so there's like a very kind of like aesthetic maybe quality to to mise en place which is is certainly valuable because a chaotic station where there's just stuff all over the place is not fun to work on but there's also a kind of order of operations to mise en place which i think a lot of people when they are first encountered with the concept, get a lot of value from. Because it's this idea of, I'll use fried rice as an example, because fried rice is something where you're cooking over an incredibly hot wok. A wok is this kind of curved pan. It's typically sitting on burners that need to be incredibly hot. And because of that high heat and the nature of preparing

something like fried rice, once the rice goes in or once the oil goes into the wok, you don't have the time to say, okay, my rice is in. Now I'm going to go over and chop my carrots or my carrots are in. Okay. Now I'm going to go over and chop my scallions. You need to have everything ready to go so that when you turn that wok burner on and the first thing hits the pan, you're ready to add the rice. You're able to hits the pan, you're ready to add the rice. You're able to add the egg. You're able to add the peas. You're able to add whatever it is

that you're adding to your fried rice and in whatever order you want to add it in. But that tends to be really helpful for folks. It's not just that there's a bowl for the carrots to sit in and I know exactly where it is because especially in knowledge work, that's helpful.

Where is this file? Did I happen to leave this recording on a hard drive that's at my office and I'm sitting at home and I'm editing? But it's the, that order of operations tends to be really, really helpful. I think what kind of jaded me with the concept of mise en place in kitchens

is that it almost becomes such a modus operandi for chefs to kind of walk through things. And so mise en place has kind of like distorted itself to almost mean how much prep do you have? So people will come up to your station and say, how much cabbage mise do you have? M-I-S-E. And there's actually a bunch of like twists on this where there's a recipe organization software called mise, but they spell it M-E-E-Z.

And so it's like it's such a thing in the industry. There's a shoe company called mise, but it it M-E-E-Z. And so it's such a thing in the industry. There's a shoe company called Mies, but it's M-I-S-E. It is such a industry jargony term that I think it's kind of twisted and contorted itself to maybe not mean what the author of that book lays out. And so I actually don't teach Mies and Plas from that sense. I think it can be valuable as a way to kind of think through setting yourself up and if it brings you value from, okay, cool, I need to have everything that I need before I start this thing, great. I think so much of working in professional kitchens is like you're not even going to start the thing before you have exactly what it is that you need.

It's almost like the quantities are so large and the processes are so dictated by the person who you're working for that you're not just kind of like fumbling about and just like, oh, I'm going to go grab this cookbook over here and open to a random page and I'm going to try this thing. It's like, no, your sous chef told you that when you make the beet cherry puree, you need to roast the beets. And then once the beets are roasted, then you're going to take these and combine dried cherries with a little bit of balsamic vinegar and red wine and reduce it on the stove. And then you need to hydrate the xanthan gum in that inside of the blender. And it's like you wouldn't even progress through a project without having mise en place being top of mind. And that goes back to that, like, where do we start people? And why is

that, you know, necessarily where we that's why I start with instruction following in my program, because it's not you in the early days of your career, you're not even going to get handed a recipe. My first few years in this industry, I was like, here's here's 10 bunches of parsley. I need you to pick it. I needed to wash wash it. I need you to salad spin it. And I need you to put it on a sheet tray with some towels because I need to chop five bunches of this parsley later today. That's not a recipe.

Like that's not, there's no mise en place about that. It is literally just a set of instructions. And why don't we start there? And then we can continue to build on this as we're thinking about, and then I also teach the end point. So what results are we trying to go for? And what I find is like, if you have the instruction following understood and you have the end point that we're trying to reach with this

product understood, the mise en place kind of takes care of itself because you're just following things from a logical progression. I like that. It reminds me a lot of standard operating procedures 100 100 it's also funny to me that mise en place has been taken over by the productivity geek community as well and they've got their own kind of take on it and has nothing to do with uh with making beet carrots it's just you know the you know it's just like uh you know, I guess their thought is, well, mise en place means that I just put my stuff away. I'm not really even sure where they're going with it. But it must be funny from the inside to see the word taken on this life on the outside. I always wonder about like a Zen monk in Japan sitting there meditating and looking at like the zen facial creams and the zen um you know

zen milk there's a zen app on your phone yeah i mean guys everything is a zen and he's like he's he's wondering what happened to his word you know yeah yeah cool so if you are advising someone who is setting up a kitchen from scratch. You're telling them, don't worry about the mise en place. You're telling them, I'm assuming here, kind of document the procedures. What else do you think is kind of mission critical here? I think from a setup perspective, the three qualities that I look for in a good setup, especially in a professional kitchen,

they kind of rhyme. And so you'll have to excuse my rap battle hat here for a second. But I think of basic, strategic, and hygienic being the three qualities that I look for in that setup. So if I were to walk on your station, Mike, and you're doing that fried rice maybe as part of your station, can I point to individual things on your station and I say, you have a strategy behind why this is here. And if you can't lay that out, I think that there's a moment of reflection that you can have there where you're saying, oh yeah, I guess like every single time that I need to reach for my cups of my mise en place that I've set aside and put in order, I'm actually having to reach over the wok burner to grab this. And so it's like the strategy, or maybe I'm not working from left to

right in a way that I think is so natural for us as humans to go, not completed, in progress, done. And any time that you can set up that flow on your station, that's a very clear strategy to me. any time that you can set up that flow on your station, that's a very clear strategy to me. When I think about basic, I think so many chefs set up these like Rube Goldberg machines on their station where they say, okay, well, I'm going to stack these containers in this specific way. And I'm going to put this hotel pan up on an angle so that when I pull the apple out, gravity just causes all the other apples to roll down. So it's closer to my station. And I'm going to have my whisk set up in this particular section of my tray so that when I go to grab it, it's like, if there's a specific strategy that you're enjoying about this,

go for it. Sounds like a lot of task management systems. Yeah. I don't want it to be so strategic from a like, oh, well, I'm so cognitively kind of like steeped in this, where it gets away from what I call being basic, where it is just do the task. Like, can it take this thing that you're needing to accomplish from not started, in progress, finished? Like if you can outline that about the way that you've set up your station, that's also really, really good. And then something that we have to think about in professional kitchens that other setups don't need to think about is, is it hygienic

from the sense of, is it going to prevent cross-contamination? Are there elements of it where you can point to it and you can say, I'm helping to keep food out of the temperature danger zone? What this might look like is you're cleaning scallops and you happen to have one hotel pan that has ice in it, and then you have another hotel pan on top of that. And then all of the scallops that you're cleaning are on ice so that through the 90 minute duration that I'm keeping these scallops out of the fridge, there is a hygiene level that's being adhered to here. And then you can go beyond that where it's like, if I were to point to like puree splattered all over your station or kitchen stock that just dribbled all over the place, or I'm picking too small of a cutting board so that when I'm going to slice this chicken or whatever it is, the juices are

just like rolling all over the cutting board. It's like there's an element of hygiene here that's not being adhered to. And so if I can walk on your station and you can point to things and you can say, this is basic about it, this is strategic about it, and look at how I'm keeping hygiene in mind, I find that that to be a much better frame to think about setup rather than what you hear chefs talk about all the time, which is like, oh, I just need you to work clean. It's like, well, what does that mean? And we can just go a couple layers deeper. As I've been developing all of this, like that's

been a huge revelation of mine is just you just need to go a layer deeper. And if you really just probe and ask the question of like, what's the framework here? If I was to really push myself and ask, what do I mean by this? It's like you can often find an answer and then you can use the answer that you arrive at to ultimately help more people achieve that result. This episode of Focused is brought to you by Indeed. We're driven by the search for better, but when it comes to hiring, the best way to search for a candidate isn't to search at all. Don't search, match instead with Indeed. If you need to hire, you need Indeed. Indeed is your matching and hiring platform with over 350 million global monthly visitors according to Indeed data and a matching engine that helps you find quality candidates fast. So ditch the busy work, use Indeed for scheduling,

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F-O-C-U-S-E-D. Just go to I-N-D-E-E-D dot com slash focused right now and support our show by saying that you heard about Indeed on the Focus podcast. That's Indeed dot com slash focused. Terms and conditions apply. Need to hire? You need Indeed. Our thanks to Indeed for their support of the Focus podcast and all of RelayFM. Well, we're the Focus podcast and justin a part of uh your content you sent out a newsletter and nine months ago you sent out a newsletter about focus i'd like to get into that a little bit this is the this is the point in the movie where the the person on screen says the name of the movie and this yeah exactly this is this is that so i really pushed myself as I was thinking about, okay, cool. So I had this

season where I was doing the pop-up thing and I was like making content under my own name. And I started to think about how can I make this bigger than me? How can I make this something where, you know, a professional chef who's just coming into the industry, or maybe they have no idea who I am. It's like, do they have to do the work to really come to terms with who is Justin? Should I listen to him? What's his experience? Whatever, whatever. I think a lot of that can be solved from just kind of putting it under this larger umbrella. I created the company repertoire for that in a lot of ways for that reason. There's other ones too. But I started to think about like, what do I want to be thinking about as I go through the kind of stereotypical company creation process?

Okay, I'm going to have to hire employees. What is the mission of repertoire? I obviously have my goals that I want it to be able to hit. But what is the mission? What are the values? And as I started to think about the values that I want repertoire to have, I really pushed myself to land on the word focus. And I think there's a particularly valuable reason that I chose the word focus that I think is in direct contrast to a lot of the other chapters of my career. kind of like bouncing from kitchen to kitchen and trying to figure out, do I like this chef's food?

Or I happen to really like the product coming from this area of the world, or this technique is only available to be learned here. So I need to make the pilgrimage out here to learn that. There was not a lot of focus and that actually helped me a lot. It was this like, they call it the portfolio, create a portfolio of opportunities. You kind of like take the VC model where you're like, we're actually going to like make a bunch of small bets and understanding that one of these is going to go vertical. And that's actually going to cover for all the potential losses, quote unquote, that we might experience with some of these other things. And as I started to really sit and write, I write, you know, I've had a bunch of family stuff lately, so I haven't published a newsletter in a while. But when I was writing my newsletter once a week, I was really kind of pushing myself to be thinking about, okay, what is it that I want repertoire to stand for? What's the kind of culture that I want to create? And what does focus mean in this context? It means that we're not going to be

pursuing every little, you know, we're not going to create a course just willy nilly on this concept just because we happen to be excited about it this week. We're going to take total station nomination. We're going to grow it to being like a genuine alternative to culinary school. And then it's like when we when we've hit that, then we can move on to the next thing, which is, again, in direct contrast to like early YouTube, Justin, which was just like one week I'll do a knife review. Then the next week I'll do an industry news podcast. Then the next week I'll

do a tips and tricks video. Then the next week I'll do a dish of the day episode. And I think what that gave me was the confidence to kind of pursue what Craig McKeown says in his book essentialism, where he says you kind of forego the trivial many for the vital few. And I found that to be really, really helpful. And so when I talk about focus from how I think about it in repertoire's context, it's like, you're going to have to say no to things. It's very much so a decision-making framework for me. And then I also think about it from the sense of what is required for me and my team to be focusing. Is it that we don't need to have a bunch of other side projects going?

Is it that we need to have systems internally so that we have easily accessible things? Is it that we need to make sure that we're spending enough time developing an idea and hashing it out before we're sitting down and recording it? And I don't think early Justin would have gotten a lot of value from that advice. Maybe your listeners are like, yeah, that's exactly what I needed to hear this week or whatever it happens to be. But I think I needed that chapter of unfocus in my career because I needed to taste a bunch of different things. I needed to get a sense of what it feels like to film a bunch of B-roll for a video. And then I needed to have the opposite.

I needed to have a video that was so A-roll heavy that it was 45 minutes of me just talking to camera. And it was like the combination of all that experience ultimately gave me the ability to say, no, this is what I want to focus on. And then I could go really full bore into it versus, you know, maybe that's just my personality where it's like, if early on you would have told me, no, Justin, you need to just focus more. You need to focus more. I would have been like, well, I don't even know if this is the right thing. I don't even know if this is what I genuinely like. I don't know if this, this tracks to what I want success to look like for myself. And so that's why, that's why I needed to write about it. Cause it was almost like, like, you know, saying goodbye to an era of, you know, the, the just

galloping around was over and then just kind of put your head down and just dedicate yourself to this thing. And I get a lot of confidence from that. And I like being focused now. But yeah, it is a little bit of like, I had to grow through that professional and maturing process. Would you say that the ability to focus

is tied to the intensity of your yes? Because it sounds like your yes is a lot more. Yeah. Yeah. It's like, it's like you almost want the yes to like, like I don't have to think about focusing on my relationship with my wife, you know,

like, like it's just like, I went, when you pick a, when you pick a cool destination to travel to, you don't have to be sitting at the cafe or walking down the boardwalk or wandering through the vineyard and being like, I need to be focusing here. It's it almost takes care of itself. almost be so good at setting the context that you're going to put yourself in or the goal to that North Star point that we started this conversation with and just say, how can I make

focus almost inbuilt where I don't, I'm so locked in and motivated on this from the jump that, yeah, it doesn't have to be so cognitively demanding. Well, it seems to me like what you're describing is engagement. And focus and engagement, I think, are definitely correlated. I think focus and creativity are also correlated. And when you were talking about how at first you kind of tried a bunch of things and then eventually you narrowed it down, the model that came to mind was uh like in that creative act they talk about divergence at the beginning where you're collecting a whole bunch of information and dots from everywhere and what what does any of this mean and then convergence you hit a point where okay

i've got everything i need now i'm going to bring this together to a point where the needle on the record player hits the record and produces the art. And I think that is applicable to anybody. You don't have to be a YouTuber. You don't have to be a freelancer. You don't even have to consider yourself creative, although I would argue that everybody is creative in some way, shape, or form. I think that's a really healthy perspective. And I also don't think that the first part of that necessarily is like anti-focus. I think it's part of the process. I think you got to explore. And then at some point you have to decide that this is important and I am going to take action on this. But I personally have this process as part of my personal retreat where I ask three questions,

what should I start doing? What should I stop doing? What should I keep doing? And every quarter I force myself to pick something to stop doing specifically so that I can engage with some other opportunity that presents itself that I'm excited about for start doing. In essence, I'm creating the space or the margin to continue to explore a little bit. But obviously, the exploration isn't the thing that is paying the bills. So it does require an elimination of options too. But I feel like there's constantly shifting between these different modes. And that is actually the art of focus, if you will. Two threads you pulled on there. One is, you're reminding me that I actually did frame, this was nine months ago. So thank you for bringing that up again.

I framed this whole piece on focus through the explore exploit framework, which does follow that process where in the beginning you want to explore the map where you want to see what's what's out there, what's over here. You know, there's a mountain here, so I kind of have to stop or, you know, I actually happen to really like this area over here. And then once you have a good enough lay of the land, then you want to exploit. That's where you want to put your building or plant your farm or whatever it happens to be. And if anybody is also getting value from this and wanting to go deeper, I think David Epstein in Range talks about this,

where he talks about some of these high performers, especially athletes, before they land on tennis as their sport, they do basketball, they do water polo, they do golf, and they ultimately get the kind of physio sensory stimulation through all of these other things where they say, well, and how does that also help you say no? Because if the only thing that you've ever done is the thing that you've decided to set your focus on, everything looks like a shiny object because you, you know, you're, you're, you're so dedicated to tennis, but you're watching these golf guys and you're like, yeah, well, I wonder how good I would be at golf if I just tried golf. It's, you know, maybe a little bit less cardiovascularly demanding.

You know, I get to wear these outfits. I get to, you know, travel all over the world to do this stuff. And it's like, that's always going to be pulling your attention towards this thing that you, you don't happen to know if you like golf, if you're good at golf, if you happen to have shoulder mobility issues that make golf really painful for you. And so the ability to taste a bunch of stuff, especially early on, I just, I couldn't be a bigger advocate for it. Even Michael Jordan had to learn. he can't hit a curveball. That's right.

But you brought up range, and that's basically talking about the value of the generalist and having a bunch of different experiences. And that's one of my favorite books. I really do believe that. And that has shaped a lot of things in our life, but probably the most relevant right now. We've got five kids. My oldest is 16, plays soccer, plays basketball, and I help coach both the soccer and the basketball team. But we homeschool also. So that means that we got to get a little bit creative. We don't have a building with a gym where we can just have practice after school. So we practice a couple times a week and it's much less intense than the standard high school varsity sports program. Interestingly, their program, all the players on the team are really good. It's still a quality program. They're still able to have the

experiences. He got to go play in a national soccer tournament in Tennessee in the fall, which was an incredible experience. But the general way I think culture kind of pushes you is, okay, find something and commit to it. And we've noticed that with sports because a lot of the people who play soccer specifically, they're on these club teams and they're gone every single weekend. And we've just kind of drawn a line in the sand as a family, like we're not going to do it that way. What we found is that, yeah, maybe he's got some hidden talent and he's the next Messi or Ronaldo, whatever. And he's not going to reach that potential. Personally, I don't think that's the case. I think more likely we are setting him up for success by allowing him to have these range of experiences and not having to commit to the one thing and have five practices a week and you got to be there for two days on Saturday during Christmas break and all that kind of stuff.

He's able to have a life, you know, and that's kind of the approach that I've taken with my career too. So that is encouraging to me because that's what I want to instill in my kids essentially is you don't have to follow the default path. You can make your own path. But I think that the diversity of the experiences is necessary. Not until you discover a thing, but it's an essential part of the human experience. If you really want to maximize your potential, you have to stay curious. I'll give a couple of other examples just to add to what you just said, because I think it's so important for people to prioritize, even if they don't think that they know that they're

going to have the opportunity to do this tangentially related thing. After I got done working at the French Laundry, I was particularly burnt out with fine dining. This was like several years of the three Michelin star, 14 hours a day, not getting paid a lot of money, really low on the totem pole kind of lifestyle. And not a lot of people know this, but I worked at a butcher shop in Napa called the Fatted Calf. And I did a couple of stints of doing butchery stuff, but what I actually wanted was like a real 40-hour work week, because for me that felt like a half day, because I was used to 80-hour work weeks. And my pay was a little bit higher, but what was most impactful about that experience was I was working on the case. I was working in the front of the butcher shop. And what that allowed me to do was basically talk

to people about food all day. You'd have these people wandering in and they're like, we're on this wine tour and we really need dinner tonight. And so I'm just curious what you would recommend that's in the case. And then you say, well, I recommend this merguez sausage. And they say, oh, that looks really, really good. How would you recommend that I prepare that? What should I eat with it? What should go on the side? What should I drink with it?

How do I prepare it? And you go through all of these, like, that was the, when I really think back, that was the foundation of me teaching people. Like, it was past the point of me doing the technique and being the individual contributor on the station at restaurants. And had I not, you know, just had that burnout moment and taken that job at this thing that was like, you're going from a three Michelin star restaurant to working at a butcher shop. It was like, that gave me the confidence to say, no, I actually genuinely like talking about food with people. Oh, that's interesting. I never got to flex that muscle before. And then the next restaurant I worked at, the chef that I worked for pushed us

as chefs to run the food to tables. And I noticed the people who had the ability to talk about food and really wax on about how we made the sauce to guests, they made it a different experience for the person sitting at that table than the person who was just like introverted. Maybe they have like faster knife skills than anybody else in the kitchen, but you put them in front of table 12 and they just like freeze up, you know, like a, like a, like a scared public speaker. And yeah, I, I just, I, I couldn't, I could go on about a couple other examples, but it is so valuable. And you, here's the thing. You don't know how you're going to use that skill in the future. Yeah. I didn't know that I was going to come out with a cooking show on youtube called dish of the day when i took that butcher shop job i was just doing it for one selfish reason but it was it was

so different from the environments that i had put myself in previously that i was just going to get such a breadth of experience from that time that was ultimately going to pay off in volumes later on because I was going to have the ability to even break something down to someone who doesn't have any context on food. You have the most amateur people in the world walking into these butcher shops and they're just like, I came here because I found you on Google and I want to buy a steak today, but I don't know how to make a steak. Where do I start?

And you're like, well, you're going to want to take a pan and you're going to want to put it on medium high heat. And they're like, what pan should I use? And you're like, oh my goodness. Like, this is like way, this is like way basic. We're going all the way back. And that ability to like, like what, what other skills are required there? Like you need to have patience. You need to have patience with people who are new and so it just taught taught me so many things like like this meandering around and exploring before i decided to exploit something the the thing that you're that i'm hearing you say that i don't think you're explicitly saying is whatever you are finding yourself uh you're going to get something from that experience you're going to learn something while you're there. And it kind of reminds me of another one of my favorite quotes is from Jim Rohn, who said

that the real question to ask is not, what am I doing here? But what am I becoming here? And that, I think, is the thing that allows you to go from a three-star restaurant to the butcher shop and not feel like you've completely derailed your career, right? Just putting myself in your shoes and going through similar situations myself, there's the voice in your head that can tell you, well, that's a huge step backwards. What the heck are you doing? You threw away a golden opportunity. But if you're just constantly learning and you're constantly growing,

essentially, you're going to find yourself in a position where all of those things collide. And that's really what's going to be your unique value proposition and the thing you're able to contribute to the world once you get there. It's almost the situational version of what you hear people talk about with interpersonal relationships. So you hear people talk about with interpersonal relationships. So you hear people talk about like, anytime you go into conversation with somebody, you can have the sense in your mind that there's something I can learn from this person. Or there's something that this person can teach me. Or there's something that this person knows that I am not aware of.

They might happen to be an expert in something that I don't have any context on. But instead of the person who is just like, oh, well, this person isn't in my industry, so I'm not going to talk to them. Or this person doesn't happen to have X number of dollars in their bank account or this accolade or this certification. And so I'm not actually going to put any investment into this conversation. And maybe what it is that I was doing was I was approaching every new situation that I put myself in with that same attitude of there's something that I can learn from this. There's something that this can teach me, even if it's not, as we were talking about in relation to the North Star

that I had set for myself at the time. And so, yeah, I totally agree with you. Yeah, you don't know exactly how that stuff is going to be useful, but if you're determined to find a way to use it, you can. There's very little that's new in the world, but the way each one of us mixes it all up, that's the new part. This episode of Focus is brought to you by Factor. This bustling holiday season, you might be looking for nutritious, flavorful meals to fuel you on jam-packed days.

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lately on the Focus podcast. Both Mike and I like to read books, and it's always fun to ask guests what they're reading. So Justin, what's on your nightstand right now? dad to a newborn. Our son is four months old. And I'm doing less traveling. I'm spending a little bit less time in the airport bookstore to see what new titles are out there on the shelf. I'm kind of in a season of just rereading books. And so if I was to open my Kindle app right now, I think it's The Rational Optimist is on my Kindle right now. That's by Matt Ridley. I read it, I don't know, it's probably seven or eight years ago now. And I think what's so striking to me about that book and the reason that I think I returned to it is because as we're heading into an election year, as we just went through a little bit of a moment of economic uncertainty, I think it's so sobering to have that moment where you're just saying, oh yeah, things have been getting better.

We do live in one of the best times to be alive, just objectively speaking. And I think, you know, me being a naturally more optimistically inclined, I think having a little bit of what he talks about in that book, you know, just remind me that like, yeah, it's okay to be an optimist in 2023 has been really, really valuable. And then if you, then if you really want to push me to be thinking about something that is new, I did pick up a hard copy of Alex Formosi's $100 million leads just because I got so much value from $100 million offers. And as I'm thinking about just a big content update for Total Station Nomination, and so I'm really thinking about running ads and doing a referral program and like

all of these principles that are just more like blocking and tackling in business. And so I'm getting a lot of value from that book as well. Business books. I love it. 100%. Not, I don't know, man. Cookbooks are like, cookbooks are often a selfish act with, with chefs and for better, for worse worse it's like sometimes the recipes and especially the high-end cookbooks i'll maybe say it in this way i have been tasked with editing cookbooks from friends in the past there's a particularly well-known seattle food writer and i did all of the recipe editing for both of her cookbooks that she did. And she's a food writer. And so she basically had chefs contribute recipes. I think her first book had

30 or 40 chefs from Seattle and they all submitted, I think it was like an appetizer and a main course. So there was a lot of dishes. And cookbook writers and recipe developers and book publishers have this kind of like rock in a hard place that they deal with with cookbooks, where the way that it's done in a restaurant has a lot of emote around it. We use this specific supplier. We use this really expensive high-end piece of equipment. We do this technique that is just like so far and beyond what any reasonable person would do because that gives us a moat for our business.

Nobody would do it in this way. Nobody can do it in this way. And that gives us protection from somebody just opening a place across the street and doing the same thing. And the publisher has this other problem, which is real people are going to be buying this book. Like this needs to have mass market penetration. And I'm going to get those angry letters in the mail. I wasn't able to use

this cookbook because I couldn't get these specific oysters, or I couldn't source this caviar, or I couldn't get this seaweed because you as the chef, you literally go diving in the cove every morning to get the seaweed out of the water. And so it tends to be a little bit less interesting for me to read cookbooks these days because I've just seen a little bit too much behind the curtain. And I know that the information that you're getting from a philosophy perspective can be really valuable. But from the recipes that you're seeing, sometimes they're not always that accurate. Because I have restaurants that I've directly worked at where I have the actual recipe that the restaurant uses, and I look at the recipe that's published in the cookbook

and it's just not right. And it's not any fault of the chef. It's often, hey, the publisher comes to that chef and says, hey, if we can't use this flour because you guys get the wheat in and you mill it yourself, what's an alternative that I can write in the book that would actually be something that someone can have a similar result with at home. And that chef using their experience, using what is going to make sure that the quality of the product is represented accurately is going to give an alternative that it's going to work. Like, it's not like the recipes don't work and you're going to get like just this pile of blub that you can't use. It's just when I find myself reading cookbooks, I think that's

hopefully what I sense that you're trying to pull on there, Mike, is that I often go for like the first 15 pages of the cookbook where the chef is talking about their story and their experience and how they decided on this concept more so than anything else. I kind of hijacked this part of the book conversation, but you know. I feel like though you learn like the benefit is the techniques, right? It's not really the result. That's true in a lot of skills. I mean, to go back to my woodworking, there's lots of people that tell you how they make a piece of furniture I'm not interested in, but I can learn a lot from watching them make it. I also want to go back to the rational optimist though, because a comment you made kind of stood

out to me. I feel like optimism in today's age is a survival skill. I think people don't realize that. And yeah, things are tough sometimes. And I know people listening to this are probably dealing with real tough times now, but, but there's also,

you know, optimism can help carry you through this stuff. And I'm not saying to be Pollyannish about it, but at the same time you know this book if you find yourself drawn to the more negative quarters um this is a good book i've read it too and i think i would recommend that the rational optimist what do you guys got so real quick with the the business or the uh the cookbook thing. It pertains to, I realize I read a lot of business books. I love those business systems books.

And every single one, you got to take the same approach. It's really what are the principles that I'm going to take from this? But there ain't no way I'm going to follow your system. Because that's not going to work in my organization. Well, yeah, because not just that, you don't have the same market conditions. You don't have the same landscape of competitors. You don't have the same, you know,

you have probably better tools than this person had when they were writing this or when they were at that stage in their journey when they were building their business. Yeah, it's like being able to parse signal from noise is such another key skill in addition to optimism. Yeah, that's essential. I'll follow up your practical optimist pick because I am reading something that I feel like kind of bookends with that nicely. It's Same As Ever by Morgan Housel.

And Morgan Housel also wrote The Psychology of Money. This is actually the first Morgan Housel. And Morgan Housel also wrote The Psychology of Money. This is actually the first Morgan Housel book that I have read, but I am really enjoying this one. And the premise behind the title is that people tend to want to know what's changed so they can be prepared for the future. But he says basically that the real important thing is the things that don't change, the things that stay the same. And I think that's kind of an interesting perspective. And he talks in that book a little bit about the balance between pessimism and optimism. And really, you do have to have both. But the one takeaway, I'm not finished with the book yet, but kind of the big takeaway as it pertains to this conversation is it's going to be okay. Things have been largely the same and okay

for a long time. And we tend to anchor on the things that are changing and the things that we feel are a threat. So anything new kind of initially feels like a threat and we anchor on that and we don't realize how there is actually a lot more stability than we realize. Like one of the things he points out is like in terms of the threats to your existence based on the advances in medicine and sanitation and all that kind of stuff. This is the best time in human history, and it's not even close. So the things that we are obsessed with, that we are worried about, are very different than the things people worried about even 100 years ago.

And basically just kind of take a deep breath. It's going to be okay. But I really like this one. It's a bunch of like smaller chapters, but, uh, like I said, first Morgan Housel book that I have read, but really enjoy this, this, uh, this writing style, some really crazy stories in here. Um, yeah, this is, this is a good one. I'm glad that you brought that up. I'm actually queuing it up here for myself to pick a, pick up a copy of that. Cause I, I have not picked up the book yet, but I'm a big fan of listening

to Morgan on podcasts. And as he was doing his big tour push for this book, I was just particularly getting, I get a lot of value from his way of thinking and how he kind of teased things up and presents ideas. So good shout. Yeah good shout. Yeah. He, he's a very clever writer and I mean that in the best sense of the word, you know, it really does pull you along. Well, mine is a little different. Uh, so in college I read, uh, letters from a stoic by Seneca. I did a lot of political philosophy back in the day and I've been trying to revisit that over the last few years. And somebody wrote me that, uh, university of Chicago just published the, um, uh, Seneca's complete works. He was a very, um, prolific writer and the, the letters on ethics I just bought. Um,

it's, uh, 500 pages of his letters and a hundred pages of notes. And then there's seven of these books because he wrote a lot. But I decided, because I read the letters from Stoic before, but this is a much extended version. So I'm going to read this. And if it's good, I'll look at some of his other ones as well. But I can see this as a rabbit hole. I could literally spend a year reading all these books. There's so many of them. But I'm looking forward to getting started. I just got it in the mail yesterday. I could definitely see you going down that rabbit hole, David. Yeah. Well, I mean, I think Stoicism is great, and it's very popular right now. But there's more to that whole school of thought with the Greeks you're Greeks are talking about than just stoicism. Stoicism is the, it's the, it's the mise en place Zen version of Greek philosophy right now, but the, but there's some real good stuff in there too. So I'm looking forward to reading it.

Well, I think that wraps it up for today. Thank you, Justin, for coming on the show. We really appreciate it. We are the focus podcast. You can find us at relay.fm slash focus. Justin, where do people go to find you? My website is justincana.com. You can search my name almost on every single platform and it should pop right up. If you want to start with something particularly fun, if you're not in the food industry, but you're still interested in maybe restaurants and chef culture, I did a whole breakdown of the TV show, The Bear on Hulu, and it's on my YouTube channel. So I basically go through every single episode and basically just add, is this accurate? Were they hyperbolizing here? Is there something that maybe the average viewer might have missed?

But I happen to call it out and then tie it to how it can help people in their professional careers. I have season two coming very soon. And then if you want to learn anything about the courses, the community, the coaching that I provide for working hospitality professionals, that's at joinrepertoire.com. And I want to thank our sponsors today, ExpressVPN, Indeed, and Factor. Thank you very much. And we will see you next time.