As with most teenagers, one of my first life lessons of being away from home at age 18 was learning how to cook. I would either learn to cook or starve!
Naturally, I was drawn first to cooking desserts since they were sweet empty calories. One of my first attempts at this was making doughnuts via canned biscuits fried in oil. Since I was a novice at cooking and 100% brilliant, I tried to expedite the process and put the stove on maximum heat to make the doughnuts fry faster. Using this method, the vegetable oil came to a boil hard and fast. Next, I started throwing in the biscuit dough one by one. As the oil heat escalated, the entire house got really smoky, the oil started to splatter everywhere, and the smoke alarm went off.
At the exact moment the smoke alarm started to sound, a girl from the apartment complex stopped by to visit. About 10 seconds after she stopped by after witnessing the chaos, she excused herself and took a U-turn. It was a smart move on her part, because the final outcome of waiting an hour for the smoke to clear was the doughnuts were very well done on the outside, but not cooked at all on the inside. In theory, the doughnuts should have looked like this:
What I got instead was not edible resemblances to that. However, I learned 3 principles to becoming a better cook with many more life applications:
1) Following directions is a good skill to learn - This principle applies to much more than cooking. If you want to get good grades and do well in your career, learn what is expected of you (I can't emphasize this enough) and then meet or exceed those expectations. It took me a long time to learn that just spending the time to understand what your professor/boss wants will allow you to do A+ work. When I spend a lot time and energy doing things that the professor or boss doesn't value, it leads to bad results and evaluations.
I must admit that I could have used the above book in my teens and twenties. It's better to learn from those who have gone before than trying to reinvent a wheel that will probably end up crooked. The difference between success and failure often hinges on one small detail in the instructions. Skip a step and you might not like the outcome.
2) Be willing to go through trial and error - We aren't usually good at what we try the first time. This was especially true with me and cooking. Even though I consider myself only an adequate cook today, my level of expertise has increased a hundred fold from when I started. I could even make those doughnuts todays without incident (most likely).
Even the brightest people in the world failed before succeeded. Madame Marie Curie, who won two Nobel prizes, tried to isolate radium from a low-grade uranium to fight against tumors. She only succeeded after hundreds of failed experiments. Thomas Edison was also well known for many failed experiments, but is better known for his few incredible successes.
Even if we aren't as brilliant as Edison or Curie, it doesn't mean we can't try and fail. We don't need to be a superstar from day one. Most superstars in most fields have a past full of failures that they leveraged into future success. I like the mindset of Edison on this one:
3) Be willing to gain experience in what you aren't good at - I was a terrible cook when I had no experience just like everybody else. The people who become great cooks gain experience and learn until they have a lot of dishes mastered.
Although Simon Cowell isn't a particularly good role model, he is a good example of what ambition will do for you. He worked in the mail room of a company he wanted to work for and then worked his way up the corporate ladder. Later, after he tried to start his own company and took on too much debt, he had to move back home with his parents at age 30. Of course, he stuck with his path and eventually ended up at the very top of his industry.
Even Hall of Fame quarterback Steve Young wasn't a great passer coming out of high school. Here's an interesting quote by him: "I don't think we ever practiced throwing the ball in high school. We passed only under duress. I was embarrassed to throw in public..." He was the 8th string quarterback his first season at BYU and was asked to move to safety by the head coach. Fortunately, he didn't see the lack of passing experience as an 18 year old as the final outcome of his career.
Although I didn't realize it at the time I was botching my doughnuts, I was actually learning by trial and error that instructions matter. Through a lot of subsequent life experience, those lessons would become invaluable to other aspects of my life. That's the reward of trying.
