Pick Our Brain
I) Vision
We all have gifts on loan to us for our short period of time here on earth. Your talents are original to you and can not be duplicated. Embrace those talents and share them with the world.
Be confident. Don’t fall prey to those who criticize your ideas for being out of the main stream. Trust in your ideas, clearly communicate those ideas and success will find you.
If everybody's thought processes were the same and we all wanted to do, act, speak and be like everybody else the concept of “American Ingenuity”, and creativity would not exist.
An auographed copy of the menu at Le Gavaroche in 1997. I had a wonderful meal there the last day of my
Eric Sloan, in his book “The Spirit of ’76,” he talked about what he thought were the 10 basic principles of America. One of these principles or spirits was frugality. We as chefs practice this art to achieve many goals, from lowering food cost to menu creation. Two hundred years ago being frugal or thrifty were a must, there were no dumps or junk yards. Leftovers were reused and thrift spurred innovation like soap from animal fat, fertilizer from animal droppings, or new tools developed from broken instruments. When I was a young boy growing up in Massachusetts, I remember my mother had to be creative with the leftover food in our house. It seemed we ate leftovers five days a week. A bit exaggerated, but you understand where I am going with this. Probably one of the most memorable things for me as a child was dinner. Not because the food was great (we ate “pot au feu” on Sunday afternoons or home made desserts daily), but many casseroles, and my favorite at the holidays, turkey, cranberry, and stuffing sandwiches as well as turkey soup from the carcass. So I think it was those dinners which ignited my passion of creativity as it pertains to food. I now take satisfaction in being able to rummage through any refrigerator and create something special with the leftovers that are inside.
Roast Duck with Fig Bitter Greens and Chestnut Honey
You don’t need to have sight to have vision. I will leave you with an excerpt of a critical thinker reminiscing of another. Pertinent to today as it was in 1973 when this was written. Eric Sloan wrote in his book the Spirits of ‘76. I believe the greatest change in American thinking occurred in the mid 1800’s; Abraham Lincoln sensed this and was duly alarmed. “Our progress in degeneracy,” he said, “appears to be pretty rapid.” He then spelled out the trend of change in a thought-provoking paragraph remarkably pertinent to our present time:
You cannot bring about prosperity by discouraging thrift, You cannot strengthen the weak by weakening the strong. You cannot help the wage earner by pulling down the wage payer. You cannot help the poor by destroying the rich. You cannot build character and courage by taking away a man’s initiative and independence. You cannot help men permanently by doing for them what they could and should do for themselves. - Abraham Lincoln
Lincoln’s understanding of that moral code, the American dream, piece portrayed through the Declaration of Independence, of which was not meant solely to bring liberty to the United States, but to shine as a beacon of hope for the whole world to aspire to if they so choose.
Those who look within for greatness realize that greatness is in them as a gift of life. Then they share it with quiet confidence and transform the world from the inside out.
-Alan Cohen
