Those who know me know that I enjoy cooking. More than enjoy, I would say that it is a hobby of mine. Spending hours in the kitchen taking individual ingredients, transforming them, and creating something that you can share with others is for me one of the biggest pleasures in life. But, apart from being a pleasure, it has also been a school. It has taught me patience and it has given me the ability to blindly wait for long periods of time to be rewarded with the outcome of my efforts. We all desperately need to learn how to cook.
It is funny that what I do for a living and what I like doing in my spare time are both related to the pass of time. Berenice Abbott wrote in her book 'The World of Atget': "(...) the photographer is the contemporary being par excellence; through his eyes the now becomes past." As photographers, we capture present time moments and turn them into memories from the past. But, as someone who enjoys cooking, the pleasure relies in imagining how a dish would taste in the future and then build with present ingredients towards that.
Carmen Herrera said in the documentary on her life: "If you wait for the bus, the bus will come." She had to wait until she was almost a 100 years old to be recognized for her art. But she never stopped painting. Not even when she was told at some point in her life that she would never make it in the art world because she was a woman. Talk about perseverance. Yet nowadays we are not willing to wait for anything in our lives: we buy pre-cooked food instead of cooking it ourselves, instant messaging has replaced almost all of our communications, we want immediate success without doing the effort.
If you have a goal in life you must have the patience and perseverance to attain it, but also the vision to make it sustainable in time. Immediate success often comes with immediate failure. Our business community is so consumed in going from zero to profit in the least amount of time possible that no one seems to be focusing on how to survive after success. In my opinion, it is better to arrive slowly but to have a solid foundation that will keep us going for long.
Don't rush into things, not even when you feel that everyone else is ahead of you. Everything happens at the right time. You can't have 40 years of experience if you haven't lived for 40 years. The same way that you can't make a delicious homemade meal if you don't spend a few hours in the kitchen.
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