While You Are Working Keep Improving

 


I recently overheard a conversation I need to tell you about.

I was having lunch in a restaurant. A man wanted a glass of red wine. He pointed to a variety on the menu. The server looked at the wine list and then said, "This one? I'm not going to pronounce the name properly, but I'll try."

He then mangled the name of the wine and walked off to get it for the guest.

Just out of curiosity, when the server came to our table, I asked him how long he’d worked at the restaurant.

"This will be my eleventh year," he replied proudly. 

Hmmm... Eleven years. At this restaurant. Taking orders for food and wine. Spending many of his most valuable hours here. Giving his incredibly precious life energy to this job. Given the opportunity to be an expert at what he does. To become a merchant of wow. To receive huge tips.

Yet for some reason, he didn't seem to take his work his craft (a currency that could bring him not only vast professional, financial, and personal rewards but spiritual ones too) seriously. He never took the time to study the wine list so he could learn to pronounce the names properly. It appeared to me he just showed up, day after day. For eleven years.

 

As a contrast, consider Ferran Adrià, the founder and chef of the iconic Michelin three-star restaurant El Bulli. Known for leading the field of molecular gastronomy, providing his guests thirty-four-course meals, and mesmerizing fellow chefs by his monomaniacal obsession with getting details flawless, at the height of El Bulli's fame (two million people applied each season to get one of the rare reservations), Adrià closed the place.

 

Although he could have made a financial fortune with his creations (his "chicken curry" turned the traditional recipe on its head by placing the chicken sauce over curry ice cream) and he was heralded as "the best cook on the planet" by super-chef Joël Robuchon, he shuttered his shop because he felt he had gone as far as he could as a chef. And needed to explore fresh challenges for his growth as an artist.

 

Here's the takeaway: the moment you're at the top of your game and near the apex of your powers is the minute you need to push yourself to shatter your winning formula, recalibrate the skills that have served you so well, and imagine new ways to completely reinvent yourself. The alternative? Mediocrity. And a quick descent into obscurity.

culled from the: The wealth money cant buy by Robin Sharma

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