If you eat protein first thing in the morning, you will not be hungry for at least half a day.

I read that somewhere, so I resolved to eat an omelette everyday for breakfast.1

Well, it works. I must have cooked more than a thousand omelettes to this day.

  1. Because following stranger's advice online is what I do. And you, too. ↩

It took me 7 minutes and 38 seconds to prepare this morning's omelette.

Those are 458 seconds.

When I started this plan, about three years age, every one of those 458 seconds felt like an hour.

My eyes fixed on the pan 👀
the pan heating up
I put my hand close: cold
wait 👀
wait more 👀
move my hand again: still cold
really? 😫

If you stare at a pan, it will take 2 hours to heat up.2

  1. As we all know. ↩

I was used to having a coffee and rushing out, that's why the wait was so excruciating.

Eventually it became the new normal, though, and I was mindlessly going through the motions,

through the omelette motions,

on autopilot,

just thinking about my stuff.

Then one day I watched Jiro Dreams of Sushi.

Jiro Ono is an octogenarian who has been obsessed with sushi since he was a kid.

A nigiri is a piece of raw fish on top of a bunch of steamed white rice; one wouldn't think there's much room to do anything special there.

Jiro will serve you 20 of those and prove you wrong.

He is a living embodiment of how obsession for every detail can turn simplicity into art.

At the end of the meal, Jiro serves a dessert.

It is the closing act of an experience that you've been waiting for months3, from one of the most skilled craftsmen in his art.

And the dessert is a tamagoyaki.

An omelette! How fitting!

  1. Just check this lady's recollection of what it takes to get a seat there. ↩

This is some random tamagoyaki from Wikipedia, not Jiro's work of art.

"I have to do one of those", I thought,

and so I started

my journey
into
omelette mastery.

Last post I talked about the perils of the unexamined pursuit of excellence. How toxic we can become with the things that we obsess about.

This time I want to praise

the benefits of
the pursuit of excellence
in the things that
we couldn't care less about.

Cooking a tamagoyaki is easy to learn and impossible to master.

It's about how much you wait to start rolling, it's about how tight you wrap the layers, it's about how cleanly you cut it in regular pieces.

For months now, I've been pushing myself to get it just right.

I've not achieved a perfect omelette a single time.

Yet.

Should I change the temperature of the pan? Should I whisk the eggs more briskly to get a softer texture? Should I salt it on the bowl or on the pan?

Stupid arbitrary goal: to cook a perfect omelette.

It has me observing attently, trying different things, reflecting on what I should have done differently.

A stupid arbitrary goal has pushed me into the growth zone for something that I don't give a damn about.

Isn't this lovely? Those stupid omelettes have enriched my mornings, they have developed an interest in cooking that I didn't have, they made me curious, they made me playful.

Playful, that's it, playful: striving for excellence at something that is irrelevant, in a very low stakes environment.

Isn’t this the best way to spend one’s days?

In the beginning, those omelettes where a chore. Just make them as fast as possible. Don't bother. Cooking an omelette is not worth the hassle. Not Worth It, that's it! That's the name of the bottom-left zone:

the "Not Worth It" Area.

I don't care, therefore I don't even try.

Every minute spent in the "Not Worth It" area is a minute lost in this life. A tasteless, mindless, uninvolved minute that you are not getting back.

Hey! I disagree!

But, who are you?!?

That doesn't matter now. My point is that spending time and effort in perfecting what is irrelevant is a waste of talent. That effort should be put into the things that matter!

Wrong!

"How you do anything is how you do everything."

I distrust anyone that is squandering efforts on this basis. Coincidentally, when the efforts are required, there's no way to find them. The muscle is just not there because it was never exercised.

This is the only work ethic! The only life ethic!

Strive for excellence in EVERYTHING that you do.

But, shouldn't the task be to spend the maximum amount of time on the things that truly matter?

What do you mean?

We should organize our life so that we spend the least possible time in the unimportant!

We should not aim to move from "Not Worth It" to The Playground, we should aim avoid them in the first place!

Well… yes, but don't dream.

The max amount of time that you can spend on things that matter is 25%.

Where did you get that from?!

I just made it up, but prove me wrong.

I didn't make it up, actually, I read it in some Peter Drucker book. It referred to work time, not total time, but life is fractal, I'm sure this rule is universal.

Say you are awake 16 hours a day, the max amount of time doing meaningful stuff is 4 hours. And 4 hours is actually an aspiration, not a benchmark. You are not going to get it.

Which means you are going to spend more than 12 hours a day cooking omelettes, so you better make it interesting.

How do you make it interesting?

How do you take something dull and lift that activity into The Playground?

  1. Log everything you do on a day.
  2. Notice the uninteresting things in your day.4
  3. Realize someone does that for a living.5
  4. Realize someone is a real pro at it.6
  5. Actually, someone has taken it to the category of art.7
  6. Search YouTube and find a video about it.

  1. Like driving to work. ↩

  2. Someone drives people places for a living. ↩

  3. Someone is just killing it when it comes to driving people somewhere. ↩

  4. Drive, baby, drive. ↩

Believe me, everything in your list will be covered:

  1. You might have noticed my devotion for Rajiv Surendra, one of my favorite people on the planet. Only the possibility that this post is introducing him to you is worth the pain of reading me. ↩

Then one day you will do an omelette and it will be a disaster and you will want to throw the pan through the window in rage 🤬. You will get in the car, swearing in frustration for the f#%k!ng omelette because it's impossible to get it the way you want and you are not making any progress but going backwards.

The omelette will spoil your morning.

The same omelette that once was an annoying chore.

The same omelette that then turned into a mindless habit.

The same omelette that you transformed into a fun challenge.

That same omelette is now spoiling your mornings.

Isn't this interesting?

The fact that I have set a arbitrary goal has made me start caring about something that didn't matter to me before.

It's one of those cause-consequence whirlwinds:

You pay attention because you care.
You care because you pay attention.

The day I decided to aim for a perfect omelette is the day I started to be attached to that goal.

At a certain point,
I drifted from The Playground to the right,
where the stakes are high,
where you get attached,
where you build expectations,
expectations bring dissapointment,
dissapointment bring self-doubt,
and all those things I already talked about.

Let's call that place: The Arena.

The difference between The Playground and The Arena is like that of writing a public presentation versus delivering it in front of a thousand people.

There's a gradient of fear as you move along the right axis that prevents you from playing and pushes you into identifying yourself with the task.

Suddenly, it's not the omelette that's at stake, it's you.

There's a way back from The Arena to The Playground, and it's called:

"Don't take yourself too seriously".

Others have used different terms, too.

The Playground represents the ideal of how this life is to be lived, with

full involvement and non-attachement.

Those two terms, that seemed contradictory to me, are only possible in The Playground.

Full involvement to push your game beyond your limits; non-attachment to let go if things don't go your way.

The Playground is the place where sustainable growth can happen to us.

But The Playground is in unstable balance. A little push and you are off.

Either we fall down into apathy, or we slide into obsession; those seem to be our natural states.

What will keep us in balance?

Will and presence.

The will to raise from apathy; the presence to not lose perspective.

But you knew this already.

So that's my Life Task right now: to keep my omelettes in The Playground, where they belong.

While I'm at it, I might as well bring along as many other stuff as I can, from ordering my socks to speaking in public to writing these posts to managing a big team to educating my children.

And if I fail because I still obsess about things or because I cannot find the motivation… well, I shall be ok. I can still open some other challenging project in The Playground like, you know, toasts.