I spent over an hour preparing dinner tonight. I diced, washed, fried, peeled, basted, marinated, seasoned and eventually served. But less important than the actual end product, the meal, I'm for some reason right now interested in the entire process that brought the food to the table. And that process of course started with the ingredients. Isn't cooking the perfect analogy for almost any work we do? So what lessons can we take from the kitchen for other areas in our lives?

It starts with the ingredients. Know them and treat them right and with care your meal will be all the more flavorful. We are a species at work. Everyday we work. Our livelihoods, our relationships, our bodies, interests, and health. It can be easy that we should overlook our ingredients in all of these daily happenings which so easily blur into the background of habit and motion. But no, it shouldn't be this way. Think as locally as possible just like you would with your meal, preferring that they'd been raised right out front in your garden. Be patient and prepare and give special treatment to the small things in your work because they provide the support and foundations for the meal at the end. 

what else can we learn from the kitchen?