My first job in the restaurant business was at an ultra-exclusive country club in Beverly Hills, California. I was working harder than any other 15-year-old I knew then or know now for that matter.
I was not hanging out with my friends and chasing girls all summer long. I wasn’t doing whatever stupid things kids going from their freshman to sophomore year in high school do during their summers. Instead, I was getting driven by my mom to my job in the kitchen. Can you imagine how the cooks treated me when they saw my mom dropping me off at the country club to work my shift?!
I don’t know where I got that work ethic from, but I have always had it. Many of you do too. Many of you actually have a great work ethic, but the world is not treating you fairly, so you get frustrated. This frustration leads to poor decision-making and poor decision-making leads to less than desirable results and that leads to giving up.
SURVIVAL OF THE FITTEST
The world has not set you up to succeed. It has set you up to survive. but you don’t want to merely survive; you want to thrive.
Being the best is not about being born with more talent than others. The great professional basketball player Kobe Bryant was often criticized by his teammates and by commentators for not passing the ball enough. But Kobe lived by what he called the “Mamba Mentality.” This meant he showed up to practice earlier than anybody else, stayed later than anybody else, and worked harder than anybody else.
Was he selfish for not passing the ball?
He was often quoted as saying that with 3 seconds left on the clock, why would he pass the ball to a teammate when he had practiced the shot 10,000 times more than they had. He would add that as soon as his teammates put in the same amount of work he did, he would pass the ball to them. He believed, and his record proved, that since he put in the work, he was more prepared than anybody else on the court to take the game-winning, buzzer-beating shot.
This idea of outworking everybody else is the hard stuff teachers are not teaching in school, that our parents are not telling us, and that our friends are not willing to say to our face.
Sure, they say you have dig in and work hard. But they aren’t talking about the same level of hard that the best work at. That is a whole new level of hard. That is working hard, but also practicing right and practicing the right things.
You can pass a class with a C or even a D, but that won’t work in the real world. Say you get a C on a test of 100 questions; that’s roughly 75 correct or 25 wrong. Imagine if you serve dinner to 100 guests tonight and get 25 of the orders wrong. A teacher would say that you passed, you got a C, you can now open a restaurant.
If your kitchen is making mistakes, don’t just say we need to do better tomorrow or we need to stop making mistakes. Find out what mistakes are being made, why they are being made, and then develop a new system and training to prevent this from happening again. Work with your kitchen staff and practice until that mistake is no longer an issue. Then do it again and again and again until your kitchen is perfect.
Will you ever achieve perfection? Probably not. But in the pursuit of perfection, you will get a lot better. Practice does not make perfect, perfect practice makes perfect.
THE ONLY WAY TO FAIL IS TO GIVE UP
There are two things holding you back from getting everything you want; not believing that you deserve it and not willing to find the knowledge you need to get it. I’m certain that somebody from a worse position than you are in now has achieved more than you can dream of and I can guarantee you that if you give up, at any point, you will not achieve whatever it is that you want.
The great Winston Churchill once said, “Success is not final; failure is not fatal: It is the courage to continue that counts.”
Failure is such a terrible word. I wish that the word “failure” did not exist. Why? Because failing is actually a good thing. It’s an opportunity to try again and try differently. It lets you know that you have more work to do.
Think about the nerves on your fingertips. They are there so we don’t hurt ourselves. If you touch something that’s hot, your brain makes you feel pain so you pull your hand away quickly and don’t touch it again. It’s a survival mechanism.
So, nerves help keep you safe, in fact, they keep you alive. Failure is similar.
Our brain interprets failure as a threat against our life, when in reality it is not. But that reaction is designed to keep us alive and to keep us from doing the same thing over and over again. We feel the pain of failure so we can get better. If we don’t improve and keep doing the same things, we run the risk of going broke, suffering from depression, or missing out on the joys of life.
Instead of allowing fear to paralyze you and make you feel sorry for yourself, use that pain to improve.
WHY NOT YOU?
Seriously, why not you? It does not matter that you’re not where you want to be right now. Don’t let the past dictate your future. That is what this is all about; it’s about believing that you can do it, understanding the rules to the game, learning how to use the tools you will need and then doing it.
You can have excuses or success, just not both. So, why not you and why not now?
Ryan Gromfin is an author, speaker, chef, restauranteur, and founder of therestaurantboss.com, clickbacon.com, and scalemyrestaurant.com. He is the most followed restaurant coach in the world helping Restaurant Owners and Operators increase profits, improve operations, and scale and grow their businesses.
