My wife bought me a terrific birthday gift in 2020: a Pit Boss smoker. Since it arrived at our house, we’ve enjoyed no end of brisket, pork loin, burgers, and more, and I’ve gotten to learn all manner of interesting techniques and tricks for unlocking maximum flavor from our meats.
But I’ve learned more than what it takes to cook up a tasty meal. Cooking is an inherently creative process, and my grill has imparted three big lessons that go beyond our backyard.
1 - The value of ritual
Most smoking recipes are broadly the same: apply X degrees of heat to the meat for Y time, with some small adjustments during the process depending on your desired final result. But with that sameness comes something valuable: a ritual. Most Sundays after church, I play it out: prime the smoker, take the meat out of the fridge, season it, increase the grill to the right temperature, apply the meat, wait, remove the meat, then eat. Based on experience, I now know just about exactly how long each step should take and what I should be doing while the meat is on the grill. The process has become second nature, and the more familiar it becomes, the better my results have been.
I’ve noticed the same process in my creative pursuits. Writing a blog post or email or print piece or creating a podcast tend to have the same workflow just about every time. Recognizing this has helped me maximize my results as in cooking. By acknowledging the existence of creative rituals, I’ve found I can tweak and improve them. What writing conditions help me be the most creative? What music? How long should it take to write something and when should I be seeing results? Knowing these answers has been an immense help and recognizing my own creative ritual has helped me repeat it.
2 - The value of patience
There’s a funny thing about meat. As a general rule, meat takes about an hour to cook per pound. That means no matter when you start your 12-pound brisket on the grill, it’s going to take about 12 hours to cook. You can’t speed it up or you’ll lose critical elements of what makes a particular cut particularly tasty.
This is both frustrating and freeing: the former because it can feel like forever when you’re waiting, the latter because it’s all out of your control.
Creatively, learning patience means recognizing that things take time. I used to write things as quickly as possible, pounding out hundreds (or thousands) of words in one fell swoop. But that approach left a lot of meat on the bone (to continue my metaphor). Often, I’ll read my work back and wish I’d said something differently or put things in a different order, adding something here or trimming something there. As I’ve aged, though, I’ve gotten more patient with my creativity. I’ve become more willing to sit and marinate on a topic or piece of writing, returning to projects a second or third or fourth time over the course of several days. That, in turn, has improved my results. Like meats (or any recipe), the results take an amount of time that can’t be rushed. Allowing that time to pass is crucial
3 - The pursuit of excellence
This is going to sound preposterous or pretentious or both, but there’s a Vince Lombardi quote that I think about a lot when cooking for my family: “Perfection is not attainable, but if we chase perfection we can catch excellence.”
Often as we’re winding down our lunch, I’ll look at my wife and say “That was great, but next time…” and list some minute change I’d make. She usually rolls her eyes, and her unspoken sentiment is right: I’m overthinking it.
But also, I’m not. I’m never going to cook a perfect brisket, but by trying to cook a perfect brisket I might cook an excellent one.
The same is true in my creative pursuits, aided by the object lesson of grilling. In about 500 attempts, I have yet to record a perfect podcast, but by attempting to capture perfection, my results have gotten better and better over time.