“A chef plays around with raw ingredients to try to make them into something good. By doing this puzzling, a chef eventually writes a new recipe. The other kind of reasoning—reasoning by analogy—happens when you look at the way things are already done and you essentially copy it—kind of like a cook following an already written recipe…
For any particular part of your life that involves reasoning and decision making, wherever you happen to be on the spectrum, your reasoning process can usually be boiled down to fundamentally chef-like or fundamentally cook-like. Creating vs. copying. Originality vs. conformity.”
— from Wait But Why
There are plenty of places in your life when following a “recipe” makes perfect sense. You don’t need to reinvent things. But when it comes to the most important things in your life, like what you’re doing for a career, I believe it behooves you to think like a chef and take the road less traveled. Meaning simply to think for yourself.
What — and how — do you think?