Daily Practice

Being excellent is a game of tonnage

The Sea Ranch, SFMOMA exhibit

When Julia Child was developing a recipe for a French baguette, she was confused. Julia had been studying cooking relentlessly for six years prior. She had already passed the Cordon Bleu exams and published the first volume of her book to wild success and popularity. Yet, the baguette stumped her. Julia spent two years and 284 pounds of flour trying to get it right. She read multiple French textbooks on the fine points of yeasts and flours. She shipped bread samples to her editor, Judith Jones, who wrote back that they “looked and tasted like gnarled olive twigs.” The breakthrough finally came via an article in the newspaper about a pastry professor. After carefully observing the professor and adapting his insights for the home oven, Julia’s discovery was that she should add an asbestos tile into the oven with a pan of water underneath the bread. Julia was so excited about the recipe – it would be the crown jewel of her second book, she thought. But right before the second book went to print with the all-important bread recipe, Sloan Kettering published some dramatic research that unveiled that asbestos caused cancer. And so it was back to the drawing board for Julia! 

I love Julia Child because of situations like this. She spent thousands of hours on baguettes until she got them right. She messed up. She had notable failures: she failed her first Cordon Bleu exam, she served various disasters to her friends, and couldn’t flip a perfect omelette every time. She was hard working and a perfectionist, but was so far from perfect. 

I’ve been trying to emulate Julia’s hard work and perfection on my own writing journey. I’m still in the phase of dropping omelettes on the floor – I’m not good at writing quite yet – but I try to do it anyway. My goal is to sit down every single morning and write for three hours. The strict discipline of daily writing ensures I don’t succumb to entertaining distractions like seeing friends and reading books to avoid my inadequacies. Every day, I wake up, make my little cup of tea, and then stare at a blank Google doc until something comes. It is often deeply uncomfortable to do so, and most of what I write is garbage. Once I’ve done the writing, I’ll let myself do whatever I want – read a book, watch TV, hang with pals, go research something. 

It’s hard not to feel like I’m horrible when writing comes so naturally to many of my friends. They turn out beautiful pages of prose and poetry as the whim strikes them. They have the gift and confidence of a natural. I give them a piece of mine to read and I can see them wincing at every awkward phrase. It’s hard not to feel super jealous of their abilities. Sometimes I feel like I’m on a regular bike while everyone else is on an electric bike that can whiz up the hill with no effort. When people try to comfort me and say that everyone works hard, I scoff – fiddlesticks! Natural talent is a real thing, and some people just have it. I just can’t let my lack of it be a barrier.

Julia Child had her own naturally talented perfect foil: Simone Beck, her co-author in Mastering the Art of French Cooking, is described as a prodigy. Julia despairs of “Simca’s” work ethic (poor) and Simca’s intuitive style (lacking measurements.) Simca was natural, creative, and emotional, and the person who came up with the vast majority of the notable recipes in Mastering the Art of French Cooking. Julia’s role was really to refine the recipes, write them in English, and make them reproducible by the average American cook. But through her perseverance, her role grew to a much more significant one over time. Julia practised and cooked so much that she became better.

For us “non-geniuses” out there, the only way to get good at anything is to practise. Sitting at the desk and writing when you don’t want to, baking endless baguettes when they all taste like crap, and writing lots of jokes until you have a treasure trove of the funniest ones. Some of the luckiest of us hard workers will become the Julia Childs of the world, or the Jerry Seinfelds. Most of us hard workers will remain toiling in mediocrity for years, hoping that the slowly compounding skill we gain every day will finally add up to something. 

After publishing so many pieces, I had a real reckoning with that potential future. “If I end up trying to write and it turns out to be a pile of crap, will I keep going? Will I keep writing even if everyone tells me it’s the type of slop reserved for high school love poetry and fanfiction.net?”

Why is it so hard to just do something just for the love of doing it vs. needing to be "good" at it? I used to be very dedicated to music and practiced for hours every day. But after I didn’t go to conservatory for college, I completely stopped. I wasn’t excellent. Whenever I saw musicians, I would feel a weird twinge in my heart. My insecurity would spoil all enjoyment I had of the practice. I was probably in the top 10% of the general population — I was top 2 in my year in high school¹ — but I haven’t played music since. Writing is the opposite: I have become so prolific because I want to get better. These days, I think about the following question: when is the desire to be excellent holding me back from doing what I want, versus when is it driving me to do more of what I want?

1. I was worse than Volodymyr Dolak, who went to conservatory for clarinet!