My Life Was a Trash Party Before I Cleaned My Cups

At the risk of sounding like your parents, Corkscrew advises you to do things like clean your cups to pave the way to success. Laugh, but it shouldn’t surprise anyone that past the age of five, no one finds it cute to leave a mess for someone else. The concepts of humility and the art of process live in the small.

Here’s a few anecdotes about how I found my own clean-your-cups moments, and some takeaways:

In cooking school we had three bins for sorting kitchen refuse: one for boxes, one for plastics, and one for compost. If we failed to sort properly our chef would stop whatever we were doing and dump out say, a steaming pile of chicken guts on the kitchen floor. We were to sort through with our bare hands for the offending article (usually a piece of plastic wrapper in the compost), put everything back in the proper bins, then return to finish our production.

It could mean disaster for timing our multiple dishes that had to come out at once, and this mess could happen two to three times in one class. If we didn’t sort our refuse properly, it would mean that someone, at some point in time, would have to — and that simply would not do.

It was called a trash party.

My favorite was when we made hollandaise, a fussy brunch favorite consisting of melted butter and egg whites. Someone messed up, and I can now confirm there is something more slippery than an ice rink. There was a hollow thump of something cavernous and plastic, and the sound of objects hitting the floor.

“Chef, someone could fall. This stuff is really slick,” I protested.

“Especially at the rate you’re cleaning it. I’m surprised: Two months in and you can’t even use a mop right — Oh wait, no I’m not.”

I was red with anger, but held my tongue.

Among other childish complaints quashed by the wrath of our chef was the whole, “It’s not my fault,” defense. We paid for mistakes collectively, but human nature led us to whodunits. When chef controversially wrote all of our failing grades on the board, we realized there was no time for finger pointing. These were hard lessons. We resented our chef out loud but appreciated what he was doing for us on the inside.

One rumor was that if you walked away from something while it was cooking to go clean, this particular chef would turn the flame up as high as it would go and burn your food on purpose. This, ostensibly, was to teach a lesson about never walking away from a flame.

After my glaze inexplicably burned three times in a row while I went to scrub pots, I had enough. All the effort I had put in that day was gone since I had to take time out and scrub the pan coated with blackened sugar on three separate occasions, throttling all else. Classes, mind you, could run from 1:30PM to 10:00PM. In this particular instance, I would get a failing grade for the day.

“Chef, don’t take this the wrong way, but did you intentionally burn my glaze?”

His face twisted and tone darkened. He took up the room like Gandalf in the Lord of the Rings movie when Bilbo refuses to give up the ring.

“I know the tendency is to blame someone else for your mistakes, but YOU were the one who burned it.”

Out of a class of fourteen, only six passed.

I was not one of them.

Food has always been a great metaphor for me. We’re working towards a result, ‘to put [physical] food on the table’, ‘to bring home the bacon’, whatever tired saying you want to slap on it. Food is a tangible mark of your efforts. The same could be said of things like painting houses, building furniture, or fixing vehicles. For the intangible elements of running a business, however, it should be a priority to find what these clean-your-cups moments are. If we were painting, we might ask whether we applied primer or sanded rough edges before we apply finish paint. Jose Andrés on NPR’s How I Built This podcast tells of how his father would only let him build a fire for years before he could actually cook, his father describing the fire as the most important part (Indeed, good fire and wood is one of the defining elements of good paella).

Clean-your-cups moments beg the question of whether we focus too much on the end result of our endeavors. Could that focus be better spent on the process we use to get to that result? I argue, and experience tells me, yes. Our chef told us that good food can’t come out of a dirty kitchen. That’s fact. Is it not outrageous then to think that good anything can’t come of laziness and having no eye for detail? Paint will peel, chairs will collapse, cars will break down, and food will make innocent people sick if you fail to pay attention. In the non-tangible aspects of running a business it is indeed the things which we consider small that add up to something larger than ourselves.

It’s also the difference between doing something right the first time or having to constantly back track to fix an error. Things like remembering to send a thank you note, organize your desk or files on your computer, these are all considerably more important than whatever fire you might be trying to put out from previous oversights.

Not everyone has a slightly off balance chef to berate them into good habits and certainly you can’t always be perfect, but here are a few things I learned off the top of my head:

1. In a team, everyone may have different roles but all are equal. If someone didn’t have to be there, they wouldn’t be there — Ideally, that is. Treat everyone with respect, whether by words or by action.
2. We look out for each other first and our individual goals second. As a Corkscrew Thinker, know that the direct route isn’t always optimal. Small acts of kindness more often than not go reciprocated.
3. Clearing clutter counts. If you were on a road you wouldn’t drive through a fallen tree, would you? As mentioned in the article on cleaning your cups, the act of tidying up can give you time to clear your thoughts. “Clean your station,” was a favorite of my chef when he saw me start to lose the plot. It gave me the time to prioritize tasks, and when I went to do them I was ready for take off.
4. Actively look for ways to make small improvements. In the previous article on the clean-your-cup mentality, the Slight Edge Theory is mentioned. Of similar sentiment is Kaizen, which emphasizes the active search for said improvements. The same way cutting corners adds up to a big failure, small improvements add up to a big win.
5. Blaming others is a useless enterprise. My chef once told me that the kitchen is his safe space. I found it odd at the time, considering how dangerous and hot a professional kitchen can be. But he was right. You can control what goes on in your work, but the same can’t always be said for what goes on outside of it. If you see something going wrong on your team, it’s up to you to fix it. Playing detective as a knee-jerk reaction will only slow you down.

The first lesson we learned was the names for all equipment, where it was stored, and proper use.

“If you continue to think that your food is more important than the dish pit, I will start sending you all up randomly, to scrub these! This is food, and food doesn’t care about fair.” Our chef shouts as he holds up a pan — A wise, if at times severe, man.

Indeed, most work isn’t fair, and doing good work isn’t easy. It only gets easy when we critically examine our habits.

So I exhort you dear reader in the shared chorus of Corkscrew, clean your cups, sort your refuse, tie the loose ends when you see them. Don’t let small mistakes accumulate. In doing so, you will clean up your act and live a much easier existence. One that others would hardly call a trash party.