Making Kimchi Showed Me How I Sabotage Myself
And how to be more productive and happy
My kimchi was bad — again, for the fourth time in a row. I glared at my black marble countertop as I crunched, trying to make sense of how the pickled cabbage could taste too bitter and sweet at the same time.
I went over the instructions again in my head. The day-long process of prepping 20 ingredients; salt-pickling the cabbage; dicing, boiling, and blending things together for the sauce; pulling on nitrile gloves to mix the pungent sauce with cabbage; and triple-checking instructions every step of the way to make sure I did it right this time.
The fresh batch tasted unusually promising. The flavors of fish sauce and garlic, salted shrimp and red pepper flakes, and salt and sugar seemed well-balanced. I had a few bites, content with myself, before letting it sit for a night and popping it in the fridge.
Then I tried it again.
I was on the phone with my mom and she had asked that I try, curious how it turned out. I took a bite; she asked why I was frowning.
The aftertaste was too salty. Again.
This happened every single goddamn time I made kimchi (except once). I tried adjusting the salt-to-water ratio or the time I spend pickling, drastically slashing recommended doses and times.
My mom recommended a patch: apple cider (for sugar to balance out the salt, and to feed the fermenting bacteria) and daikon radish (to suck up the salt).
The next day, as I was glaring at my black marble countertop, I started spiraling — not just about the failed kimchi.
I thought of the 1000-piece puzzle sitting lopsided on my tufted carpet. I thought of the journal rejection sitting in my inbox that I hadn’t told my former PhD advisors about.
I thought of the salt I had used — granulated, instead of coarse— and I wondered, ‘Do I hate myself?’ Why else would I make things so difficult, then get mad at myself for not being able to follow through?
The truth is I had stubborn notions about how to master something. I thought the worthiness of a victory was dictated by the blood, sweat, and tears with which it was accomplished. This led me to this bizarre notion that inducing blood, sweat, and tears — unnecessarily — could lead to victories, and I valued these victories even if they were false.
Hopefully, I’ve finally learned the following lessons:
1. Just follow the goddamn instructions
They exist for a reason. In the case of kimchi, they’ve been developed over millenia of experimentation. Who am I to uncover the secret that will overturn millenia of tradition?
In previous attempts, I had substituted less common ingredients for whatever I had at home, or just not added them at all. ‘Fish sauce? I’m sure the garlic and fermented shrimp will cover for its absence.’ (It did not.) ‘Napa cabbage? I’m sure any old cabbage will do.’ (It does not, unless you completely re-work the recipe to account for the thinner leaves.)
‘Coarse salt ? I’m sure I can just use 2/3 of the recommended amount with the granulated Morton’s I have at home, that fine, sand-like substance we use at restaurants.’ This was by far my most egregious mistake. Over three previous failed attempts, I had learned my lesson to actually use the right ingredients not all at once, but groups by group — Napa cabbage and salted shrimp; fresh red chili flakes and sugar; fish sauce and green onions.
Even after learning my lesson with three previous failed attempts, I held out on using the right ingredient for the most important ingredient of all: salt.
Salt is by far the most important ingredient of any kimchi recipe: not only does it pickle and de-sanitize, it also flavors. Granulated does the first two just fine, but its fineness means it gets absorbed more easily by the vegetable you’re pickling.
The pickled vegetable becomes unbearable.
Why — why did I insist on torturing myself by holding out on a five-dollar bottle of salt? How did I keep forgetting it over various H-Mart runs? Why couldn’t I pop over to the local store to see if they have coarse salt for salt grinders?
The truth is I was cocky. I was so convinced I was clever enough to substitute one ingredient for another, that I could course-correct without understanding how the handle affected four wheels — without understanding where the wheels were or in which direction they were heading.
Kimchi is not a noun so much as a verb. You can make kimchi of anything — cucumbers, radishes, cabbages, oysters. It is not a stochastic process so much as the amalgamation of several stochastic processes. Each ingredient — including time and room temperature — not only has its own trajectory, but affects and is affected by the trajectory of every other ingredient.
Instructions exist because you don’t understand these interactions. Even factory-made kimchi using the same machine and same recipes day after day has huge quality control problems. The same jar from the same company often tastes completely different — unless they cheat and drown the ingredients in vinegar, as non-Asian-sold varieties often do.
Why bother making things unnecessarily difficult?
The instructions are right there — literally right there.Coarse salt is one of the only consistencies across English and Korean sources, whether authentic-made by a Korean auntie or peddled by an outsider.
But this was not just about salt. I was ignoring straightforward, age-old instructions elsewhere, too:
- I wasn’t sleeping regular hours and wondering why I was tired all the time
- I wasn’t meditating because it only dialed down the volume of my internal radio chatter instead of turning it off like I wanted, then wondering why the volume was pushing 100% all the time
- I wasn’t taking breaks that were actually breaks and wondering why I felt burnt out all the time
- I wasn’t asking for help — from friends or advisors — and wondering why I felt stranded and alone
- I was doing puzzles on shaggy carpet instead of smooth surfaces and wondering why it was taking so goddamn long to finish them
But all of this was partially a lie. I wasn’t wondering why. I knew, to some extent, and just thought I could push through without following stupidly simple instructions: Sleep well; meditate; take breaks; ask for help.
This self-fulfilling trap of a mindset was sustained partly out of not being able to acknowledge my own wants and needs, but also partly out of arrogance. I prided myself in thinking I was clever enough to overcome moderate difficulties, even setting challenges for myself.
What I didn’t foresee was that these tiny frictions at each step and iteration compounded. Every second I wasted trying to see if the puzzle pieces actually didn’t fit or just couldn’t fit because of the uneven surface beneath them added up, not just for each puzzle piece but for each connection I tried.
“Just follow the goddamn instructions” means stop making things harder for yourself.
2. Do it right the first time, instead of course-correcting later
Course-correcting is costly and easily leads to over-correcting. It’s like trying to throw a basketball at a moving basketball to get the first one into the hoop instead of throwing it right the first time.
My efforts to save kimchi have so far gone unrewarded. This is, as I said in Step #1, because I don’t understand the interactions between the stochastic processes. Adding this or that a few days later to bury the strong taste of salt, or make up for lack of richness in taste, was like throwing a basketball blindfolded without knowing where the other ball in the room was.
My mother is the Michael Jordan of kimchi. She doesn’t need to write out physics equations to destroy the game. She understands these processes so intuitively I can’t get her to explain them in well-measured doses.
She is also not physically in my court; she lives an ocean away. Trusting her to fix my kimchi over the phone was like trusting her to direct my body’s direction and aim while I was still blindfolded, not knowing where the other ball was, while she also didn’t know where exactly the other ball was because she could only guess where it was based on staticky imaging.
I’m moving away from my ‘At least get started!’ mentality towards ‘Sure, but with an end in sight.’
I’m finding this is increasingly the case with my fiction-writing. I love starting a project, high on the rush of novelty, but often find myself stranded with no middle and no end in mind. I enjoy exploring that untamed world to varying degrees, depending on how busy I am.
But I’ve found the stories I’m least likely to abandon out of boredom or frustration are those where I thought up the entire thing, line by line, beginning to end, before writing anything down on paper.
I think anyone who’s coded has had the same experience. Hunting for a misplaced semi-colon can suck up hours that should have been spent realizing your code is wrong anyways for achieving what you had set out to do.
So much of our culture emphasizes getting started because it’s a major bottleneck. We stop ourselves out of fear, doubt, and over-planning.
Finishing, though, is the other major bottleneck. That’s why Step #1 (Follow instructions) is so important: it bypasses the possibility of over-planning because it gives you a (often straightforward) plan from the get-go. This increases the probability of completing Step #2 (Do it right the first time instead of correcting later), making it more likely you’ll complete the project at all.
As someone who has a tendency to over-plan, I’m relying more on age-old instructions and well-tested paths to make sure I can get started and finish. There’s plenty of room for innovation, individualism, and creativity in between (in the case of fiction, for example) or after you’ve mastered the process (with kimchi, for example; maybe I’ll make kimchi out of pineapple).
3. If you do it right, write it down
Make your own instructions. Don’t re-invent the wheel every time.
My first patch of kimchi was perfect. I got cocky. I mistook beginner’s luck for mastery and didn’t write the recipe down. Four more attempts later and I still haven’t rediscovered that golden touch.
This is reflected in the way I demolish a puzzle and put it back in its box for another day instead of framing it up and getting another. It’s reflected in how I’ll often write reams of fresh code for a dataset I’ve worked with for years instead of falling back on code I’ve written— something I end up doing anyway.
We have limited time on this planet. Don’t waste it re-inventing the wheel.
I’m not talking about sanding down the stone wheel and making it better. I’m not talking about using lighter, more flexible, or more robust materials.
I’m talking about this: imagine every generation forgot about the wheel and hunted about for some way to ease transport. They would invent hand-held carriages and train horses and maybe get around to discovering wheels before they die, only for it to start all over again.
Imagine if instead it was you, who not only forgot but chose to forget how you did something well that one time.
Starting something from scratch can always be fun, and it can help you practice basics so you don’t lose your foundation, but at a certain point you have to leave the project to spend time with your family, or go to the doctor for that appointment you’ve been putting off for forever.
Make your own instructions so you can move on: to family and leisure, to mastering the process more deeply, or to mastering some other process altogether. Making your own instructions also enhances your ability to speed through Step #2 (Do it right the first time) the next time you have to, for example, make kimchi, or explore a dataset.
4. Even if you ‘fail,‘ it’s not that big a deal
Do you know what happens when kimchi goes bad?
It doesn’t go bad. You use old kimchi for soups and fried rice, anything but an unadorned side dish, so that the soup or rice covers up the strong smell of extremely fermented kimchi. It’s incorrect to say “overly fermented kimchi” because there is no such thing.
I spent several hours fuming, long after I had stopped staring at the black marble countertop, because I couldn’t stop thinking about what a failure I was. How much time I had spent. How stupid and stubborn and arrogant I was for not using coarse salt.
Fighting against that toxic inner monologue was another truth: kimchi never goes bad. Its recommended use just changes.
Post-its were created by accident when a hapless scientist set about creating the strongest glue ever and a businessman recognized the value of his failed experiment. Pencillin was discovered by accident, too.
Not every mistake you make will become a must-have office product or win you a Nobel Prize, but they’re very rarely the end of the world or your life.
If you’ve failed, you have to move on.
Whatever it takes to get you out of that dark mental space, do it. There’s straightforward instructions for that, too: go for a walk, vent, reflect, tweak, try again — or don’t, because it’s probably not that big a deal.
In conclusion, stop being hard on yourself
Following instructions, doing it right the first time, writing it down when you do, and not getting overly discouraged if you fail helps you free up time and energy to try again, or move on to something else.
