What cooking rage has to do with your business

Let's talk about cooking rage.

Cooking rage is a real thing. There's a good chance you'll recognize it when I describe it.

I want to talk about it because when I experienced it earlier this week I discovered a striking parallel between what happened to me as I attempted to cook a healthy meal for my family and what happens to me and to so many of my clients and friends who own businesses when we try to do something we believe will help our businesses grow.

When I shared this revelation with a community of entrepreneurs it struck a chord. In fact, a number of people responded that they needed to hear exactly what I'd written, and so I decided to share it with you too. Hope it gives you something to think about. Here's the post:

Photo credit: DDP on Unsplash

I have just experienced cooking rage. It's not the first time I've felt it, but it's the first time I named it and the first time I let myself really think about what was going on.

I'm sharing this here because I think this is something we also experience in business. The rage part. The part where we get inspired to do something good for ourselves or our businesses--like buy a new cookbook and cook a healthy meal, or learn about social media and decide to map out a strategy and take on the internet.

For me, I started the day with high hopes, great intentions and a new cookbook. I picked out recipes. I planned to go shopping after I picked up the kids. It sort of worked out that way, with a short detour to write out ingredients for several recipes (this is where my magical thinking momentarily took over--I got waaaaay ambitious instead of sticking with the two dishes I wanted to start with).

I finally made it to the store. I even brought my own bags so I could help save the planet. I went to the health food store so I could really be healthy and take care of myself and my family and live up to the expectations of this very organic and clean eating cookbook.

Things started to go downhill from there. It started in the rice section. WHY ARE THERE SO MANY KINDS OF RICE??? Arborio, Basmati, Jasmine, with white and brown varieties of each, long and short grain versions of each, organic and nonorganic... And, by the way, no long grain Basmati rice. None. I checked. All the shelves.

I also couldn't find the beans I needed (and I described them as both "gigante" beans, as they were listed in the recipe, and "gigantic," just in case I was difficult to understand with my lame Spanish accent). I also couldn't find a bunch of other things, so I bought whatever had made it into my basket and headed to another store.

In the second store I had better luck, partially because I stood paralyzed in front of the rice aisle for only ten minutes stressing over what difference it would make if my Basmati rice were not long grain, and only five minutes agonizing over whether it made a difference that the crushed tomatoes did not appear to be peeled, as the recipe had specified.

Oh. My. God.

Get the picture? It was NUTS. Don't even ask me about the sumac, which I first had to Google because I had no idea what it was, and then had to Google what could be substituted for it because, despite reading the labels on what had to be at least a hundred bottles of spices, of multiple brands, none of which were in alphabetical order, I could not find any. (Lemon zest and salt, by the way, can be substituted for sumac. You're welcome.)

I finally made it out of the store, after realizing as I approached the checkout counter that I'd forgotten the pink Himalayan salt and deciding to screw it; regular salt would just have to be good enough.

In the block it took me to walk home I identified my cooking rage. I was fuming. I had spent close to an hour (did I mention I had to go back to the first store because they gave me the wrong change?) on a shopping trip around the block from my apartment searching for ingredients for two recipes, spending close to $60 for a dumb rice and bean meal, and missing the time I'd planned to spend with my kids after school. I was furious that healthy food is so expensive, that raw honey is $18 a jar, that Ceylon cinnamon must have magical properties because why else would I have to buy it when I'd just bought a jar of regular cinnamon last week??

Cooking rage.

I'd wanted to do something nice for myself and my family, something healthy and good, and it took more time, money and energy that I'd ever imagined it would. I'd started out inspired and ended up unbelievably cranky. Kind of the opposite of what I'd been going for.

And here's my point: this happens in our businesses all the time.

We learn something new, we get an idea, we hear an expert and we're revved up to take action--to create the marketing plan, build the website, increase our social media presence, you name it. We start out with excitement and a willingness to jump in and go for it.

And so often things end up taking longer and costing more than we'd expected. We're faced with decisions we're not sure how to make. Different experts say different things, there are multiple products or paths to choose from, we aren't sure what needs to happen first or which will give us what we really need and we get paralyzed.

We also get overwhelmed thinking about all the people who seem to be telling us what to do or where we should be or how important it is to do a certain thing in order to build a successful business. And we despair when we think about all the people who seem to have their sh*t together and are effortlessly doing all the things we can barely wrap our heads around, much less get traction on.

Cooking rage. Business rage. It's not there all the time (unless it is, in which case you might actually want to rethink how you're approaching your business), but when it comes up it can knock you out.

So maybe do what I did--decide it's good enough. Decide that white salt is fine, and next time you'll get pink salt. Be present with your kids as soon as you do get home (and accept the fact that they were perfectly happy without you). And take a deep breath and cook the one recipe you now have time to cook (turns out the gigantic beans need to soak for an hour and then cook for another hour, so those are going to have to get made another day).

Decide that focusing on the one social media platform you actually enjoy is good enough. That real conversations with people you like is exactly what you need, and that you can explore other avenues another day. Decide to focus on the one project in front of you that's most directly moving your business forward, and that the rest can wait. At the end of the day, at perhaps a more reasonable hour than you're used to, close down your computer and live the rest of your life.

And then pat yourself on the back for growing your business in some way, for nurturing your vision and bringing something to life that didn't exist when you started the day. Or, in my case, for making an awesome spinach rice dish that only burnt the bottom of my pot a little bit. Enjoy where you are and what you created today. Tomorrow is another day, and it will be good enough. Just like you.