Experience is Invaluable

By Maria Fernanda Pereira Ywazaki on November 24, 2014

Today, as I prepared myself a sandwich, I chopped into my thumb. Cutting the tips of your fingers is always messy because they always tend to bleed a lot, even if the cut is shallow. In the past months I have hurt myself more than I did during cooking classes. As a comparison, I took classes for six months, four times a week. I, alongside my classmates, cooked meals every day of class for eight-person portions.

Here, living by myself, I cook maybe thrice a week, and only enough for myself. On top of all, the cuts were not something considered as “hacking” into my fingers. I had burnt my fingers with caramel–which burns as bad, if not worse, than oil–during the classes, but here I have managed to burn my forearm with the oven.

Every time I cut or burn myself while cooking, I remember what they said to me the first time it happened during class: a person is not a chef until he/she has been cut or burned while cooking. Granted, to have the title of chef you have to be the boss of the kitchen, so it is not as easy as cutting and burning yourself. At the time, I found the words amusing and rather ironic–especially because I had cut myself unsheathing my chef-knife and not actually doing any cutting. Later on, I understood what the lady was trying to tell me. The chef was showing the scars he had gotten in his line of work, and he said to never trust a chef that has “pretty” hands.

This is one of the circumstances that are hidden in plain sight, but we do not think about them, so when they are being pointed out we feel like saying ‘ooohh.’ Then the words of the lady made sense. We are humans and we all make mistakes. Something that people do not realize is that we are more prone to err in tasks that take less concentration than the other way. This is because we become distracted during the task we are doing. If it is something we are used to doing, then even more so, because we are confident that we do not need full concentration to get it right.

According to statistics, the people more prone to crashing while driving are those in their early 20s. We would think that it is the “reckless teenagers”; however, they do not have the confidence yet in their driving abilities to be more daring. People in their early 20s, though, they have the confidence, the “reckless youth,” and lack the actual experience to drive in the manner they are doing. Because driving is something that is “motor memory” after a while, we become distracted and do not give our full attention to the task. It is something inevitable and, honestly, quite tiring if we kept the same level of alertness as we did when first starting out.

The same applies to cooking, or rather, almost everything else in life. One would think that chefs seldom make mistakes, and have fewer scars as a result compared to a novice. Experience brings confidence, though, and confidence brings mistakes. Notwithstanding the fact that the more times you engage in the activity, the higher the probabilities that you will make a mistake sooner or later. In other words, the more times you cook, the higher the probability of getting hurt. It is similar to a police officer having a higher probability of getting shot than a person who does not deal with those types of situations. A chef that has “pretty” hands means that he/she has not exposed him/herself to the “perils” of cooking. This means that the chef has little experience in his/her line of work.

The same could be applied to everything else in life. It is about experience and how “practice makes perfect.” My mother often has told me the phrase más sabe el diablo por viejo the por diablo, roughly translated into the “devil knows more for his age than for being a devil.” Of course, it does not necessarily have to be related to age, rather experience. This is the reason more and more employers ask for work-experience when hiring. With more people being able graduating from university and college, having a degree is not enough to be considered in today’s job-market. Again, it is not something we realize until someone points it out and we have that ‘oohh’ moment. Many people have found themselves graduating with honors and not being able to find a job because they focused solely on their studies, instead of looking for experience. Looking it as a life-and-death situation it makes perfect sense. Who would you trust more if you were stuck in a battlefield: The corporal with hands-on experience in war, or the high-ranking officer that spent most of his military career behind a desk?

It is true that when we study we learn the theories behind the work. We learn critical-thinking and are sort of dipped into that world. However, classes can only give us hypothetical scenarios, which are seen through different eyes when in class. The “real world” is different than we imagine, so I have been told, and it causes apprehension–especially if one is close to graduation. We cannot do anything but leap, though… or we might be pushed to leap anyway, so it is better to do so willingly than being shoved. Finally when we leap, we should remember to not be afraid of making mistakes and seeking out that experience, and not to trust those who have not been “scarred” in their line of work because it means they do not have the knowledge to help us.

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