Confessions Beyond the Food
Confessions Beyond the Food is a podcast about working in the Food Industry. People who work in the Food Industry have grit and lots of stories to tell. W3 Sales, a sales & marketing company, will host this podcast with their confessions on how they have a new, fresh approach and invite guests to confess their secrets to their sauce.
Confessions Beyond the Food
Restaurant Visionary: Mark Brezinski's Creative Journey
In this episode of Confessions Beyond the Food, listeners are taken behind the scenes with restaurant industry veteran and creative powerhouse Mark Brezinski—author of Fork Fight and the visionary behind some of the country’s most iconic dining concepts. From the early days of Macaroni Grill to the launch of Pei Wei and collaborations with brands like Pizza Hut and Velvet Taco, Brezinski has left a lasting mark on the foodservice landscape.
This conversation explores the emotional and often unpredictable journey of building a restaurant from the ground up. It’s a raw, revealing look at the spark of an idea, the grind of execution, and the highs and lows that come with bringing bold concepts to life. From risk and resilience to discovery and consequence, this episode pulls back the curtain on what it really takes to create something enduring in the ever-evolving world of dining.
Welcome to Confessions Beyond the Food. I'm your host, Nancy Redland. Let's dig in and get inspired. Welcome back to Confessions Beyond the Food, where we dive deep into the stories that shape the food service world.
Speaker 2:Today.
Speaker 1:I have the absolute pleasure of sitting down with Mark Brzezinski, a restaurant visionary, concept creator and the author of the incredible book Fork Fight. I have to say I was completely absorbed in Fork Fight. The story is raw and real and filled with a kind of behind the scenes truths you rarely get to hear in our industry.
Speaker 1:I was genuinely sad when it was over because it pulled me into the emotional roller coaster of what it takes to bring a restaurant to life. Mark isn't just a storyteller, he's a creator. His fingerprints are all over some of the most recognizable restaurant brands in the country. He was a founding force behind Payway, played a key role in the early days of Macaroni Grill and has worked with industry giants like Pizza Hut and Velvet Taco. His ability to bring innovative concepts to life has shaped how we experience dining, blending creativity and deep operational knowledge. Today we're peeling back the layers of that journey, starting with a spark of an idea, through the grit of execution and, ultimately, the unpredictable arc of success or failure. We'll talk about the risk, commitment, discovery and consequences of following a creative vision, and what it truly takes to build something that lasts. Welcome, mark.
Speaker 2:Hello, thank you for having me.
Speaker 1:Oh, I'm thrilled to have you. So let's start with why you wanted to do the book. I thought, it was really cool that you know back in. You know, going into college you wanted to go into journalism and you write poetry and you read a lot of poetry, so the full circle of having a book is really cool. So tell us what inspired you to do this.
Speaker 2:Well, I've always loved writing. I mean, my grandmother I think my mother's mother was the one who always encouraged me to read, read, read, read. And back in the day, when I grew up, we didn't have cell phones, we didn't have the Internet, we didn't you know. So our entertainment was either something physical, like sports, or it was something more cerebral, like reading right, or creating. You know math. Whatever it was, I just took to reading. I became a voracious reader. I read all to reading. I became a voracious reader. I read all the classics. You know, some of my favorite authors were Steinbeck, Clavel, you know some of the other people who started writing more novelistic type things. But I always read and I turned that into a love of writing.
Speaker 2:I didn't write books because I didn't know how books were constructed. I mean, I could at that time. But I could write poetry. I could put thoughts together in poems, and that's the way I kind of counteracted.
Speaker 2:My shyness is I could write things down and hand it to people and run away and let them read it right. So I used poetry as an entree into expressing myself to people in a way that I couldn't personally face to face. So that was kind of a coward's way out of trying to meet people is through poetry, but it developed where people encouraged me. I had teachers who encouraged me and I went to my dad when it's time to go to college and said I really want to go to the school to study journalism. When it's time to go to college, I said I really want to go to the school to study journalism and he looked at me in a no uncertain term, said no, son of mine is going to go and study something like journalism. You're going to study business if I'm going to pay for it. Long story short, I went and studied business but did poetry and journalism on the side. I wrote for the school. The college newspaper I wrote for the local Ithaca Journal was the name of the paper. I wrote a sports column for them. So I always kept dabbling in writing. But there was no methodology or path for me to make a living out of it. So it became just a great hobby like anything else. A great hobby whether it's fly fishing or tennis or whatever it is you like as a hobby. It became my hobby anytime I would meet somebody and I was inspired. I'd write a poem, I'd write short stories, but I was a I, I was in business. That's the way I made my living. But as my career pursuit progressed, uh, and then I'm gonna really fast forward to the the In my business, in the restaurant business, we came to a grinding halt, as many businesses did, don't get me wrong.
Speaker 2:But I had nothing to do. I mean, I literally couldn't travel the way I like to travel. My restaurants were typically the ones I was affiliated with at the time were closed or trying to adjust. So I was kind of stuck in the mud for a little while and I said, well, it's as good a time as any. I love to write, I live alone, I've been married, I never had children, but at that point I was living alone and it was like, okay, what am I gonna do? I can't watch TV, you know, 16 hours a day.
Speaker 2:So I got down, I got my computer out, just started writing my story and not an autobiography, but I like to tell stories. So I turned it into kind of a journey book. I call it a journey book, not a story book, because it is about my journey, you know, from how I started to how I got to where I am today. And like all journeys, it's not always smooth, it's not always all ups, and you know strawberries and cream. Sometimes you get to the bottom of the barrel and I've just felt like my story had to be real and I had to tell the stories of the great successes but also how I dealt with failure and how I came back from failure and all the processes that go into that journey. And that's kind of what it was the pandemic, as bad as it was, and as many things that changed for so many people. It changed my life because it put me back in a position to lean on writing as something to occupy my time. So that's how Fork Fight came to be and it just came naturally. I didn't have to do research, it was all from memory. I've been blessed with a good memory, so as I wrote my stories, it all comes back to me and fortunately I had a good editor who kept me on the straight and narrow and helped me through the process.
Speaker 2:And one thing led to another and when we were done we submitted it through an agent to multiple publishers. And about a week after we did that I got a call from a publisher at Simon Schuster, which surprised me, and she said Mark, I fell in love with you through your book. Don't go anywhere else. We're going to publish your book. And then that was completely out of the blue to me. I'd never gotten a call like that, Didn't expect a call like that. Quite frankly, A lot of people told me I might have to self-publish my book and so I was prepared for anything. I was prepared for not even publishing, but the experience of writing it was was fulfilling enough. The experience of having a publisher say they want to publish just took it warp speed right, Took it to another level and I've been blessed. When it came out I was probably proud of Simone in my life and it was. It's been fun, it's been a, it's just been part of the journey, quite frankly.
Speaker 1:It's always good to look back and reflect on the journey, and so, actually what you just told me, I'm a little bit shocked right now that you said that you were shy in high school.
Speaker 2:Oh, I'm really shy.
Speaker 1:I mean, you are a bold businessman and entrepreneur in our industry and that is a little shocking to me.
Speaker 2:Well, I played sports and I come from a family of five kids. I was the youngest and my brother closest to me and I were always really good in sports. So we played all sports together. So I expressed myself athletically and I was very good at it. I made all-state in basketball and I was written up in the grade. But that was all like outside of me. You know what I mean. It was something I did, not something I was, and I used that forum to meet people and when I met people I liked that's when I would write poetry to them because I couldn't express myself personally face to face. But I could express myself really well when I wrote it down and then, like I said, I was a coward. I would write a girl a poem and I'd fold it up and give it to her, but fortunately people liked it and they were encouraging. So, yeah, but very, extremely shy, the late bloomer for sure.
Speaker 1:Yeah, but those words and your creativity definitely played into your concept development. And speaking of that, so you talk about the bubble start of creativity what does that moment feel like when a new concept starts to take shape?
Speaker 2:It's so hard to explain, nancy. I mean thought bubbles, right, I've written an article about how everything starts with a thought bubble and how those happen. I don't really know, but I do know that it's all about being committed to whatever it is that you do. And for me, being committed means when somebody opens a new restaurant or I hear about somebody doing something new, I have to go out, I have to go see it, I have to experience it. As an example, I'm going to New York next week with a client for a week. I love New York. It's like a second home to me. I know it like the back of my hand. But this client wants to study Italian food. So we're going to go to, in four days, probably 30, 40 places. You don't eat it, I mean, you nibble, you learn how to eat and run, so to speak. But you know that thought bubble about what we're going to create together starts with okay, let's go see what other people are doing, let's absorb.
Speaker 2:I always say innovation is as much about absorbing as it is about emitting, and I think somewhere along the line I just became very good at absorbing and was committed to it, because you and I both met a lot of people. The first thing I want to do is tell you all about themselves and everything they've done in their life. And you sit there after about 15 minutes and realize you're not having a conversation, you're having a monologue. You know they're telling you about them, I'm telling you about them before you know it. But somewhere along the line, in order to be a good listener I think that's part of being a good writer is you have to listen to the. It's going to sound corny. The universe talking to you and you the universe talking to you, and you have to absorb that and you have to know what to do with it once you get it. So a thought bubble is okay, let's look at this. Then you have to know what to do with what you just saw.
Speaker 2:An artist may have an inspiration, but do they work from photographs? Do they work completely from their mind? You might like an abstract artist like Chagall, who probably didn't work from photographs. He probably worked from just what was creating his mind. To other people who are doing landscapes and doing you know, realism. So it just depends upon your individual. Me, as an individual, it always starts with.
Speaker 2:I wonder about the curiosity, the four C's of innovation in my mind Curiosity. You have to have curiosity. You can't always think you know the answer. You have to go explore, you have to go out and absorb things. So curiosity is the first step. You have to have courage. You have to believe in yourself enough to fight through all the naysayers and all the barriers you're going to experience. Then you have to have commitment. You have to say I'm committed to it, I've studied it, I'm curious, I've done, courageous enough. Now I need to be committed. And once you're committed, the fourth C is capital. You have to have the ability to do it, because without the capital it's just an idea to do it, because without the capital it's just an idea. And ultimately, for some reason and I can't explain it I've been able to follow all those steps through the creation of concepts that I've done. Either I've been with partners like Paul Fleming for PF Chang's, or when I worked with Brinker, with Norman Brinker. They had the money, I had the thoughts, we all had the curiosity. You put it all together. So it's rare that your group or as an individual you can do all of it so typically.
Speaker 2:Another C if you had to add one, if somebody said, hey, you have to have another one. We need collaboration. You can't do this by yourself, people, I can write a book. I wrote a book but I couldn't do this by yourself. People, I can write a book. I wrote a book, but I couldn't do it by myself. I mean, I needed an editor to read it, I needed friends to give me feedback, I needed the publisher to say we need this, we need more of this. So you collaborate on a book, you write a book, but you collaborate on a published book. There's a difference. Right when I was writing poetry and articles, I didn't have editors. You know, you're just writing and send it out and say this is what I think.
Speaker 2:But when you do conceptual work, it's always a blending of those Cs plus adding the collaboration to it, and I don't know how to describe it. Honestly, somebody says where does it come from? I say I don't know. You know I mean your mind comes mostly in shower moments, you know you just the water is pouring down and you're just thinking about your day and you're thinking about what if, what if, what, if? So to me, that's my time to ask what if? What if this? What if we did this? What if we did that?
Speaker 2:I just had breakfast with some friends and I talked about an idea I came up with for a client, which was what I call Pad Thai Poor Boy. So Pad Thai is a Thai dish. It's a noodle dish. You usually eat with chopsticks or a knife fork or whatever. So I came up with the idea of why not take those great flavors and put it on a baguette great flavors and put it on a baguette. We're in the South. You know New Orleans, you know Texas, south Houston, you know where I was working with a client. She said so let's do a poor boy, but let's put Pad Thai flavors on it. And we created a Pad Thai poor boy. That didn't exist anywhere. But the thought bubble was I want a handheld sandwich that tastes Asian. That doesn't exist. So you have these thoughts. How do I connect them? And sometimes you're just able to connect them. You can't explain how you connect them, but you connect them. And so Thought Bubbles brought together, encouraged and developed. I don't know how else to describe it.
Speaker 1:Well, in your book you talked about all your travels across the world and I thought it was really interesting. You mentioned Mumbai, for Bengal Coast, and how you immersed yourself in the food culture, trying out a billion different restaurants and then bringing it back to the States and figuring out how that's going to translate here to the American palate and then conversely taking when you were with Pizza Hut on and you went it was China, china, yes. And you went, it was it was china, china, yes, and then going out and coming up with, um, a set menu for a more condensed menu for them. Um, I thought it was fascinating here like they had like hundreds of items on their menu. Their pizza had many pieces very different in china. I learned through your book completely different.
Speaker 2:Yeah, um, and I don't know. You know it's, it's funny. Again, I want to go back to the absorbing versus emitting. Even that trip to Mumbai and at that point in my life I had enough money where we actually circumnavigated the world I mean, we started in Japan, we hopped down to Thailand, we hopped over to India, we went to London and then we came home. So I don't know how many people get to circumnavigate the world in one trip, but we were blessed and fortunate to do it that time. But even that trip, it wasn't about me consuming things. It was about me absorbing things, like we would go to a restaurant.
Speaker 2:I traveled with a very famous, well-known chef. His name is Mark Miller, did Coyote Cafe, the father of Southwestern cuisine, but he also knows Asian food. Anyway, I asked Mark to join me and we would go to five, six, seven restaurants a day. But I wasn't there to eat all that food. I was there to look at it and I was there to watch Mark tell me how it was made and I was there to watch other people enjoying it, how they enjoyed it. But if I ate everything at every place, I would have been probably sick, because it's hard to eat that many things at that many different places when your stomach or your system is acclimated to a certain lifestyle. So when I travel, the funny thing is people want to hear try this, try this. I'm like no, because I'm not here to taste it, I'm here to watch it. I'm here to look at it. I'm here to watch it. I'm here to look at it. I'm here to take pictures of it. I'm here to try to understand how you did it, not how it appeals to me. How it appeals to me is incidental. I'm not trying to match it up with me. I'm trying to say where does this go? How do I incorporate this? So it's funny.
Speaker 2:One quick funny story I was in Beijing and we how do I incorporate this? So it's funny. When quick funny story went to, I was in Beijing and we went to a hot pot place. You know a hot pot is right and and they bring you a big bowl of broth and all these other elements and the people I was with a neat interpreter, you know it's very typical for them to eat things like lamb hearts that we would not eat here, intestines and heart, and they were very curious what I thought of it and I'm like I don't do that. I apologize, but I don't do that. I'll watch you enjoy it and see how you use it. But all I could eat was some noodles and some green tea because I couldn't be in the middle of Beijing. And all of a sudden my stomach, and you know, like what do you do in the middle of Beijing if you can't fulfill your trip?
Speaker 2:So I tell stories like that in the book about how people expect me to give them opinions on all this wonderful exotic food. I'm like when I was in China I ate a lot of pizza and a lot of fried chicken, you know. And so even in India you brought up Mumbai we went by so many street stalls and stands and you look and as an American I'm looking at. So where's the running water? Where's the hot water? How many places is that rag bin? Because I can't, but I want to absorb and see how it works and see what other people are doing. So I apologize for that long explanation, but I'm not as experimental in terms of what I ingest as I am as to what I absorb. There's a difference. And Jess, as I am is the word I absorb. There's a difference.
Speaker 1:That's really cool. I went to China a couple years back and I was really worried about you know, because they entertain you. You know they're wonderful entertainers and so. But yeah, I couldn't wait. I was so excited to see those golden arches in the airport, so okay. So the restaurant industry is relentless. What do you think people underestimate the most when committing to a concept?
Speaker 2:Well, I think, underestimate the amount of tweaking you might have to do. You know, I've been quoted as saying that if in a new concept, if you get it 80% right, you're a genius, you know. But people have this desire to think that they can get it 100%. Number one I don't believe in perfection. I just don't think it exists, right? You hear people I strive for perfection. I was like I don't do that. I strive to be as good as I can be or create something as good as I can create it with the group. But ultimately, I think people underestimate that you're going to make mistakes.
Speaker 2:Don't punish yourself for the mistakes. Correct them quickly. You and I were just talking about a salad right, taking a salad and shaking a salad. If you realize that you missed that and you need to add it, be quick. Don't personalize it. Don't call yourself an idiot for missing it. Don't try to blame somebody because you missed something. Just correct it, Adjust it, massage it, make it better. Most people think because you've got to get it, so right right away. That's not the goal. The goal is not to get it. The goal is to get it as close to your vision as possible and then again, absorb and learn, observe what people are doing with it and then adjust it.
Speaker 1:Right, because it always doesn't translate. The way that you think in your mind and I think that was something that was really profound in your book is you would create this unbelievable concept and be wildly successful. And then people come in and they have their ideas and, like you said, rigidity, I think that was the word you used Rigidity yeah, and so that they just don't want to change, they don't want to adapt, they just want to get their point across. You know, be right.
Speaker 2:I look at your studio here. Right, I'm wearing your shop here and it didn't start like this. I mean, you started somewhere, but along the way you said, hey, I've got to have this line, or I want to expand into this room, I need more space. Whatever it is, any business, you just got to get it going. You have to have the ability.
Speaker 2:I go back to the four C's You've got to be curious enough, you've got to be courageous enough, you've got to be committed and you've got to have the capital to make it work. But then after that, you've got to be able to adjust. And 80% is probably generous. But the concepts as I look back, I'm trying to think I'd say that was the biggest part of my success. I was able to get most of them right out of the box without having major adjustments, but each one of them had make no mistake. When you go into a Velvet Taco today, it's different than the first Velvet Taco, because it has to be Right. There are learning curves and, by the way, not all learning curves are good. Sometimes people become involved after the fact and want to change things without really having a reason other than they want to put their fingerprint on it. So you've got to. There's a lot to manage. Even after you open, there's a lot to manage.
Speaker 1:So you mentioned in Fortify that failure isn't just possible, it's almost inevitable. How do you decide when to push forward and when to pivot?
Speaker 2:Okay. So the practical answer of it is when you run out of money, it's when you stop Because you can't keep on raising money. Although I've I've been there myself too you've read about that where I just kept pouring money. I think money's gonna. Money's gonna solve the solve the problem. Money doesn't solve the problem. Uh, sometimes you just miss the mark. Sometimes you just are in the wrong place at the wrong time or chose the wrong location for the right concept and the time.
Speaker 2:It's a collection of things. Honestly, it's not a singular answer. It's a collection of how much money you have. It's a collection of what people are telling you you have to have an intervention. Interventions aren't just for addictions. You can be addicted to success and need an intervention. Interventions aren't just for addictions. So you can be addicted to success and need an intervention for somebody to tell you when you're really not going to where you think you're going. I've done that. I've had friends and peers intervene with me and say enough, right, didn't work. And then there are times when I've realized myself don't work, stop, stop the bleeding, so to speak. Move on. You've got other ideas.
Speaker 2:And that's part of it, I think, nancy, is that you have to have the faith in yourself that you can recover from a failure, and that isn't an innate thing, that's not something we're born with. That's something we learn. We learn from failure. You know you can listen to I'm a sports person, so you can listen to the Larry Birds and the Michael Jordans of the world and even you know Roger Federer is watching something. The tennis player is talking about how in his lifetime he's only won 54% of the points of his matches.
Speaker 2:You go how's that possible? And you've got 22, 23 major titles. Well, you don't have to win every point. You have to win more points than you lose and you have to win them at the right time. So the more you listen and realize as you get older that failure is part of the process and you're not going to win all the time, but that you can recover from it and probably highlight those things that help you be successful and try to replicate those. But somewhere you have to learn that failure is inevitable. I didn't win every basketball game I played in. I played in college. We lost games. I mean, you just realize you're going to have a bad game. You're going to have bad games, a stretch of bad games, perhaps.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I thought that in your book, just the rawness of your low times and when you were going through really challenging times, and I thought it was just really courageous, one of the C's of you, to put that out there. And one thing that struck me in the book is something I've had to learn in my life is that your sister said business doesn't define you, and that feels like such a heavy and necessary truth, especially when our industry is tied to our success, our identity being wrapped in our success, our failures. So how has that shaped the way you see things now?
Speaker 2:Well, you mentioned something that I want to back up to Success. How do we define success? Well, you and I would both say that in business, success is making money, right, I mean. So we have this vision of hey, are you successful? And immediately people want to know how much you make. What's your bottom line, right? So what you have to do is you have to figure out a way to kind of separate the elements of success. For instance, I wrote a book, right? Not a New York Times bestseller. One of my goals always was you know, I want to be author comma, new York Times bestselling author Mark Brzezinski. Right, I'm not, but I wrote a book. So what is success in that world? Everybody wants to know how many copies, right? How much did you make? How many copies? I don't have any idea how many copies we sold. I know I didn't make any money from it, so I know that it probably wasn't one of those huge successes, but is it a success to me? 100% of it.
Speaker 2:In business, it's all about, but the things that I created Bengal Coast, which bankrupted me, right? I think it was my most brilliant concept that I've ever created. It was beautiful, it was sexy, the food was good. The vibe was good, people loved it, the people who opened it. We opened at a bad time. We opened the financial crisis of 2008 to 2010.
Speaker 2:Those of you who've been around that long realize that everybody was suffering. We couldn't overcome that. But was Bengal Coast a failure? No, was it a success? No, only a success financially? No, but I have more people, even at breakfast this morning. What are we? I closed Bengal Coast in 2010 or 11. So we're 15 years removed.
Speaker 2:I had people this morning bring up Bengal Coast at a breakfast I had is would you be interested in reviving Bengal Coast? And I smiled. I said I get that question once a month or so. So to me it failed, but it was very successful at establishing my reputation as somebody who could create something from scratch that was different and alluring and Hypnotic in its own way. So, yeah, it failed it. It took me my needs financially and that's hard to get over. Don't get me wrong. I didn't sit at home and drink and champagne say, well, that was a nice concept, you know, but. But you learn that, you know, but you learn that you know.
Speaker 2:Okay, success is not just financial. Success is all about how it makes you feel when you're done and are you able to hold on to that feeling and use it again and not consider it a blanket of failure that snuffs out all your fire. Failure just just snuffs out all your fire. You have to learn that. I had to learn that. Nobody taught me that. I had to have to learn it through experience, so I know how other people deal with it. I know that I learned to deal with better as I got older. I was a sore loser and a basketball we lost a game. I would go in and throw my jersey or throw my sneakers. I hated losing. Nothing wrong with hating losing, but at some point you got to learn that that's part of the process. Losing and failure are all part of the arc of the journey.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that was one thing I really liked in the book that you said that it wasn't about money for you, it was about experiences. And you said and I probably messed this up, but that you should view success and failure as imposters.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's a quote from. I forget who it is, but if you can learn to accept success and failure and treat them both the same, there's a better saying than that. But ultimately that's what you have to do. You don't over-congratulate yourself for what you did right and you don't over-punish yourself for what you did wrong. You try to use them both and try to establish who you are going forward. You try to use them both and try to establish who you are going forward. I mean, I think the best quote and this one I know by heart that I've lived by is let yourself be silently drawn to the stronger pull of what you really love. And that's by a guy named Rumi, who was a 17th century philosopher, poet. But in my heart, that's what I always have done is say what do you really want to do? What makes you happy?
Speaker 2:I very rarely have held on to a job. I left Payway and if people read the book, I left Payway at the height of its success. I was making considerable money, living in Preston Hollow, huge home, beautiful neighborhood, and I was unhappy. I came home and it didn't matter how much money I was making. It was making more money than I ever dreamed I'd make, living in a house I never dreamed I would live in. But I left Payway and I dropped it because I wasn't happy and I realized that and that's when I started Bengal Coast. So I went from the height of where I could be over the years that Bengal didn't work to the depths and then had to learn how to come back out of that too.
Speaker 1:Well, you fought in a major way, and I mean you have just developed I mean so many cool concepts since then. So if you could go back and give the young Mark any advice, what would you tell him?
Speaker 2:Don't be so impatient. You know it's not always going to work. I talk about this with people because I want to teach. You know I really I've been trying to get into, you know, hospitality programs to guest lecture and do this, that. But you know, besides the four Cs because people want to innovate, that's great, but just life lessons is just the idea of perseverance and persistence with what you believe. You're not always going to believe the right things and so you've got to learn what to put your energy into. And again, I don't know how to define that for students, but I would go back to my quote and I would always end with my quote Let your heart be silently drawn to the stronger pull of what you really love. But I would go back to my quote and I would always end with my quote Let your heart be silently drawn to the stronger pull of what you really love.
Speaker 2:If you listen to yourself and not others, you have that quiet time, and kids nowadays very rarely have quiet time. You know that it's the phone all the time or it's the computer all the time. I would say find an hour of every day just to be by yourself, whether it's on a walk or wherever it is. However you do it, listen to yourself. What do you really like? What really makes your life full? What do you feel like? Because that answer is there. We don't always listen to it. You have to find the time to extract it sometimes to allow yourself to pull it out.
Speaker 2:I do that with kids that I talk to or students that I talk to and said you know, don't listen to what everybody else is saying, listen to yourself mostly, but be smart about it and then find somebody who can mentor you in developing that, because we all need that. You know these concepts weren't you in developing that, because we all need that. You know, these concepts weren't created in a vacuum. They were created with people at a table kicking around ideas.
Speaker 2:But to get to that table, you have to be able to be strong enough in your conviction about what you feel, and you can only do that by knowing who. You are Hard to do, not easy, and you can't write a book about who you are Hard to do, not easy, and you can't write a book about it, because everybody has a different upbringing, everybody has different experiences that shape their lives. You know, I wouldn't presume to know what motivates you. I know what motivates me and I think the most important thing is know yourself right. Get to know yourself more than your interest in getting to know everybody else right.
Speaker 1:Yes, I think that's amazing, especially like that's. What keeps us in this industry is the passion and just the love of being able to host people, give them, like you know, it's like a vacation from life, you know when you go and eat out and get to experience everything.
Speaker 2:A little bit of an escape. Right, we need escapes. My escape was always going to a movie by myself in the middle of the day or late at night, where you could just get away from the noise and let all the noise stop and just focus on one thing. You have to learn that, though you have to learn that you don't always have to be you know busy. Sometimes it's better to not be busy and to have time to think. It's a hard thing to do. I never had children, so I can't say that from example of what I've done to help. But I try to do that when I teach and I try to do that when I talk.
Speaker 1:Well, one thing you mentioned earlier too was just having an outlet, you know, with writing, and with me I, you know I love to dance. And so I you know, taking that time for yourself amidst the chaos to just pursue your passions. You know, outside of that, and it usually does spur on some sort of creativity for me. I don't know about you, but because when you're in it all the time you don't take a break. You don't allow yourself for that reflection time. You're just going to burn.
Speaker 2:And however you express it. You express it through writing, some people express it through cooking, some people express it through cooking, some people express it through travel. Just learn what it is that you need to do to fulfill that need inside of you. And it's not selfish. There's a good selfish. There's a good being selfish too, right? I don't know how mothers in my era. My mother had five children. I don't know how mothers in my era. My mother had five children. I don't know how she ever had time for herself. I couldn't even imagine how we gave her enough time to develop what she wanted to. But everybody's got to find that in their own different way, whether you're married, single family, no family, whatever it is.
Speaker 1:I don't know how to do it.
Speaker 2:There's not like a step by step on how to do it. You just have to learn what makes you comfortable and what motivates you to move forward.
Speaker 1:That's awesome. You've given us some really good the four C's. I love that. Some really good nuggets of wisdom, lots of wisdom guys in his book. You have to read it. I cannot push it more so to check out Fork Fight. But before we leave, do you have a confession?
Speaker 2:You're not going to make me cook for you or anything are you Actually?
Speaker 2:Do I have a confession? Jeez, my book. I don't know how to confess more than what I've confessed in the book. I guess you'd call this a confession. So my confession is that people look at me as a restaurateur who should know we talked a little bit about it who should have all this knowledge about all these different foods and stuff. My confession is is I'm a pretty average eater. That I don't, you know, I'm not. I have friends that say try this out, do this, do that, and I'm like no, thanks, I don't eat. I don't eat like deer and stuff. Yeah, I just. I eat pretty basically. I observe, observe much broader, but I eat very basically and not very experimental when it comes to that. No, that's a really good confession.
Speaker 1:And honestly, that makes me feel a little better, because I'm not a very experimental eater, so I really resonated with the. You'll have to read it in the book. But about your shellfish and your experience with salmon. But thank you so much for sharing with us today and again, another shameless plug. Check out Fork Fight.
Speaker 2:Please do.
Speaker 1:Yeah Well, thank you guys for tuning in. We'll see you next time. Thanks For more inspiration, follow our social media. At W3Sales, please like, comment and subscribe. You know all the things we would love to connect with you.