I Hope All of My Children and Grandchildren Are Like Flynn McGarry

I just read a news story about a 14 year old named Flynn McGarry who thinks, and speaks, exactly like I did at that age. My biography is almost exactly the same as his, just applied to a different discipline. He’s now worked in some of the best kitchens in the world and … just stop and go read the source news article . It’s that good.

My favorite parts:

“My mom didn’t really like cooking, and when she did cook I didn’t really like her food. And I was watching something on the Food Network, and I thought, ‘I could do this,’” he said. “And so I went to the bookstore and I looked for the thickest, biggest cookbook. And I found ‘The French Laundry’ by Thomas Keller. And things were very hard to make and took six-plus hours to cook. So I decided to try something simpler, like salmon and potatoes and it went from there.”

and

“Focusing on your passion and hard work definitely pays off in the end,” he said. “At the point in your life where you stop caring if you’re going to be famous or do well, your dream will come to you. I did something with my talent and people recognized.”

I love it. It follows the same pattern of my life and what I’ve seen work over and over in the lives of others:

You can read Flynn McGarry’s blog at his official website.

See Something Interesting
Realize You Can Do It
Obsessively Study How to Do It (Reading and Seeking Out Experts)
Execute and Practice Constantly Until You Become Better
If You Become Overwhelmed, Back Track To a Simpler Step And Build On That Knowledge Until You Can Proceed
People Notice Excellence (Even Though You Are Doing It For Your Own Fulfillment)
Find a Way to Earn Compensation for Doing What You Love, Buying Your Freedom

That’s the formula. This kid has it down perfectly!

It’s this type of philosophy and work ethic that makes me talk about the problem with extended adolescence in the United States. People are putting their lives on hold until they are 25, 30 or 35 years old, not realizing that the average person lives 27,375 days before it’s game over. If you are 30 years old, still in university, relying on you parents, you’ve already wasted nearly 11,000 of those days and have only 16,000+ left. It’s a terrible use of time capital.

You can write me as many angry letters as you want, but I’m trying to save you from wasting your life. Stop putting it on hold and making excuses. No one is going to save you. Every day that you sit in suspended existence is a day you’ve lost forever. Your life is ending a minute at a time. Make the most of it. Find something you love. Figure out how to make a living doing it. The rest tends to work out in the end.

We must stop treating 14 and 15 year olds like they are children (while still offering protection against employment in certain industries – otherwise you get societal abuse where the offspring of the poor are forced to go work in coal mines). The average age of the scientists and engineers in the room during the Apollo moon landing was 26 years old. Those same people were preparing the mathematics and science of undertaking a mission like that when they were barely teenagers. World War II was won by kids barely older than this young man and, yet, we continue to raise the drinking age despite this causing increases in alcohol abuse due to the forbidden fruit mental model.

Sometimes, I think we should go back to the Colonial days in the United States, where high school was completed by 12 or 13 and then people either applied to university or trained to learn a trade instead of giving in to what Oprah Winfrey once called “the soft bigotry of low expectations”. It’s clear that Flynn McGarry’s greatest contribution to civilization is going to be in a kitchen. His talent should be developed, encouraged, and given an opportunity to shine.

You can read Flynn McGarry’s blog here. I can tell you from experience that with the mindset he has, he’ll always be fine. That doesn’t mean there won’t be challenges but the fearlessness of learning combined with love for the topic and curiosity will open doors he never imagined possible.

http://www.facebook.com/joe.pierson.54 Joe Pierson

I believe most people do find their passion, problem is no matter how hard they try, they are just average at it. It has to be that way; it’s just the law of probabilities. To help you understand imagine there are 300 million Joshua Kennon’s in the USA. What do you think YOUR life would be like? You probably would have a dull blue collar job making 50K, because every exciting business opportunity you would try to succeed in would fail because a million other older, more experience Joshua’s would have already tried and succeeded. I mean somebody has to be a garbage man.
- http://www.joshuakennon.com/ Joshua Kennon
  
  Very good point!
  
  (To answer your question: It would be utter chaos. I’m strategic and doggedly persistent, so 300 million people trying to outsmart each other and find a niche would lead to utter societal collapse. Millions of years would pass. And then the average house cat would evolve into the new dominant species. I would be responsible for the destruction of the human race and the rise of the new kitty overlords. Then again, I tend to be very good at accepting reality for what it is. I’d probably shrug my shoulders and say, “Well, I’ll figure out how to maximize my utility on $50,000″.)
  
  One of my mentors growing up used to say if that is the case – if you are average at your skill – find a good paying job and then treat your skill, the hobby, as a part-time job. Think of your occupation as a subsidy program for your true love, which you do because of the joy it brings you, not for the money. If someone like McGarry loved cooking but couldn’t cook, he could get a regular job but still cook for himself on the weekends. It might be bittersweet, but it seems like a viable coping strategy.
  
  Thoughts?
  - http://www.facebook.com/joe.pierson.54 Joe Pierson
    
    Would you spend your weekends reading annual reports as a hobby if you were a lousy investor? I doubt it. The incentive must exist, Mungers’ #1 rule.
    - Gilvus
      
      We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit. From a really smart Greek dude whose name starts with Aris- and ends with -totle.
      
      I agree that some people are born with natural talents, like a person with perfect pitch having an affinity for music or a high-functioning savant having a penchant for crunching numbers like a Cray. In that respect, having them switch is like forcing a fish to climb a tree, or a chimpanzee to race Michael Phelps.
      
      But in the vast majority of other cases, people just don’t make it a habit. Maybe they never try, or they try for a bit and give up because of the steep learning curve or low initial returns. Maybe Joshua isn’t particularly well-suited for investing, but simply got really good after doing it obsessively for 20+ years. It’s possible (probable, actually) that there are people who are inherently better investors than he is. Why haven’t we heard of them? Two possibilities:
      1) They are very few in number, and they don’t have blogs.
      2) They were too busy chasing girls, watching TV, or fighting to survive in a third-world country to even figure out what investing is.
      
      Just my two Lincolns
  - Michael Starke
    
    I have to quote myself from elsewhere:
    “I am of the opinion that a person’s best effort every day should be directed at the things that do the most to advance their goals and give them the most fulfillment. … If you devote your attention to the things that are most important to you, then in the aggregate, your life will be built of of things that you value.”
    
    I didn’t mention work and though it is important, it shouldn’t dominate a person’s life. I agree that the point is to make it so that the job supports the passion. If a person can devote “marginal” effort to work (I’m not going to discuss the morality/ethics of “shortchanging” your employer by giving them anything but your best), and save their best for something that excites them (regardless of the level of skill/expertise) that is in my book more than a mere coping mechanism, and is in fact rather noble.
    
    The dream scenario is achieved by finding something at the intersection of “good at,” “love to do,” and “can get paid to do.” Monetizing passion can be hard, as evidenced by the number of businesses run by passionate people, that still manage to fail (they tend to be failures in the “can get paid to do” dimension). In fact, it seems to be a rather rare quality of successful people that they manage to hit “can get paid to do” and one of the other two. People spend their entire lives searching, hoping to just to maintain the “get paid to do” dimension. McGarry sounds like an exceptional individual who’s managed to find the sweet spot as a teenager.
- art school dropout
  
  I’m not sure if I buy into that theory. From what I have noticed in
  general life, the “average” person is not going to invest thousands of
  hours into a personal goal for years on end. One could argue that
  dedicating years of study in a school environment could count as
  working towards a dream/goal. I don’t entirely agree. If someone is
  learning/taking on projects in addition to college work ( or maybe just
  doing something entirely on their own ) then there is a good likelihood
  of above average results at a later stage. Most people won’t do that.
  
  The odds of you becoming better than average at something is directly proportionate to the kind of hours you put into it.
  
  Notice I didn’t say anything about being #1 or #10 or even #100 in your field. I think a big trap is trying to be the “best”. This kid with his cooking didn’t care about that. He just wanted to be better and better at what he did. The rest is a news article.
  - http://www.joshuakennon.com/ Joshua Kennon
    
    This is probably one of the best comments I have ever seen. I’m saving it. If Disqus had the ability to award some sort of comment medal – like Reddit Gold – you would be a recipient right now:
    
    “Notice I didn’t say anything about being #1 or #10 or even #100 in your field. I think a big trap is trying to be the “best”. This kid with his cooking didn’t care about that. He just wanted to be better and better at what he did.”
    
    That’s wisdom. And absolutely true.
    - art school dropout
      
      Hi Joshua,
      Thank you for the compliment and your blogging efforts.
      This was really good one.
  - http://www.facebook.com/joe.pierson.54 Joe Pierson
    
    Yes, but you have to ask the question why don’t most people invest thousands of hours in a skill? The answer is they simply don’t excel in the skill they chosen. It’s a negative feedback loop. They put time into something, don’t improve, no reward, they have no incentives to continue. The incentive is to quit. The opposite is true, if you try something your good at it, you improve quickly, if you improve quickly you have incentives to continue as you are constantly getting rewarded (more praise, more money, more status etc etc). So you work more.
    Now from the outside world, one person is labeled ambitious and the other lazy. That erroneous conclusion is make because one lacks critical inside information so misweighs the only thing he does know (one guy quit and the other didn’t). The ambitious guy is just doing what he loves, he doesn’t wake up in the morning thinking, crap I got to do this to become successful, he just does it because of the constant rewards he gets.
    - art school dropout
      
      Most “successful” people fail just like anybody else.They just process failure differently so it does not affect their forward momentum. Failure is simply a necessary component of the improvement process.
      
      Failure is normal.
- weixiluo
  
  Theoretically, your point would hold true because of the law of averages. However, in practice, most people aren’t wired, or don’t have an incentive, in committing time to become excellent, above-average, or even being better in a field.
Anon

Thanks for this information! You’ve had a very productive blogging day!