How to Cook Without Burning Down the Kitchen

An Analogy for Work and Life

Steve and I recently spoke at a conference that included some of the world’s top investors. Many, if not all, were type-A pushers—smart, driven, ambitious, and wanting to be the best at what they do. As the conference went on, we received a few questions regarding overload:

How do you know when you have too much going on?

The two clearest indicators: either a decline in objective performance or subjective experience. The numbers go down, the stress increases, or some combination of both. But these are end games you want to avoid. Ideally, you spot the issue in advance. It is easier to prevent overload than to escape or reverse it.

A useful analogy is pots on a stovetop:

If you are an accomplished chef without other distractions, perhaps you can manage a stovetop with eight burners. But if you try to bring each to a boil at the same time, water will spill over, food will overcook, and you may even burn yourself or set off the smoke alarm. It's unsustainable and it will make you crazy.

However, if you keep some burners on a simmer while bringing others to a boil, if you set some burners between two and five and others between seven and nine, if you time your dishes, you can manage the entire stovetop, perhaps even entering the zone while doing so. Alternatively, you could keep all the burners between four and six, but odds are, some of what you are trying to cook demands more heat.

Managing multiple projects or priorities at work is like managing a stovetop. Most experienced people can navigate anywhere between two and six burners, depending on the craziness in the rest of your life. A less experienced chef, or someone cooking with kids and animals running around the kitchen, may be able to manage three or four active burners, of which only one or two can be boiling at any given time.

Cooking well—literally or metaphorically—means deciding how many burners you can have going, what should be boiling, and when it does so.

There will be seasons of work when what you are cooking in a particular pot is, by far, the most important thing: drafting your book, completing the model for a billion dollar deal, preparing for an organ transplant, presenting a case before the supreme court, showing at your first exhibition, or going on tour. During these periods, it is imperative to bring everything else to a simmer; a simple reality of life is that it's nearly impossible to keep more than one burner on its max setting.

There may be other seasons of work during which each burner is between five and eight. In this circumstance, cooking well demands agility and paying close attention; even though no burner is on high, the rush of cooking across all of them is still engaging, perhaps even thrilling. But like all things, we need variability, we need seasons of being on high followed by some low simmers, and even periods with the oven shut off.

Make this metaphor work for you by reflecting on how many burners you’ve got going and the heat of each. You can check in at the beginning of every week to prioritize which burners need to be actively boiling versus which you can keep on a simmer. You could even put this visualization on a whiteboard in your office. If you start to feel like the entire kitchen is getting out of control, that’s a sign to turn down a burner or two, or perhaps, even eliminate some altogether.

We all want to cook, but none of us want to burn down the kitchen. Hopefully, this helps.

– Brad and Steve