There Are No Recipes

Some Thoughts for Tomorrow’s Generation

You cannot engineer your career. You cannot craft your success. Your accomplishments will not come by following a plan, mimicking your hero’s habits, or staying up-to-date on the latest trends.

Your luminaries are statistical aberrations, with stories no more interesting or unique than those who have failed. You are reading but one of countless plausible narratives in an ocean of silent evidence.

That feeling you get after purchasing the latest book from the business section is just the recycled high that accompanies the illusion convenient narratives provide. An endless attempt at grasping the mirage of an unworkable blueprint.

You are sidelined by complexity because you have never been taught to embrace variation. Your schools have modeled you into a creature of convention, taught to shun failure, avoid risk, and perceive human engagement as competition rather than collaboration.

You have been conditioned into thinking success flows from known fundamentals, despite nature showing us it emerges entirely from unforeseeable circumstances. You cannot see that your best self materializes out of friction, not sterile reassurance.

Limit your hero worship only to the initial motivation it brings you. The so-called paths and approaches championed by those you revere are just post-hoc explanations, conceived to fill-in the gaps of a wholly unexplainable and unexpected windfall.

There is no locating nature’s ultimate answer. There is only appreciating what emerges and leveraging discovery in the moment. You are a creature of adaptation, not prediction. You cannot schedule your creativity, it must be compelled.

You cannot chase something that leaves no trail. You cannot connect someone else’s dots to make a picture of your own life.

There Are No Recipes.