Do this with me:
- Griddle up a pancake on one side.
- Do not flip it. Instead, remove from heat and set on a plate.
- Immediately start the first half of another pancake.
- Continue until you have a stack of five half-cooked pancakes. They should be crispy and fluffy on one side, oozing and dripping raw batter on the other.
Oops. We didn't make a meal—we made a disaster.
The 10x pancake-maker
I’ve met busy, expert-level cooks who spend a great deal of time making only the first sides of pancakes. Everyone is hungry, the food goes to waste, but you gotta see how fast they move. Their bias towards action. Velocity. Look at them: a “flow state.” There is always something cooking, so they must be great at this. And the incredible variety of pancakes their menu offers.
What remarkable flavors their breakfasts must have, if they ever manage to finish a single god damned flapjack.
The best pancake
- The best pancake is cooked perfectly, ready for someone to enjoy.
- A strongly OK pancake might be a bowl of batter next to a hot griddle.
- The very worst is a pancake-in-progress, one that's started cooking, and then a doorbell rings a few rooms away. It’s easily interruptible, delicate, a liability if the mind or body wanders.
Started but not finished
Put on your continuous improvement goggles, go look for work that has been started but not finished. You’ll find it everywhere. Gross. Let it be as much cause for concern as that stack of half-cooked pancakes.
- Given a pancake-in-progress, you can guess how far along it is. Pour, one side, flip, the other, serve. You can even check the batter and guess how many more you can cook.
- But given a basket of nuanced, exploratory projects, everyone believes & reports each activity to be 85% complete… but the reality can be obscure. Plus, everybody is too busy starting all these other projects to quite finish any of them.
It’s enough to put you off your breakfast.