Next time you are at a brewpub or local dive look around at the other tables and look at how many tables have French fries at them. French fries touch almost every table, often they touch every plate at the table. The next part in our exercise is for you to think how many places you have been that had awful French fries. So many restaurants are messing up with a food item that hits every table. This blows my mind. If you have excellent French fries at your restaurant you have the chance to put something on nearly every plate that makes people happy. I keep thinking about this a lot, and what this whole concept means when applied to life.
Most of us are not restauranteurs, our ability to make French fries does not matter. In our daily pursuits however, we often will have things that take the place of French fries. When I talk about French fries, I’m talking about something that hits almost every customer or person we interact. I am talking about something we are very capable of getting right too. These “French fries” will be different things for everyone, but we all have them. What I wonder is how many of us are messing them up all the time.
If we are looking at ourselves critically, I think we are likely to find a French fry or two we are messing up. When I ran a Meetup group, I used to be lazy about reaching out to guest speakers. If I had been more proactive about this, so many of our meetings could have been better. When I didn’t focus on this, we ended up with sub-par speeches thrown together at the last minute, or no speaker at all. This was a French fry. This one is easy to see but I can’t help but think I have more I need to find.
Finding our repeated faults and acknowledging them can make such a big difference. It can be as simple as recognizing what tasks we do across all or most of our projects and simply asking can this be done better? If the answer is yes, there is then the time to evaluate whether this task or aspect of the project matters. Many things can be improved, but they have to matter. If they matter there could be huge upside to fixing them.
One time this proved huge for me is changing my warmups to my workouts. I used to have a modest warmup for my workouts. Due to some injuries and age I have started to do a more thorough warmup. I diligently prepare myself to lift hard with every workout. Fixing this one thing has lead to me being stronger and having less minor injuries. It was an easy thing to get right and I notice the impacts across all workouts now.
Now I’m telling you French fries are important, but so are other things. If we go back to our restaurant example with a limited menu you could really get everything right. If you get the French fries right, if you get the bun right, if you get your house sauce right, you are on your way to having every meal be good. All of which can be done by just focusing on the things that hit every plate.
This whole post seems really simple and silly. At the same time, how many restaurants serve really awful cold French fries? A lot of them do, and they are missing so much opportunity. As I have thought about this I’ve started thinking I’m serving more than a few awful French fries up in my life as well. I am horrible at following up with people I meet. I am awful at creating a good writing environment for myself. These kind of mistakes hit across so many projects and efforts. So you can say I’m thinking a lot about the French fries, and trying to make sure every plate gets hit with a dose of awesome. Hitting each plate with a dose of awesome gets you halfway to the meal being good. Businesses, careers, and legacies are built on serving up good meals, so there is no reason not to serve up some good fries.