A tale of two tortilla soups

With a side of Hollandaise in the next issue

Failure.

The very word terrifies some people, and makes others have a sense of shame when it happens to them. It can limit life experience, and definitely enjoyment.

Why does it have so much power over your life? What does failure actually mean, and how can it be utilized as a tool, not something to avoid?

Let’s talk about cooking, because in the kitchen, failure is just waiting for you like those people that want to talk to you about your expired car warranty (and man, they really want to talk to you, don’t they?)

I like to cook, and I do it pretty much in some form or another every day. I also consider it part of the division of labor between my Significant Other and I, but we can get into that sort of thing later on, if it is of interest.

For now, cooking, and more specifically tortilla soup. I make a killer tortilla soup. It’s very tasty, it’s loaded in veggies, it’s quite healthy as well. I make it frequently, but this recipe is adapted from a rather famous one that you can find in a restaurant, and took some fine tuning to get it right. Not to mention, that when I was able to acquire this recipe, I was still a novice at cooking. Cooking takes a lot of practice and when you start, you suck at it. Or, at the very least I did, and got better as the years went by.

Anyway, I had refined this recipe, and gotten it to taste just the way that I liked it, and was confident in my ability to make it.

“What do you want for dinner?” I asked my SO.

“Tortilla soup,” he states without hesitation. No problem, I have all the stuff to make it, and off I go, but this time, it did not go well. It was an abject failure. The wonderful fresh veggies were left too long to cook, and disintegrated into the broth. There was nothing left of what I had started to make other than overcooked chicken, and over reduced broth, with no veggies to be found.

My Significant Other did try to convince me that it was salvageable, even tasting it an assuring me that it wasn’t that bad. That was a lie, and a big one at that. It went down the drain, and dinner was something far less interesting I am sure, though I don’t remember what it ended up being.

It was a terrible screw up, and really I can’t tell you if I got distracted, misjudged the cooking time, forgot the very basics of cooking, I have no idea. What I do know is that I had to change how I made the soup in the future. I had to be more aware, I had to use my failure as a guide to tell me how not to do it later on.

“Please don’t let one failure stop you from making tortilla soup again,” my friends that seemed to appear from darkened shadows whenever they smelled this soup getting cooked, urged me. That was a weird thing to ask in my mind.

I like this soup, and certainly am not interested in paying six dollars a bowl to get it at the restaurant that the recipe comes from. Not to mention, I make it better… most of the time. This time doesn’t count in that statement, because it was bad, and I mean really bad.

I reevaluated the recipe, adjusted when things were introduced to the broth, and how long each stage of veggies needs to be at the perfect mouthfeel when you eat it. What I didn’t do, and what I never considered doing was not trying again. It never crossed my mind to let a failure have any power over me past improvement. Now, it’s better than ever. Failure improved it to a higher caliber and now it is so good, I have someone that will do free work for me, if I just make it for them.

For some reason people are terrified of the judgement of others when they fail, but failure is a tool. It tells you where you are going wrong, and it gives you hints on how to fix it. If you have ever played a video game and you get to an area that you try to see how you are supposed to proceed, but are just stuck, but then notice that little nudge the developers left you to give you a hint, that is what failure is. It’s that nudge.

You can keep running yourself headlong into a wall over and over again, and not changing anything, and you will end up with a headache. However, if you look around, and see why what you are doing isn’t working, but take from that where you can adjust, you can make it through. You will get information that will tell you what to do, not only in that situation, but in future situations as well.

Your failure builds you. It makes you stronger, and it gives you skills that you didn’t even know you needed. However, if you fear failure so much that it stops you from trying because you can’t face not getting it right the first time around, you are crippling yourself. You aren’t giving yourself room to grow. Why do you want to do that to yourself?

Try new things, and embrace failing at them. If people give you a hard time for your failures, it’s probably because they are afraid of failure themselves. They are projecting onto you their own unspoken worries, and past failures that they don’t even want to think about, especially if those failures stopped them from trying again.

You have enough to deal with from your own fears, don’t let theirs convince you that you shouldn’t expand your experience in the world. That would just be a self limiting pointless venture.

You’re not going to be good at everything. That’s fine. I can’t draw. I tried to learn, but it was a nonstarter. It’s just a broken pathway in my brain. Oh well, just because I can’t draw, doesn’t mean I can’t bake, or cook, or stunt drive, or fire eat, or any other weird thing that draws my attention. I see something, and I want to learn how to do that thing. So what if I have a long road ahead of me to do so, and so what if I fail? The only way to do better, is to know what not to do next time.

Failure is a roadmap. Learn to use it and read it, and that’s coming from someone that is directionally impaired and cannot read a map to save her life (probably literally but haven’t tested that out yet).

When you are learning something new, your brain is creating synapses for that activity. This is a process. What you are terrible at right now, given enough time you will create a network of pathways that will make that activity far easier. This is again, evident in gaming if you do it. You have to learn what the game wants you to do, and you can expect to fail at it several times while you learn the mechanics. Even after you do, you can still make mistakes, you can still fail, but it should never stop you.

Let failure be a guide, not a block in your life. Let the fear of it fade, and change your thinking towards it. It’s giving you information, it’s telling you where to go, and it’s helping you get there. If you let it speak, you will have a clearer understanding of getting what you want. No one ever said that life was easy, but how you approach the fact of failure is going to have a great impact on how enjoyable it is.