i lived the life for 8 years when i was young. everything tony says about cooking, and cooking education is 100% true.<p>i was far too broke to get into drugs, and thereby did the waitresses stay away too, so i have no entertaining stories of fevered cutting-board liasons. i do have many marginally interesting stories of burns, lacerations and unbelievably horrible working conditions for very little money.<p>interestingly, the experience has served me very well in the software business. i rarely complain about my chair, monitor, lighting, keyboard or anything else that isn't actively burning.
I love his writing. Some of it is uneven, but it's mostly good. I first got hooked when I read the first pages of "A Cook's Tour" where he begins<p>"Dear Nancy, I'm about as far away from you as I've ever been... There's one lightbulb, a warped dresser, and a complimentary plastic comb with someone else's hair in it. In spite of the EZ Clean design features, there are suspicious and dismaying stains on the walls. About two thirds of the way up one wall, there are what look like bloody footprints and - what do they call it, arterial spray? How they got there, so high up, I can only guess.
The wall opposite has equally sinister stains - evidence of a more opaque substance - these suggesting a downward dispersal. Having seen the bathroom, I can't blame the perpetrator for anything."<p>I can read that letter over and over.
Bourdain's earlier book, <i>Kitchen Confidential</i> is great and I highly recommend it. It also has a "So You Want to Be a Chef" chapter (perhaps they are the same).<p><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Kitchen-Confidential-Updated-Adventures-Underbelly/dp/0060899220/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1285019980&sr=8-1" rel="nofollow">http://www.amazon.com/Kitchen-Confidential-Updated-Adventure...</a><p>There was a time in my life when I aspired to be a chef and/or restaurateur. Later I concluded that it's better if some of your passions are simply left as that ... passions without the added burden of depending on them for your livelihood.<p>But I do think everyone should work at a restaurant at least once in their life. It's a customer-service learning experience and gives you an appreciation for the staff when you patronize restaurants later.
At the end of the article, Bourdain admits he succeeded primarily due to luck, and that "luck is not a business model". I suspect many here have heard the more famously quoted "hope is not a business model", which is also true. Perhaps less famous, but more dangerous to entrepreneurs: "passion is also not a business model".<p>Interestingly, although each of those is certainly not a business model, all of them are ultimately required for a startup to reach a [VC|FU-money] level of success.
"Look at the crews of any really high-end restaurants and you’ll see a group of mostly whippet-thin, under-rested young pups with dark circles under their eyes: they look like escapees from a Japanese prison camp—and are expected to perform like the Green Berets."<p>At some point in my life, working in a bakery, i - a 19 yr old and very fit back then - still had very hard time to keep the pace with and not fell behind the middle-aged women who'd been working there for years (it was a temporary summer job for me, and in general no man had been able to work there for more than a couple of month in a row)
No, his books hammered this in my head. I don't want to be a chef.<p>I read Kitchen Confidential and loved it. Is there a similar non-technical book I could read on another line of profession that would be just as interesting?
What a terrific career advice! Go after hard to get skills in your early career, work with the best even if you have to work for free! Don't let the better pay to lure you into dead-end jobs.<p>I wish my parents taught me this when I was 18. I’m thirty-two, a consultant developing in-house software for insurance industry. Well-paid and in demand for the best part of my thirteen year professional journey, getting well above average programmer’s pay I suffered so many sleepless nights thinking about where I really dreamt to be: working for the likes of Adobe, MS or Google. A real software company that makes a difference in the world!<p>Just to think that would have I made some better choices thirteen years ago, I could have been part of the core Skype team right now breaks my heart. But I can’t, I’m just not fit for the job, after thirteen years of hard work there is nothing on my CV that would make a head hunter working on behalf of a real software company to pick up the phone and give me a call.<p>So far the strongest driving force behind my career, the litmus test for any prospective job was financial viability; it was always about the better pay! I had to support myself and increasingly my family since I was 19 and I just couldn’t afford to go into full time education, I had to stay on the path scattered with lucrative but essentially mundane in-house programming jobs. The beast I had to feed was getting bigger and bigger as I was getting older and I didn’t know any better nor had anyone given me the timely guidance to get off the money needle and hunt down the hard-core programming skills and experience needed to hack Linux kernel, write a sound processing library or a come up with a better search algorithm, the skills that would have opened so many doors to me, the doors that now matter so much!<p>The advice I’ll be giving my kids is not to let the financial considerations alone to guide your early career choices, go for awesome skills what will pay off in a fulfilling job later in your life.
<i>"If you’re twenty-two, physically fit, hungry to learn and be better, I urge you to travel—as far and as widely as possible."</i><p>This is the best advice. People that never traveled, settled with their first girlfriend and took the first job, can be happy and fulfilled. But they miss out on so many good things..
This is possibly the best "don't get into startup in any form unless you're designed for it" article I've ever seen. I've known a lot of people who want to either own a restaurant, or open their own web design firm, or do something entrepreneurial when they just don't know what they'll be in for. I could even use this as a form letter for many other areas (except for the "too fat?" part).
Some good analogies with the main business of hacker news, here. It's worth thinking about some of the connections, especially:<p>1) Working in places where you will learn and acquire respect subsequently, if you care about that sort of thing. Yes, you can get more doing chintzy jobs, but there are plenty of high-paying jobs in computers that are the equivalent of Bourdain's 'country-club kitchens'.<p>2) Coming in with the right attributes (e.g. not being fat), and not mistaking attributes of people in at the end of their careers with the ones that you can get away with when you are young.<p>I have seen many, many people who have decided in computer science to emulate some famous guy who is wildly opinionated and a bit obnoxious and have it work out far less well for them than it did for the Grand Old Man of computer science.
He says "The restaurant kitchen may indeed be the last, glorious meritocracy," yet his own career has greatly benefited from his talent for writing and self-promotion.
I think one might miss the point here, if one would take his writing too literally, that he ended up on an amazing success by just following what was good for him no matter how long did it take.
The idea that you have to be willing to kill yourself in the process of being successful is a dangerous one, and will only be true measured by others standards.
Kitchen Confidential got me into the life and I.T. got me back out. This guy is one of my heroes.<p>I also agree with callmeed, in that passions sometimes shouldn't be one's livelihood... I ended up leaving due to burnout and doubt that I would have been as successful opening my own gig based on the highly competitive environment where I live.