Mise En Place: Doing the Prep Work

Last summer, I was listening to a Tim Ferriss podcast, and he had an interview with Chris Young. Chris Young is a chef. He’s an inventor, and innovator. And he’s had a career in a kitchen and his current company is called ChefSteps. And he’s worked with remarkable people all over the globe, help restaurants maintain and raise their Michelin star. And in dialogue with Timothy Ferriss, he flips out a word or a concept that I never heard up to that point. And in the kitchen, people know it, but in my domains of design and business and all the stuff I do I’ve never heard it before. And it’s called me son plaze. Now, this is a French word, a French word meaning putting in place and everything in its place.

And I didn’t understand it. So I started looking it up. And I didn’t really go into deep explanation of it. But as I began to see what Nissan plaas was for the kitchen, it opened up a whole new domain for every aspect of my life. And the best way that I understood it is I went back in my memory to a time when I worked fast food. And in fast food. I woke up really early to get there before the restaurant restaurant opened. And I prepared everything. I was cutting vegetables. I was cutting salad. I was toasting buns. I was prepping me. I was doing everything before the restaurant open. And so they would have all the supplies there. And ultimately me Psalm plaas is getting everything organized.

And we’ve seen it before we seen it in a TV network. The Kitchen shows where they tell you the ingredients. And they have all the ingredients pre portioned into little bowls and containers. Everything from the dashes of this, the ounces of that, it’s all scooped up together, right. And what’s amazing is it looks so easy on TV, it looks so easy when you’re at the chipotle line. And they’re just a dash of this, sprinkle it, it’s a little bit of that, but it’s all organized. So when it’s time to go, it’s there, you’ve been to the Mongolian grills and all those ingredients are just scooped into your bowl thrown on the grill flavored a little bit. And it’s ready for you. But ultimately, what happens when we try to recreate that recipe at home, we come up with missing ingredients or it’s not complete it is a modified version of what it’s supposed to be because of poor planning.

And so we cook it and we’re missing the oregano or we’re missing the five or we’re missing all of these pieces only because the effort to stop the production and go get that piece is not as worth it. And so me some plus extends beyond the kitchen. It is a conceptual understanding about all the components, all the ingredients, and building systems around each of the steps. And so we don’t have to start from ground zero, having the right pieces in place, organized prepared, portioned, you do all the strategic thinking, problem solving and preparation so that you peak at the right point. That means we need to revisit some of the concepts we were talking about with batching. That means our planning our foresight, our vision is prepared knowing that what we want to achieve requires things to be in place, we take the time we construct them.

And so now instead of worrying about running to the grocery store, or preparing these components, we can focus on our performance. Because you look at the TV show, they saute the vegetables, they do all the things, they put it in the oven. And with the magic of television, they’ve already prepared it and then they just pull it out the oven, cut a slice off and share it with the studio audience. And everybody just raves into a frenzy because it’s so good. It’s so good because there’s a system behind it. If we are going to evolve and advanced that recipe, the recipe that we are calling what we want to achieve. If we want to evolve beyond it, we have to give our own mind the capacity to level up.

And if we’re solving too many things, if we’re figuring out if we’re rendering every step along the way. We have decision fatigue, we have a cognitive fatigue that won’t allow us to break through. It’s almost that easy. And to think that Chris Young brought this idea to me and I used it in other areas of my life. I’ve used the organ now, I pre portion. So were my nutritional supplements or you put the gym bag and all the stuff in it. So you know that you will not only achieve success, but you’ve planned it out, you’re going to hit the right notes because you have the instruments in place along the line. Like you watch some of those Terminator movies and they just have bags of weapons placed within the warehouse so they know once they run out, they’ll have the other stuff in place.

This takes planning, this takes preparation. This takes deconstruction and if we can deconstruct the level of performance that we want to operate on, watch out, watch out because we become fierce. So it’s easy to understand why some of these fast food or restaurants or even high end mission lean restaurants performed consistently over time. It’s the systems that give them the strength and as you understand how to operate within the systems that you construct. The results are consistent, giving you the headspace to further advance your costs. Isn’t that awesome? Me Psalm plus m i s e ENPL a CE, French word, meaning putting everything in its place, thus giving us the opportunity to excel. What could be better than that? How many ways and areas of your life could you apply this concept? Food work, project management, you name it, you can apply it.