Not for my son, and I love that about him. Like most fathers and sons, we are simultaneously very similar and very different. Like me, Jonathan loves learning and reading, teaching and the mission of the church. Unlike me, he is an extrovert, more naturally pastoral and intuitive with people, and… a cook.
The world needs cooks. People who experiment and tinker, play and care little if it doesn’t turn out just right (at least for that one time). They begin with a playful spirit that wants nothing more than to avoid the mundane and the routine of the tried and true.
We owe almost all of our innovation to cooks.
Yes, there is a place in the world for the baker. We are the ones who work the process and the strategy with bulldog tenacity. We may have “cooked” our way to a recipe, but once we have it, we bake it until our fingers bleed.
While bakers run a tight ship, if they are good leaders along with their baking tendencies, they will have a very large place for cooks. It will often be cooks who bring creativity, improvisation and blue-sky thinking.
Leadership doesn’t have to mean a conflict between baking vs cooking. If you are naturally a cook, then you need to open yourself up to some baking, which means to remember the goal of cooking will only serve others if it allows them to replicate what you create—in other words, help them know how to bake what you cook.
Oh, and it’s okay to bake with your kids who hate baking.
This article about baking vs cooking originally appeared here, and is used by permission.
