From the course: Career Advice from Some of the Biggest Names in Business

David Chang on constant growth

- One of the things I loved in your book was, you talk about, growing the company, use the lobster as a metaphor for how you think about how each of your, restaurants needs to grow. It reminded me a lot of what people suggest for people's own careers and how they think about it. So would you talk about why the lobster is this perfect spirit animal for growth? - Yeah, it's, funny right? There's a great essay non-fiction essay by David Foster Wallace called Consider the Lobster, That's probably one of the best works of food non-fiction ever. And I really meditated on the lobster, not just because I cooked a lot of them. Because, you know, growing is hard, getting out of your comfort zone is very difficult as we've talked on this call so far, you know, part of the Momofuku process at least for me is making mistakes and moving from them. And analyzing, I constantly analyzing the mistakes that I've made because, I'm like pathologically wired to be better, to improve it doesn't always happen at the pace that I'd like, oftentimes I have to be reminded by other people that, hey Dave, you are really bad at this. You suck at this and I need to be told so I can be better. And, growing up is so painful, it's so hard. And a lobster molts, and when it molts to get bigger it becomes vulnerable and at some point, I can empathize with anybody that they just don't want to grow up anymore. And age has nothing to do with wisdom. Absolutely it has nothing to do with it. It's a matter of how many hands of poker do you want to play and you want to see hands. And you're going to lose a lot of these hands of poker. And you're going to... the more you fail, the more you're going to grow, the more it's going to hurt and at some point, a lobster if it doesn't get eaten by a predator, it dies because it, just doesn't want to molt anymore. And it literally just, it'll just... that's how it will die unfortunately, and that's the choice that (indistinct) upon myself, and I feel so many people that I know, that choosing to take the road less traveled, choosing to make your heart or your life more difficult. So you can, become a more wise, more mature person, a more well adjusted human being is not an easy task. And at some point it's natural for people just to want to give up. And I have to remind myself, as a lazy person. Cause I am naturally a lazy person to not do that, to constantly molt. (upbeat music)

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