This will be the final entry in the series about food and cooking.  We started by thinking about playing our role in any given situation.  From there, we reflected on leadership style vs. competency.  Then, we shifted to think about flavor combinations, belonging, and inclusion.  Additionally, we thought about following recipes to drive better engagement, and last week was about being daring enough to expand our flavor palettes.  This week is about potatoes and transformation.

Before we talk about potatoes, let’s think about apples.  Apples are delicious. I love a good honey crisp apple.  With an apple, you pick it up, brush it off (or wash it if you’re into being clean), and you eat it.  It’s instantly amazing.  It doesn’t require any extra effort.

Potatoes don’t work like apples.  You don’t pick a potato out of the dirt and start eating it right away.  Potatoes take work.  Potatoes are most delicious when they are transformed, and I would say that potatoes have a large range of things they can become.  Clean a potato and throw it in the oven and it becomes a baked potato (add in some butter, cheese, and bacon, and you have magic).  Slice a potato and fry it and you could have fried potatoes, one of my favorite breakfast foods.  You could deep fry potatoes and turn them into French fries, waffle fries, or tater tots.  Potatoes could be turned into all kind of different potato chips. You could turn a potato into smashed potatoes.  You could dice potatoes and throw them in a casserole.  You could turn potatoes into mashed potatoes, and then if you are awesome you could turn leftover mashed potatoes into potato cakes.  Some potatoes even grow up to become vodkas.  The variability is amazing!  Bonus, potatoes can even power flashlights.  Tell me that isn’t cool.

You might be wondering what this has to do with work.  I’d argue that we aren’t apples.  We aren’t ripe for picking already at a high level of instantaneous delicious awesomeness.  We won’t become bruised and disgusting if we fall off a tree or are dropped.  Instead, we are all potatoes.  We are all pulled from the ground, covered in dirt, and filled with potential.  All that is left for us is to figure out what kind of potato we are going to be.  This won’t be easy.  Potatoes require work, and so do humans.  To reach our potential we have to go through a transformation.  Often, these transformations are caused by some kind of challenges, and they are never easy.  A potato gets beat up, smashed, cooked, and sliced, but it comes out better on the other side.  In the same way, we get beat up, confused, lost, and hurt, but we have the chance to come out better on the other side.  It’s up to us to make sure we transform into something better.

The challenge: Who and what are you transforming into?

Have a jolly good day,

Andrew Embry