Chefs Need to Eat, Too: The Unbearable Taste of Your Own Cooking/Medicine (Patreon)

So, I was talking recently with a friend about why I went so silent for so long. It wasn't a healthy hiatus. It wasn't a "break". It wasn't a recharge. It was just a downward spiral.

Why, how, could I fall off the horse when about 50% of what I do is help people either

1) prevent falling off the horse themselves, and/or

2) rapidly remount?

Doesn't this make me a hypocrite? Does it mean the advice I give is total BS or at least ineffective? Am I a fat diet doctor? Am I smoking lung surgeon? Is this verbal diarrhoea? Am I a joke to you? Do you think I'm here for your enjoyment? Are we just quoting lines from mafia films now?

Yes. Possibly.

And, but, there's also this. I'm human, despite my frequent protestations to the contrary (for real, I often joke that I'm an AI that just isn't fully electrically powered yet...except that I'm not joking: if the world of "The Matrix" were real, I'd have fought on the machine side, and if you've watched "The Animatrix", you already know why; the humans were squarely in the wrong almost the entire time); I understand flaws and problems because I experience them as well.

Even chefs go to restaurants. Even chefs need to eat. I give advice, some of it's really good. Scratch that, all of it's flawless and infallible. LoL. No, for real, though, some of it's really good. Some of it's freaking awesome.

But just because I give it, just because it comes out of me or through me, that doesn't mean that it's all inside me all the time [*oblique self-reference -- naaaaaaailed it*]. A chef can cook great food, and have great culinary skills, and put out great cookbooks, but that doesn't mean he'll never be hungry; it doesn't mean he'll always be willing or able to cook for himself.

So, that's why I am and always will be both a consumer and producer of advice, whether my own or other people's. And it's taken me a terribly long time to realize this fact, but I'm beginning to understand why grandparents are so mellow: they've already learned these things.

How can this help you? I dunno. Figure it out. LoL. But, I guess...don't beat yourself up trying to be perfect? Perfection only exists in mathematics. Infinity is a construct. Infinitesimals are a construct. These things are very useful except where they're not. In engineering, it's all about approximation. Statistics, too, while based in maths, is all about imperfection -- imperfect samples, confidence intervals, imperfect assumptions, imperfect calculations, imperfect conclusions; it's fuzzy, like a cat...with an imperfect litterbox usage rate.

Admittedly, it would be less imperfect if the box were always clean, but sometimes the box is perfectly clean and he still...you know what? This...this isn't the time or place.

Don't be perfect. Just improve.

And maybe perform imperfect statistical approximations of the perfect...