Meaningful Returns

A great dish hits you like a Whip-It: There’s momentary elation, a brief ripple of pure pleasure in the spacetime continuum. That’s what I was chasing, that split second when someone tastes something so delicious that their conversation suddenly derails and they blurt out something guttural like they stubbed their toe.

I recently read a fascinating piece over at Wired by Chef David Chang entitled “The Unified Theory of Deliciousness,” which is really stimulating even if you don’t like food that much (which, really?).

The article is Chef Chang’s attempt to show that while food appears to differ widely from culture to culture, the difference is more an expression of differing tools and ingredients rather than a fundamental difference in the way we taste food at the most basic level. Music is the same way–we have different instruments and time signatures and even different scales altogether–but all music at some base level is profoundly similar in that it is a uniquely human activity that enables us to express ourselves and our understanding of the world around us.

But there is a little nugget in this article that stood out to me in the context of money (emphasis mine):

Joshua told me he wanted to make a version of a Bolognese, the Italian meat sauce. I told him that was fine, but he had to use only Korean ingredients. I often set these kinds of limitations, because I’m a big believer that creativity comes from working within constraints. (And also, maybe it’s a form of payback; when I was a kid in northern Virginia, my mother had to make her Korean dishes using only ingredients she could find at the local Safeway.)

I think that for people with means, people who will never understand the harsh realities of real poverty, this money concept is far and away the most difficult to grasp–the idea that creativity comes from working within constraints. And the reason it’s difficult is because we can fool ourselves–at any and every level of wealth–into thinking we are working within constraints when in reality we have just spent money until we can’t spend any more and never bothered to think about what we were creating with our money.

For example, let’s say Joshua decided he wanted to make a Bolognese, and Chef Chang refrained from his “only Korean ingredients” directive. Well, Joshua could have looked around the kitchen, used a bit of all the ingredients therein, created a lackluster Bolognese and said, “see, I was constrained, I needed more ingredients.” And of course that makes no sense. But that is often what we do with our money. We simply look at what’s available, spend it without real intention until there is no more, and then complain about “constraints.”

For constraints to work and beget creativity they have to contain two ingredients: 1) Intentionality, and 2) Foresight. Constraints that you stumble into after the fact and much to your complete surprise aren’t particularly useful at all. But constraints that you set for yourself in advance, to accomplish something specific and meaningful–these are priceless.