How does information become knowledge?

Practice via ritualization forms habits. Habitual actions are completed via internalized knowledge. This is how we do things, make things. This is even how we stay stuck, stubbornly clinging to outdated knowledge that either no longer fits with the evolving world around us or may have proved helpful on one occasion, but doesn’t turn out to be a cure-all for every circumstance or situation. Perhaps confident knowledge is both the antidote and the disease.

Maybe these concepts are too vague in their breadth. Let me elucidate my subject of curiosity with a more simple, specific example. How about cooking? When does recipe execution become cooking from the heart, or at least, from one’s reservoir of remembered recipes?

Here’s what my cooking process often looks like. I have an idea for something I’d like to make. I’m inspired by remembering a past food experience or reading about/tasting a recipe that looks delicious. I research a variety of similar recipes, looking for the different possible key ingredients and ratios of elements that I believe, in the alchemy of the kitchen, will come together as the closest possible iteration of my idea. I buy what is needed. I anticipate the time it will take. I prep my materials, chop vegetables and aromatics, take spices off the shelf and oils and other embellishments from the fridge and cabinets and voila — it’s happening. I’m cooking. I’m changing an idea into a tangible fruition. I follow my recipe plan closely, sometimes taste-testing along the way. Other times, I wait until it’s all finished and surprise myself with the final outcome.

Last night, I attempted a red lentil soup. I eyeballed my spice measurements using some of what I already had in the house (coriander, cumin, cayenne and sumac — I would have loved to add turmeric as well, but had run out). This spice bouquet turned out beautifully; each individual flavor still discernible in the round, pungent bouquet they intermingled to form. Unfortunately, the whole soup suffered under my heavy-handed salt job. Sigh. So, I’ll tweak things next time. Make the exact recipe again, either without salting at all, with some salt and water with less concentrated stock added, or with homemade broth which I hope there will be lots of in my kitchen this winter. I digress.

The point is, I’ll tweak this red lentil soup (pictured left) until I find my idea of the perfect recipe for this thing. I’ll record the perfect recipe in all its refined glory and then, my hope is that it will become another item in my cooking repertory. Yes, that’s what I hope. It’s what I endeavor, but it never quite happens just so. Too much time passes before I’m able to make the soup again so that when I do, I have to refer back to the recipe. I have never committed the thing to memory. If I try to remember it, I diverge from the carefully wrought plans and screw up some other aspect of the sensitive flavor balance of the dish. In essence, I gathered a lot of archival information about this dish and filed it away so that I have access to it, but never converted the information into my personal knowledge bank, never transformed it via practice into a habitual action that I own.

If there is the desire to complete the memorization, body-ingraining, muscle memory owning of these dishes, where’s the missing link for me? Is this an issue of my lack of the 10,000 hours effect in the kitchen (Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers anyone)? Recently, on an Ask Me Anything Reddit session, Gladwell explained that his theory of 10,000 hours of practice won’t turn just anyone into an NBA all-star, but that in general, “natural abilities require a huge investment of deliberate practice in order to be made manifest.”

Well then, since my Italian-American mother did all the cooking while I was growing up, I got a late start. Only in college did I start concocting food for myself and beginning to accrue my 10,000 hours. I was curious and I certainly experimented when I had the time, but it was never a main area of focus.

So then, what about something like dance? I started quite early. The story goes that I demanded my mother take me to dance classes as my birthday present when I turned a wee three years of age. Lots of practice hours there. Then, following my high school graduation, I remember that Jean Leavey, the owner of the recreational dance school (The Dance Project) in Whitestone, Queens where I studied tap, jazz, ballet, modern and hip-hop from age 6 — 18, offered me a job teaching at her studio. She wondered whether I’d be able to organize my college course-load at Connecticut College in New London, CT (a 2.5 hour drive from NYC) so that I could return to the city every friday to teach classes for her. I was stunned at the offer. My immediate response, and one I actually stuck to, was that I didn’t feel I had expertise to offer her students. After all, I’d just graduated from the place where they were studying. I preferred to go out into the field and learn more, from different teachers with different perspectives and only then, I thought, would I have something to return with and offer her students.

While some might view this as responsible, I look back and notice how it completely devalues any of the intuitive knowledge and talent I possessed. Not to mention all of the outside dance experiences I’d accumulated over time: taking open classes at Broadway Dance Center, performing with a teenage, non-profit repertory company that worked with elderly Holocaust survivors through dance, performing in LaGuardia High School/NYC Opera productions of A Chorus Line and Into the Woods, starting to choreograph my own work, and performing with a pre-professional ballet company my senior year to name a few. I had started to develop my professional resume very early in the game, yet I declined Jean’s offer and chose to focus on gathering more information with the hopes of transforming it into personal knowledge.

In all the time since then, there have been an enormous amount of practice hours in my life spent dancing, performing, teaching, auditioning, improvising, seeing dance ,choreographing, acquiring anatomy expertise, training people, researching and experimenting with different somatic practices and yet, I still grapple with whether or not I’m an expert.

I’m between two thoughts on this. First, that the word deliberate which Gladwell posits, must come before the act of practice, if one is to elevate themselves to standout status in any field. I recently experienced a clear understanding of this. During my to Prague this past September, I was so inspired to learn about Alphonse Mucha’s career. To me, it seemed, above all, deliberate. Early on, after his first experiments as a scenery designer and home-decorator, he earned a sponsor; someone who paid for his deliberate, focused studies in fine arts by sending him to Paris and providing him with a scholarship and living wage. Even though this generous support only lasted for a couple of years, it was enough time for Mucha to refine his emblematic style. When Mucha lost his scholarship, he took commercial commissions providing book illustrations and designing advertising posters like the one for Job rolling papers pictured above. In his long and prolific career, the thing that struck me most about Mucha is that he never had to work outside his art. While his media for creating were expansively varied, from furniture design to theatrical posters, from his art-nouveau defining water-color and ink panels to his grand scale, oil-painted Slavic epic, Mucha never had to work outside of his art. He always found a way to support himself through his practice and he deepened his ability in this way. He was incredibly focused at always finding an outlet for his unique style no matter how extraneous the task at hand.

Mucha was deliberate and he started out with the support to be that way, to grow that way. Waa-waa, boo-hoo, it’s hard to be deliberate and focused without support. Yet there are still Van Gogh’s who persevere despite tremendous adversity and hardship. Which brings me to thought two which has to do with a person’s confidence and the usefulness of their self-criticism practice. Whether or not one has support, one needs confidence to pursue any goal. You need to believe the goal is valid and worthwhile and that you have the capacity to make it happen. Self-doubt is nothing more than a roadblock. If you have a persistent pattern of self-doubt, or if you view the world as populated with competitors who are against your success, it will make the journey to completing the goal in your sights, that much more difficult. It will be like carrying a boulder with you on your uphill battle. You must be realistic, but not negativistic. You must combat depressive thinking. You can acknowledge challenge and rise to the occasion without expecting the worst.

I think deliberate, focused practice in a ritualized manner, performed over and over again, demanding the majority of one’s time, can only be committed to if one truly believes in the organic nature of the purpose. It’s self-confidence. If you cling to the knowledge that you “probably can’t”, you won’t. That’s a harsh reality, but at least it provides a choice that’s clear as day; shift your outlook, change your outcome. I’m here working on it. How about you?

For fun, here’s my lentil soup recipe from a few nights back. It may not be perfect yet, but then again, it may never be and that doesn’t mean I shouldn’t cook. I recommend using organic ingredients as much as possible.

Ingredients

1 medium Spanish yellow onion, sliced

3 stalks celery, sliced

4 carrots, sliced

unrefined extra virgin olive oil

1 tblspn cumin

1 tblspn coriander

1/2 tspn cayenne

generous amount of fresh ground black pepper

2 pinches sumac (earthy, citrus-y spice)

1 cup red lentils

3 cups water

3 cups chicken stock (boxed or home-made) — you can use veggie stock or any other meat/poultry broth you prefer

juice of 1 lemon

handful cilantro, chopped (can use italian parsley if preferred).

Recipe: Coat the bottom of a stock pot with olive oil. Heat. Add onions. Sauté til translucent. Add carrots, celery, cayenne, coriander, sumac and cumin. Sauté until veggies are tender. Add lentils and stir until they are slightly browned and fully coated with oil and spice blend. Add water and stock and bring to a vigorous boil. Lower to a simmer. Skim soup scum from top of broth. Allow to simmer for 45 to 90 minutes stirring occasionally. Right before removing from heat add chopped cilantro, fresh ground pepper and the juice from one lemon. Salt to taste sparingly. (If you’re using boxed broth, you may want to note how much sodium is in it before adding your own salt to the soup). Can drizzle with fresh evoo in bowls at table and sprinkle fresh cilantro as garnish if desired. Bon appétit!