Today I read an interesting comment in an interview with Australian celebrity chef Poh Ling Yeow. Poh rose to fame in Australia by coming runner-up in the first Australian series of MasterChef. She has since had a number of her own cooking shows and is appearing again on the current series of MasterChef All-Stars 2020.
In the interview, Poh was asked why she’d had so many jobs in her life, including chef, television chef, artist, make-up artist and even actor. Poh’s response struck me: “I’ve always been very greedy – not for money but for life experience. I’ve always been driven to suck the marrow out of life. If there’s anything out there that I want to try, I try it.”
Sure, famous people effectively saying “I love to try new things” in an interview isn’t unique, however the food metaphors (“greedy” and “suck the marrow out”) made me want to chew this answer over a little longer. (See what I did there?!)
Life is all about attitude and the quality and nature of your attitude heavily dictates the quality and nature of your life. It’s one thing to “enjoy trying new things” (a phrase which I think is a bit of a clichéd cop out) and another thing to constantly seek out challenging new experiences. Poh isn’t worried about failing publicly – let’s face it, even if she comes runner-up there will be the armchair experts that consider that failure even though it’s still a formidable achievement – she’s just worried about doing the best that she can do to prove to herself.
Poh claims that she isn’t in it for the $250k prize as she’s in a comfortable financial position. Instead, she really wants to win this one to show herself (and everyone else) that she is capable of winning. We can see Poh taking a number of big risks in an effort to take out the title. (We’ll find out in a few weeks if she succeeds.) Poh attributes part of her drive to succeed to being a migrant child (Poh’s family migrated to Australia from Malaysia when she was nine) because being a migrant meant she always felt she had to prove herself more than other people do. Poh even says she’s “addicted to the fight”.
Being greedy for life experience is something that everyone could benefit from. We hear about the people who have tragic or life-threatening experiences and suddenly find a renewed thirst for life and don’t want to waste a minute. For people who have lived reasonably comfortable and quiet lives that haven’t had any extreme highs and lows, it can be hard to move out of that comfort zone to see what else is out there. Fear can tempt us into settling for satisfactory.
That’s where the concept of being greedy for experience is terrific. So many people have a scarcity mindset where they think that there isn’t enough to go around and so they are going to miss out. Experience isn’t a zero sum game. Experience is what you make of it. You having a terrific experience doesn’t stop other people from also having a terrific experience. In fact, it can be quite the opposite: experiences shared with others are often more enjoyable.
People who are greedy for experience are people who regularly put everything they have on the line. They know things aren’t always going to go to plan so they look for the silver lining. There is always something to take away from the unexpected. Who knows, sometimes the unexpected is even better than what we were hoping for.
One thing is clear. Life cannot be lived properly from the couch. People think that they’re happy staying in watching Netflix and scrolling through Facebook and Instagram, but if that’s you, what does that tell you? It says that deep down you know you’re missing out. If you were so satisfied with your life, why are you spending so much time looking at the lives of other people?
When we let life happen to us we tend to get whatever life has left over. What else should we expect? If we can’t be bothered putting the effort in to live our lives to the fullest, why should the universe send anything our way that’s half decent? Why hand us the good stuff on a plate if we couldn’t be arsed using our initiative to look for it?
Opportunities for experience cross our paths every day. The more we get out there looking for experience the more opportunities we’re going to come across and the better the quality of those opportunities. Opportunity begets opportunity because those people among us who are greedy for experience find themselves amongst kindred spirits and shared opportunities.
Being greedy for experience doesn’t come with the trade-offs that being greedy in other ways does. If we’re greedy for food, then we end up consuming far too many calories and doing damage to our bodies. If we’re greedy for money, we can find ourselves making choices that leave us lonely or even in trouble with the law. Being greedy for experience doesn’t have these negative side effects. Sure, experiences may not always go to plan and possibly leave us licking our wounds for a bit, but there is always something that we can take away from the experience and build on for next time.
One of the few risks of being greedy for experience is that some of the people in our lives may be left behind if you’re growing and they’re not. We look at the world differently when we’re trying to see how we can squeeze out every last drop. Subsequently we can find ourselves growing apart from people who are choosing safety over growth. But why should you hold yourself back just because other people are scared of what could be?
Be like Poh: be greedy for experience. The only way you can live your best life is by seeing what you’re made. The only way you can see what you’re really made of is to seek out challenging opportunities that will give you the experience and personal growth that will make it worth getting out of bed every morning.