Episode 1. The Calling

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The opening episode takes up the first chapter of The Luxury of Attention and its claim that a career in luxury hospitality, or in a serious kitchen, begins with a recognition rather than a vision. Aaron Kaupp lifts a coffee pot during a breakfast shift at the Golden Tulip Hotel and knows his career. Eric Ripert, kicked out of school, has already found his calling at his mother’s table. James Low walks into a Kuala Lumpur hotel lobby and sets aside a plan to work in a bank, and Damien Bastiat watches the general manager walk the floor of the Savoy. The hosts follow Albert Adrià, Alex Atala and Aaron Silverman, who arrived despite themselves, then the inheritance of George Cozonis, Mahmoud Skaf, Jonnie Boer, Sven Elverfeld and Kanani’s own mother’s kitchen. The episode closes on the resistant calling, the question of fit, the sorting schools and kitchens perform, and Anthony Bourdain on the few, the proud and the weird.

In this episode

Aaron Kaupp’s coffee cup at the Golden Tulip as recognition rather than vision.
Eric Ripert, James Low and Damien Bastiat recognize the work at different thresholds.
Albert Adrià, Alex Atala and Aaron Silverman arrive despite themselves.
Inheritance: George Cozonis, Mahmoud Skaf, Jonnie Boer, Sven Elverfeld and Kanani’s mother.
The resistant calling: each return a fraction of a centimeter more adhered.
Fit, selection over persuasion, and Bourdain on the few, the proud and the weird.

Transcript

Automatically transcribed from the audio and lightly corrected. Speaker turns are not marked.

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I want you to start by picturing a very specific sequence of physical movements. We are observing a professional serving breakfast at the Golden Tulip Hotel. Right. We're talking about Aaron Kaupp here. Exactly. Okay.So the server is Aaron Kaupp and he is watching a guest in the dining room and he registers that this guest's coffee cup is running low. Yeah. And before the guest even looks up, before that guest even consciously acknowledges their own need for a refill, Kaupp has already lifted a fresh pot from the sideboard. It's just immediate. It really is. There is no grand fanfare at all.There is no dramatic realization. There is just the action, the observation and the response. Right. And the reason we are starting with this exact sequence is because Kaupp later described that shift with these precise words. Quote, my first job in the industry was serving breakfast at the Golden Tulip Hotel and I knew right then that I wanted this to be my career. It is an incredibly definitive moment, you know, but what strikes me most is just how quiet it is.Right. And he didn't come to that realization after some massive promotion or like climax of intense pressure. The realization lived inside the simple unglamorous mechanics of refilling a cup. Absolutely. And welcome to you, the listener to this deep dive into chapter one, The Calling from Rahim B. Kanani's book, The Luxury of Attention.Yes, welcome. This is episode one of 14 where we are going to extract the absolute core of Kanani's philosophy. And we're going to wrestle with what they actually mean for the mechanics of a professional life. And the central premise Kanani establishes right out of the gate in this chapter is that a career in luxury hospitality and equally a career in the culinary arts fundamentally begins with a recognition. Right. A recognition not a vision.Yes. It does not begin with a vision. And we really need to spend some time unpacking that distinction because it completely subverts how most of us are taught to think about our work. It totally does. Right. Because this isn't about fate dropping from the sky.It is the quiet click of understanding that something you are already inside of is exactly where you want to stay. I actually want to stop right there and push back on this whole idea of vision because it feels like we are dismantling a very sacred cow here. Oh absolutely. We definitely are. Because if you look at standard career advice, it is almost entirely built on the concept of having a vision. You know, you are supposed to visualize your future.You are supposed to build the five year plan. Right. The classic five year plan. Exactly. But Kanani makes this crucial distinction. A vision is inherently forward looking and it is inherently grand.Yeah, and heavy. Yes, heavy. When you have a vision, you are taking on the massive cognitive load of imagining a future that does not yet exist. But a recognition. Kanani says a recognition happens entirely in the present tense. It requires zero imagination.Zero. It only requires attention. Think about the mechanics of what you just described and why that distinction is so vital for you, the listener. Think about the sheer anxiety generated by trying to sustain a vision. Oh, it's exhausting. It really is.When you are trying to map out a career based on vision, you are constantly straining to project yourself into a hypothetical space. You are trying to predict who you will be, what the industry will look like, and whether the two will match. Which is impossible to know for sure. Right. But Aaron Kaupp, standing in the Golden Tulip Hotel, he didn't do any of that. He didn't envision his entire future trajectory.No, he was just pouring coffee. Exactly. He didn't picture himself running international properties later on. He just paid attention to the tasks right in front of him. And he recognized that the energy of running a restaurant and being around people was a perfect match for his constitution in that exact present moment. So mechanically speaking, it's kind of the difference between trying to draw a map of a city you've never visited, which is the vision, versus putting on a coat and immediately realizing it is tailored perfectly to your shoulders, which is the recognition.Oh, wow. That is a phenomenal way to frame it. Thanks. I don't have to imagine how the coat will feel later on or how it might wear over time. You just know with absolute certainty that it fits your physical frame right now. Yeah.And it challenges you as the listener to audit your own professional life. Like, are you burning energy trying to visualize a future that you have no guarantee of reaching? That's a tough question to ask yourself. It is, but it's necessary. Are you paying rigorous attention to the tasks that currently feel like a natural fit? The work that doesn't exhaust your spirit.Because Kanani argues that the true calling doesn't ask you to imagine anything. It just asks you to pay attention to where you already are. Exactly. Well, let's follow that thread of where you already are because this recognition doesn't always happen in the middle of a work shift. It doesn't always look like Kaupp holding a coffee pot. No, it can look very different.Right. The chapter outlines three very distinct stories of recognition and they happen at completely different thresholds of the craft. I want to start with Eric Ripert. Okay, yes. The Ripert was kicked out of school, but at home his mother set the family table daily with fresh linens and multiple courses. Which is quite the setup for a family meal.It really is. Now, when Ripert looked at the culinary world, he initially thought working in a kitchen simply meant he would get to eat all the time. Which is pretty funny, honestly. Right. But the calling had already happened in that dining room. The culinary school he attended later was just the confirmation of a recognition that it already clicked into place.We really need to look closely at what Kanani is doing by including Ripert's story here. The recognition for Ripert happened inside a domestic space. Yeah, not a professional one. Exactly. It happened before any professional training began, before he ever touched a professional station. The fit was established by the daily mechanics of his mother setting that table.Right. The recognition preceded the profession entirely. But then you have James Low and his recognition happens in a completely different way. Yes. The atmosphere example. Exactly.It arrives as Kanani phrases it in the shape of an atmosphere. So Low was on a school trip. He walked into a hotel lobby in Kuala Lumpur. He registered the decor and right there in that exact instance, he abandoned his existing plan to work in a bank. Just from walking into the lobby. Just from that.He stated, quote, I quietly told myself that this is the environment I want to be in. This is where we have to explore the mechanics of an atmosphere. Like how does a room communicate a calling? It's kind of wild to think about. It is because Low didn't check a guest in. He didn't balance a ledger.He didn't perform any of the actual labor of hospitality. But an atmosphere is essentially a physical manifestation of a specific set of rules and values. No, that makes sense. Yeah. When Low walked into that lobby, his nervous system recognized the order, the aesthetic, the unspoken rules of that space. And it registered as a match.The atmosphere itself functioned as the filter. He recognized the shape of the room and he knew he fit inside it. Precisely. And then we moved to a third threshold with Damien Bastiat, whose click happened while he was actively watching someone else work. Watching the general manager, right? Yes.Bastiat was at the Savoy Hotel in London watching the general manager walk the floor. And in that sequence of observing another person's movement, Bastiat realized he didn't want to be the cook and he didn't want to be the bartender. He wanted to be the man walking the floor. He was very specific about it. He was. He said, quote, I realized that's what I wanted to do.Notice how the calling narrows its focus in Bastiat's case. Kanani emphasizes that for Bastiat, the calling became specific. It wasn't just general hospitality anymore. Right. It moved from a generalized, vague interest in hospitality to an incredibly targeted role. And again, look at the mechanics here.Why did watching the general manager's physical posture trigger that realization? Because it's a very particular type of presence. Exactly. Walking the floor requires a specific kind of vigilance, a specific kind of peripheral vision and authority. Bastiat saw that posture and his internal wiring essentially said, that is my posture. So across these three examples, Kanani is showing us that recognition isn't a monolith.Not at all. It can happen at the threshold of a school, inside the passive threshold of a lobby, or by actively observing the specific physical mechanics of a role. Yeah, it takes different forms for different people. But I want to pause and challenge this a little bit. Okay, go for it. With Kaupp, Low and Bastiat, the recognition sounds almost, I don't know, poetic.They walk into a space or the observer role and the heavens part and everything makes sense. Sure, it sounds very clean. Right. But what about the people who don't have that romantic moment? What about the people who just stumble into the work by complete accident? Because Kanani brings up this concept of arriving despite oneself.The accidental calling. Yes, the accidental calling. And I want to know how an accident can be a calling. Well it is a vital question because the accidental calling strips away the romance entirely and it forces us to look at the raw mechanics of the work. Okay. Let's look at Albert Adria.He entered the kitchen at El Bulli simply because his brother Ferran needed cooks. So just doing a favor. Exactly. There was no grand desire. There was no poetic recognition of the atmosphere. He had no underlying interest in cuisine whatsoever.Wow. His exact quote is, I had no idea what cooking was or what being a cook entailed. But once he was inside, placed there by absolute necessity, he ended up being deeply drawn to the technique required in the bakery. So the necessity put him in the room but the technique is what kept him there. Precisely. He had to choose the craft based on a preconceived notion of what it was.He encountered the physical reality of the bakery technique and his nervous system responded to it. That's fascinating. And we see the exact same pattern with Alex Atala. Atala described his European training not as a grand pursuit but as a traveling circumstance. A traveling circumstance. Yeah.He was bouncing in and out of kitchens for completely unrelated reasons. The kitchen was just a backdrop to his life. But then one day he just wasn't out of it anymore. The circumstance stopped being a detour and became the absolute destination. And then there is Aaron Silverman who did a month-long stage at 2941 restaurant. His work was incredibly repetitive.I mean, he was picking herbs and torching tomatoes. That was it. Very rote tasks. Extremely. And yet he described that rote foundational labor with this quote, the key moment that led me on this journey. This is where Kanani makes a very sharp, very illuminating assertion.He writes, a month is plenty. A breakfast shift is plenty. Meaning you don't need years to figure it out. Right. We have to stop and think about the mechanism of the accidental calling. These operators did not sit down and select this path from a menu of options.No, they didn't. They were placed in the environment by a traveling circumstance, by a favor to a brother by a month-long stage. And the environment itself revealed their own nature to them. They didn't impose their will on the kitchen. The kitchen showed them who they already were. I really wanted the listener to sit with that idea.Think about the traveling circumstances in your own life. How many of your deepest, most enduring professional commitments began as temporary favors or just complete accidents? Probably more than we realize. Yeah. You took a role just to pay a bill or you covered a shift for a friend and suddenly you realized that your brain actually prefers the constraints of that specific room. It completely reframes how we judge our own career paths.It really does. We put so much pressure on ourselves to have a master plan. But Kanani is suggesting that the plan matters far less than the exposure. Exposure is the only way to test the fit. You cannot theorize whether you like torching tomatoes or picking herbs for an entire month. You either have the wiring for it or you don't.Right. The only way to find out is to be subjected to the repetition. Okay. So we have the sudden recognition, like low in the lobby. We have the accidental calling, like Adria helping his brother. Now let's look at a completely different pattern that Kanani identifies.The inheritance. Yes. What happens when the calling is an inheritance? This is perhaps the deepest psychological layer of the chapter. Because when a calling is an inheritance, the boundary between family life and professional hospitality is entirely permeable. It's blurred.Very blurred. It isn't a job you go to. It is the environment you are formed inside of. Think George Cozonis. He grew up playing in the storeroom of his parents' restaurant. He picked up trash in the parking lot for a dollar a cottage cheese container.A very specific childhood memory. Yeah. And he watched his parents operate on a daily basis. And he noted, quote, it didn't seem like they had jobs as much as they were always taking care of the restaurant, its guests, and our employees as though they were extended family. Right. He added, quote, it was just their way of life.And then later on, when he entered the industry as a professional, he completely internalized the philosophy of the work, noting, quote, we were all ladies and gentlemen serving ladies and gentlemen. Notice how Cozonis describes his parents. It didn't seem like they had jobs. The labor of hospitality was indistinguishable from the act of parenting or the act of maintaining a household. That's a huge point. The standard of care was simply the baseline reality of his childhood.So when he adopts the philosophy of ladies and gentlemen serving ladies and gentlemen, he isn't learning a new corporate ethos. You're just repeating what he saw. He's just formalizing the exact way of life he witnessed in that storeroom and in that parking lot. We see this mirror directly in Mahmoud Skaf too, who said, quote, my mother's love for cooking persuaded me to become a chef. And I worked in the kitchen of a small family-run hotel restaurant. The environment and the affection for the environment was handed down to him.And we can actually look back at James Low, who we discussed earlier with the hotel lobby in Kuala Lumpur, because Kanani reveals that Low's lobby recognition didn't actually come out of nowhere. No, they had a foundation. It was built on a very specific foundation of watching his father's father was a police officer and his father would direct traffic and counsel young offenders with immense passion. Wait, let me make sure I am mapping this correctly. Are we saying that watching his father direct traffic as a police officer is what prepared Low to recognize the hotel lobby? How do those two things connect?They connect through the concept of character and disposition. Low's father modeled a very specific kind of authoritative care. Okay, I think I see where you're going with this. Yeah, directing traffic and counseling offenders requires vigilance, empathy, and the ability to maintain order in a chaotic environment. Low internalized that character at home. Okay.So when he walked into the hotel lobby in Kuala Lumpur, he saw an industry where that exact character could be applied. The character was built by the father. The lobby was just where that character found its industry. That makes profound sense. It's about a disposition seeking a venue. Yes.And Kanani reinforces this with Jonnie Boer, who described a disposition rather than a single lightning bolt moment. Boer said, quote, I always followed my own path and passion, and I never compromised on quality. That is an internal orientation that exists prior to the work itself. Right. And then you have Sven Elverfeld, who took his superior's advice to broaden his horizons beyond a confectioner apprenticeship. Elverfeld noted, quote, I am still very grateful for his advice.So in all these cases, the calling is deeply tied to a prior influence, a prior standard that was modeled for them by a parent or a superior. Kanani actually grounds this entire concept by including a note about his own experience, too. He discusses his mother making roti, vegetable curry, and biryani. Yes. And she didn't rely on written recipes, right? Nope. She relied on decades of accumulated instinct.And Kanani uses this incredibly powerful resonant phrase to describe this entire phenomenon of inherited callings. He calls it an inheritance disguised as a choice. An inheritance disguised as a choice. Let's really pull that apart. What does that actually mean for the person making the choice? Well, I think it suggests that by the time you make the conscious deliberate decision to enter the field, the decision has in many ways already been made by the environment that formed you.The values, the tolerance for the labor, the standard of care. Exactly. Those were encoded into you before you even knew what a career was. So when you finally step onto the floor or into the kitchen, you think you were making a choice, but you were really just choosing to express what has already been written into your nervous system. It's almost like finding a new language to express a value system you've spoken since childhood. A career in this context is not so much begun as it is continued.Continued, yes. I love that word for it. You aren't starting from scratch. You are just translating the standards of your childhood, the care of a family restaurant, the discipline of a police officer parent, the instinct of a mother cooking biryani into a professional vocabulary. Exactly. And understanding that deep, almost cellular encoding explains another phenomenon Kanani explores, which is why some people find it literally impossible to leave this industry, even when they actively try.Which brings us to the concept of the resistant calling. Right, because we can't assume that everyone just accepts this calling gracefully. Some people actively fought it. Adrià and Atala, for instance. They definitely fought it. They resisted the pull of the kitchen and they lost.Others took detours. They walked away from the craft, tried other things, only to return to a field that had essentially already made a decision about them. But how does that resistance actually function? Why doesn't walking away break the spell? Kanani frames this through the concept of persistence. He argues that a resistant calling isn't fundamentally different from a sudden one.Really? How so? It is simply the exact same event stretched across a longer timeline. If a sudden calling happens in a single breakfast shift for Aaron Kaupp, a resistant calling happens over years of leaving and returning. Oh, I see. And Kanani notes that each time the person returns to the kitchen or the floor, they are a fraction of a centimeter more adhered than the last, until detachment becomes impossible. A fraction of a centimeter more adhered than the last.That is such a vivid image. It makes me think of a mechanical metaphor. It's like stripping a screw. Oh yeah, that's a good comparison. You put the wrong tool in, you try to back the screw out of the material to walk away from it. But the friction of resisting it actually locks it in tighter.Every time you try to leave, you strip the threads a little more until you literally cannot extract yourself. The work has completely embedded itself in you. That is exactly the mechanics of persistence. And it asks you, the listener, to look at the recurring themes in your own life. Is there a pursuit that you keep taking detours from? Something you keep trying to quit?Right. Something you keep telling yourself you are going to leave behind. But you find yourself inexplicably pulled back to it over and over again. That gravitational pull is the persistence Kanani is talking about. You are becoming a fraction of a centimeter more adhered every time you return. Which logically demands that we ask, what is generating that gravitational pull?Why do these specific people get pulled back into environments that are notoriously demanding? It's a great question. Kanani reveals a very surprising insight here. He admits that he expected the driving force behind this work to be a pursuit of beauty or a pursuit of absolute excellence. But what he discovered after analyzing all these operators is that the actual answer is fit. Fit.Not a grand philosophical ideal, but a mechanical neurological reality. It's so pragmatic. It is. And this is perhaps the most crucial pivot in the entire chapter. Kanani unpacks the specific wiring required for this work. We are not talking about a generic strong work ethic here.No, it's way more specific than that. Hospitality demands unwavering attention to others. It demands a nervous system that actually prefers sustained grueling repetition in order to hit a mark that is almost impossible to hit. Right. The chefs in these kitchens dream of perfection and they never catch it. But the hunt itself is the pleasure.That is a highly specific, highly unusual type of neurological wiring. Let's dig into the psychology of that repetition because I think most people here picking herbs for a month and their brain registers it as torture. Oh, totally. For most people, it would be. Mechanically speaking, what is happening in the brain of someone who thrives in that environment? Why do they want to hunt a perfection they know they will never catch?Because for a certain type of wiring, the impossibility of the task is the feature, not the buck. Interesting. If your brain requires a definitive finish line, if it gets frustrated by never reaching the end of the puzzle, you will burn out in this industry immediately. Right. But if your brain finds deep rhythmic pleasure in the microscopic adjustments and the relentless daily hunt for a standard of perfection, you know you'll never touch, then the work fits you perfectly. The repetition is soothing to them because it provides an endless frontier for refinement.You have to actually enjoy the impossibility of the task, which completely changes how we view the role of institutions in culinary schools. Oh, drastically. If this is entirely based on a pre-existing neurological wiring, what is the point of the school? Kanani makes the point that these institutions do not persuade people to love the work. No, you cannot teach the love of the work. You cannot teach a nervous system to suddenly enjoy the impossible hunt for perfection.It's either there or it isn't. Exactly. Therefore, Kanani argues the retention numbers at these schools or in these early career stages are not evidence of persuasion. They are evidence of selection. Selection versus persuasion. That is a massive distinction.So the brutal attrition rate we see, the people who drop out after standing there picking herbs for hours, or the people who quit during the first year front desk rotation, that isn't a failure of the institution to teach them properly. Not at all. It is simply the craft sorting for the wiring. The craft is acting as a filter. Filtering out the people who don't fit. Right.It is filtering out everyone whose nervous system does not naturally fit the demands of the work. The institution's only job is to provide honest exposure. Just put them in the room. They just need to put the person in the environment, stop talking long enough and let the calling speak. They let the environment test the wiring. If the wiring matches, the person stays.If it doesn't, they leave. This brings us directly to Anthony Bourdain, who provides an incredibly stark look at this reality. Kanani introduces Bourdain's experience of being handed a raw oyster on a fisherman's boat on the Bassin d'Arcachon. A very classic Bourdain moment. Yes. And Bourdain famously had a very unromantic view of who actually populates these high-end kitchens.He didn't see them as polished aristocrats. We have his exact quote here. This profession has always been accepting of all kinds of people, refugees, maniacs and misfits. But to excel at it, only the few, the proud and the weird will flourish. Bourdain's quote is critical for Kanani's argument because it helps to find what the calling is not. Right.The calling is not a sensation of destiny. It is not fate. Kanani argues this explicitly in the text. He says that is not fate. That is self-knowledge. Self-knowledge, yeah.The calling is simply answering a question about a neurological match between a person and a craft. When Bourdain calls them the weird, he is talking about that specific wiring we just discussed, the people whose brains are wired to find comfort in the chaos, the repetition and the impossible standards. And honestly, if you were listening to this and mapping it onto your own life, isn't that incredibly relieving? It really takes the pressure off. It does. Think about how much anxiety we carry because we are waiting to be struck by lightning.We are waiting to feel like we were born for the work. Kanani is handing us a massive relief here. He's saying you don't need a lightning bolt. Exactly. He is saying stop looking at the horizon for some divine purpose and look at your hands. What are you doing right now that doesn't grind you down?You don't have to be chosen by fate. You just have to pay rigorous attention to your own experience. Right. If picking herbs for a month feels like a revelation rather than a punishment, that isn't fate. That is self-knowledge. It completely democratizes the concept of a calling.It removes all the mysticism and the mythology. The calling is available to anyone willing to pay rigorous, honest attention to their own internal responses to the work they are doing in the present tense. So to synthesize the ultimate distinction of this chapter, it is vocation versus recognition. Yes. The operator's Kanani profiles in this book from Aaron Kaupp, pouring coffee to Bastiat watching the manager to Audrey and the bakery. They didn't chase the work.They didn't force it. No, they didn't build a massive vision board and reverse engineer a path to an imagined future. They simply noticed they were already inside the work. They noticed that the physical and mental demands fit their wiring perfectly and they stayed. The recognition is the key that places you in the room. It confirms the fit.But it is absolutely vital to remember that the calling does not do the work for you. Oh, right. The calling just points you to the correct station. Which is exactly Kanani's framing for the sequence of this entire journey. He states it perfectly. The calling brings the person through the door.The apprenticeship makes the person a professional. That's a perfect transition. It really is. That transition from recognizing the room to actually mastering the room is everything. And it is the exact subject of our next deep dive, which is episode two, the apprenticeship. And as we close this out, I want to leave you with one final provocative question to mull over.Go ahead. If a calling is simply an opening that places you in the room without actually teaching you the work. How many of us are standing in the exact right room, but falsely expecting the room itself to do the heavy lifting of teaching us the craft?

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