My 2011 will contain more sleeping. Seriously. It’s a start to relearning some good habits. And sleeping is key to mental happiness, healthy immune system, healthy weight, etc. Speaking of which, I’m off to yoga in a few minutes–one of the good habits I’m continuing from last year!

Kudos to you! And I look forward to checking this blog regularly.

Let me know how your Craigslist decluttering goes. I may need to do some of that myself, but many of my declutterization foci are extreme niche items…. Not sure how to go about it.

Erm, and it’s 2011 now. Unless I was grossly misinformed by the IC towers

It would be easy to write off things like the ability to track things in a spreadsheet, knowledge of accounting practices, marketing, branding, and internet/technical ability as wasted talents, but that only holds while I’m a line cook. When I’m a chef, or when I’m a chef-proprietor, those skills will be absolutely critical to holding the bottom line while making sure all those non-food jobs are getting done.

And you’re right, if my heart doesn’t pull me on the chef/sous path, there are all those other avenues, and all my wealth and combinations of experience and knowledge, that promise I’ll work in one way or another.

That’s something that I have come up against. Look at what you’ll be advancing toward — do you like that work? As you become better at your job, do you do the more challenging, deeper, more invested work of your field? Or are you relegated to administrating those doing the work, as is often the case in business. As I thought about careers I often wanted to do the mid-level jobs in a field, and would do the entry-level to get there, but then I wouldn’t want to advance. I took that to mean it probably was not the right field for me.

That’s one of the things that appealed about nursing — as you gain experience, you can take more challenging cases, become a primary care practitioner with an advanced nursing degree, teach new nurses your experienced techniques, etc. You can go deeper into the work. You can also choose to use your experience and research, write textbooks, whatever. You can choose management if your heart pulls you there, but it’s not the only option.

Cooking feels like that (from over here on the outside). You advance – you set the menu, choose the ingredients and techniques, you can choose to run a business or not, you can choose to write, research, become a “personality” and have a show, etc. But you will go deeper into the conceptual work of providing food, and possibly the physical work of *cooking* the food. Rock on.