I love doing demonstrations. I think to be a great chef you have to be a great teacher. I love doing classes with people who love food and enjoy food, bringing them all around one table so to speak.
The reason we have poverty is that we have no imagination. There are a great many people accumulating what they think is vast wealth, but it's only money... they don't know how to enjoy it, because they have no imagination.
I did everything to get food. I have stolen for food. I have jumped in huge garbage bins with maggots for food. I have befriended people in the neighborhood who I knew had mothers who cooked three meals a day for food, and I sacrificed a childhood for food and grew up in immense shame.
I enjoy money. You got to know how to enjoy it, though. A lot of people enjoy it the wrong way: They spend it all.
Don't be too much concerned about money, because that is the greatest distraction against happiness. And the irony of ironies is that people think they will be happy when they have money. Money has nothing to do with happiness. If you are happy and you have money, you can use it for happiness. If you are unhappy and you have money, you will use that money for more unhappiness. Because money is simply a neutral force.
I'd say for sure though, read the fine print in the contract. Make sure after you defend your belt for however many times and then you lose, you're not making less money than a kid who had three fights in the UFC. That's a shame. That's laughable. That is a shame.
I have my new food line in the works - I think it's over 200 items. Hopefully I can make a difference; it's delicious food that's just so easy. I think it'll help people enjoy their lives... it's good!
Everybody is born with the capacity to enjoy, but not with the art. People think just because they are alive and they breathe and they exist, they know how to enjoy. That is sheer stupidity. Enjoyment is a great art, it is a great discipline. It is as subtle a discipline as music or poetry or painting. It is the greatest creativity.
Worry, shame, and fear can't be the energy with which we deal with food and weight. It only spurs us to eat more food and produce more glucose/sugar which gets stored as fat.
You know, I hate to borrow Apple's tag, but think different. Really. From the very beginning. I didn't know what the fast-food rules were. I got my training at the Culinary Institute Of America, and then I opened up a fast food place according to fine dining rules.
I think food is the great equalizer. Other than the ocean and the air, food is the thing that we all share in common. I think along with that comes the question of why are some people starving, and why do some people produce more food than they need, and why is food going to waste.
Money's fine if it enables you to enjoy your life and to be useful to other people. But as something that is a means to an end, no, it's useless.
While a particularly deft sense of irony may be one of the tools of great storytellers, I think it's also true that if irony serves as a retreat from an emotional engagement that you're overly concerned is uncool, that's a failure of nerve.
Sadly, an average service that's well marketed will always generate massively more money, than a great service, which too few people know about. Think about it: People can't hire you, if they don't know you exist - regardless of how amazing you are.
I did what I did not to make money but to help prevent the defeat of a new system which had, at great cost, given ordinary people food and fares which they could afford, a good education and a health service.
I am a connoisseur of fine irony. 'Tis a bit like fine wine, but it has a better bite.