Living in Chicago, there is no shortage of amazing places to dine and experience the diversity of cuisines. It’s amazing. But the more you learn the skill of cooking, the more interested you become on how to manipulate tastes to achieve certain outcomes. You literally can replicate certain dishes in your own home, but to your own preference.

At some point, you can actually begin to appreciate going out to different restaurants in a new way. And in this new way, you realize that you actually start to become held to whatever that particular chef has created for that specific dish. Much like you can be constrained to certain technologies as a non-technical person.

For example, in my experience, the process of building a simple web page. You can always use templates (which are getting better), but what if you want to customize certain features? The idea is to learn just enough to be dangerous. Dangerous enough to be able to manipulate certain things to achieve positive outcomes.

This is in no way saying that templates or dishes at a restaurant are bad and that you should start to build everything from scratch. But knowing that you have the ability or the skill to tweak or adjust certain ingredients can positively change your path. And potentially change your life.