Same Ingredients, Different Recipes: What Are You Cooking Up?

 

I love life; I am thrilled by the provision it makes for variety. I love creativity, with its endless possibilities. I love individuality, how the diversification of our uniqueness makes room for creativity with all of life’s rich varieties.

I am thrilled by the fact that one hundred persons sitting for an examination will be given the same essay topic to write on, and the same number of words to produce under the same time range, at the end of which they will return a hundred unique articles. And no matter how tight the constraints are, or how it tries to limit their choices, their outputs must each have evidence of uniqueness in them, except there is some form of mal-practice —someone copying exactly what another wrote.

It thrills me to know that two or more companies can go into making a product to serve the same purpose, but come out each with something that has the unique stamp of its manufacturer on it. If you are used to a particular company’s products and their pattern of design and operation, you won’t have a hard time picking them out of the competition any time. 

Have you pondered on this, that the same ingredients can be used in different ways to make different kinds of food? Or, that even the same food can be made with the same ingredients, but in different ways? This became more significant to me when I watched a TV cooking contest organized by a leading seasoning cube manufacturer in Nigeria. Severally, the contestants were given the same resources, and asked to make full course meals out of them within a specific time. Their results were always different. 

I think about life in this manner. I feel that in many ways life has given all of us the same basic resources—time, people, ability to choose, passion, talents, etc—and these are the things that really matter. What we do with them is left to us. Our results differ based on how we make use of what we have been given.

It is like saying that life has given us the same ingredients. The choice of what we make out of them is ours, and it is a question of what recipe we want to go with. Some do not even know how to cook in the first place. They are making a mess of their life. 

While some are just complaining about what they’ve been given, others are busy trying to figure out the best ways they can make use of theirs to get the most out of them. Many are learning, researching and exploring their creativity, to see how they can make something magical and captivating with what they’ve got. They are courageous enough to carve their own paths, create their own recipes to help them cook up wonderful and outstanding masterpieces that the world would rush at to consume.

The question is not on whether you’ve got ingredients or not, but whether you’ve got a recipe you are using to create the meal you want to serve your world. There’s no need asking whether you’ve got what you need. We’ve all got something. The problem some people have is that they look at what beautiful cuisines others have made of the ingredients of their lives, and think they must have had something extra-ordinary. So they lament they don’t have it, and keep waiting for a miracle.

I hope you’re not in that league. You’ve got all you need already. All you have to do is get busy, find that recipe that works just for you and use it to cook up something you-nique. The world can’t wait to have a taste of you.