Research till intimately connected.

I have a fondness of watching the various food channels on my cable.

They de-stress me (while making me hungry at the same time), takes my mind off work.

Which is why I never expected I would catch an inspiring statement from a featured chef in one show (I was in a half-asleep state so I really could not remember WHO said it and WHAT show she was from, which i regret terribly!).

This statement resonated what I felt in my heart about our business and work ethics, and summarized what I’ve always wanted to convey to my team and clients about how we should go about doing every single project.

And the statement is:
“Research till intimately connected.”

I suppose the chef was commenting on a fellow competitor in a food competition, and was trying to convey a sense of connection to the food and how, as a veteran top chef for many years, she went about her work and how she achieved recognition and success.

In our line, because of the rapid turnarounds, mental fatigue, and numerous job requests at the same time with near impossible deadlines, there is a tendency to just get on with it and not feel a thing about a particular project. And yet be functionally successful at the same time with minimum effort.

If we stop feeling a thing anymore about our work, then I feel it’s high time to stop.

We need to feel connected to every job we do, in the most intimate way. And believe what we’re doing will work.

To begin with, we must know everything about that particular topic in order to come up with the best strategy and messaging. Never underestimate research. The more we know, the more we feel connected. And the more we do justice to the work that we eat, live and breathe by.

A lot of people ask me, how do you know when you’ve really hit upon the best idea, and how do you know it’ll work?

My answer has always been: You’ll feel it. And this feeling comes with the amount of preparation you’ve done researching, reading and understanding everything you can dig up.

If you’ve done all your research and left no stones unturned, the answer will come automatically. If you don’t have any plausible ideas despite tossing and turning in bed for days, then you’ve not researched and read up enough.

If you’re not intimately connected, you have not done enough.
It’s really as simple as that.