The Age of Ideas: Unlock Your Creative Potential

I was 18 when I first started working at a restaurant. I was a dishwasher. I only got the job because I wanted to go to Ibiza for vacation, and washing dishes was the only job I could find.—Chef Ferran Adrià

When I was a young man I wanted to be a chef. Food always fascinated me. I loved to taste it, I loved to cook it, and I loved—well, before the rise of food porn, I loved to read about food, talk about food, and watch people prepare it. When other kids were watching The Price Is Right on days home sick from school, I watched The Frugal Gourmet, Yan Can Cook, and shows featuring Julia Child, TV’s cooking matriarch. Combine this passion with an over-encouraging mother and an Italian grandmother who made a mean Sunday gravy, and you have all the makings of a future chef.
I followed my passion diligently, even at a young age, constantly experimenting and honing my craft. Then, opportunity knocked: close friends of my mother were friendly with Wolfgang Puck (thank you, Ron and Nancy), and encouraged me to write to him to apply for a culinary stage my junior year of high school. I followed her advice, and a few months later, during summer break, I headed to Los Angeles to work in the kitchen at Wolfgang’s original restaurant, Spago, on the Sunset Strip. After a couple of bumps in the road (including not knowing that chefs brought their own knives to work), I hit my stride and began the daily grind that is working in a professional kitchen.

The backbone of modern kitchens is formed by immigrants (many illegal), who are highly skilled cooks but willing to work for the wages that give restaurants the possibility of making a profit, and young culinary students willing to work for next to nothing to learn their craft. I spent months chopping fruits, vegetables, herbs, and spices, occasionally worked on meats or fish, and, when I was lucky, got to prepare a staff meal. The experience was magical. I still remember the smells, the tastes, and even the first time I ever got drunk—with the staff—and spent the next morning in the bathroom throwing up when I wasn’t chopping jalapeños while the staff cheered me on. I rubbed my bloodshot eyes with the same hands I used to chop the jalapeños—and let’s just say it was a painful mistake I never made again.

After a couple of months, just as I was getting the hang of it, I had to leave. School was starting, I had a girlfriend back in New York, and it was my senior year of high school. I remember returning and being really stoked about cooking, but I was also no longer in the kitchen. While Wolfgang wrote me a college recommendation and I got accepted to Cornell, I also got back into the regular life of a teenager. And the further I drifted from the energy of that kitchen, the more I convinced myself I would be wasting my talents as a chef. Why should I be a manual laborer when I could use my Ivy League degree to become a wealthy businessman? Most chefs made an hourly wage, and I would probably have to spend many years struggling. So I abandoned my dream and pursued the business side of hospitality. While the decision worked out well for me professionally, I can say without question that not pursuing a career in the kitchen is a decision I continue to regret.

While in general I don’t believe in regret, I keep it alive in my consciousness in this case as a reminder that I made a decision for the wrong reasons. I wasn’t willing to sacrifice my short-term comfort to pursue the purest form of my purpose. I didn’t recognize or accept that I couldn’t start at the top; my ego got in the way, as it does for many of us. If Mark Zuckerberg can start Facebook and be the CEO, isn’t anything less a failure? After all, that’s what the media sells us. We’ve discussed the error in this kind of thinking, but at the time, I was blissfully unaware of it, and it cost me—maybe not financially, but in many other ways.

Going through all this adversity, going through all this difficulty, is what defines you. I’m just thankful to be cooking.

—Chef Danny Bowien

It was October, 2013, and Danny Bowien had just received word that his Manhattan restaurant, Mission Chinese, had been shut down by the health department for an array of violations, including an infestation of mice. Overwhelmed, embarrassed, and worried about his employees, Bowien, a rock-star rising chef, didn’t know what to do. It was then that his phone rang. René Redzepi, the chef behind the world’s best restaurant, Copenhagen’s Noma, and Danny’s close friend, said, “Chef, are you ready? They’re coming for you. They smell blood. You’re hurt, you’re wounded and they’re going to come for you.”

But those weren’t Bowien’s only worries. At the same time, he was in the midst of opening the Lower East Side taqueria Mission Cantina. The health department issues distracted him, and he canceled a crucial research trip to Mexico. He opened Cantina before it was ready, and the reviews weren’t good. Even Redzepi sent him an email saying his tortillas needed an upgrade. After a stretch of being celebrated by peers and customers alike, the once-rising chef was faltering.

Redzepi coached Bowien through his challenges, telling him, “Everything’s going to be okay, but you’re going to need to handle this. You’re going to be fine, but you just need to focus.” This encouragement, combined with tough love from another close friend, chef David Chang, founder of Momofuku, spurred Bowien into action. Despite resolving his issues with the health department, Bowien shuttered the original Mission Chinese and set out to start over in a newer, better location.

Bowien came to terms with his adversity and the realization that it had been his own fault. “I got swept up in the whole thing,” he remembers. “Doing events everywhere, getting flown all over the world, not being in the restaurants enough. At the end of the day, my time is best spent in the restaurants. This is what got me here.” He retrenched, focused, went back to giving the kitchen the benefit of his considerable energy. He gave up alcohol, once his regular companion. The challenges that once could have destroyed him instead were compelling him to rebuild; a stronger, better Danny Bowien would make a stronger, better Mission Chinese.

After a year-plus of hard work, Bowien reopened Mission Chinese in 2014. The original restaurant had sported a beer keg on the floor and was thrown together and cramped. His new location was more civilized, maintaining the edgy, creative energy people expected from him, but through a more refined expression and ambience. The reinvented Mission Chinese is like an artist’s work later in his career—self-assured and polished. He’s now spending long hours in the kitchen when he’s not with his family, focused on his craft and his fatherhood, not his fame. Danny had become an experienced creative. And it shows in the results: the new Mission has snagged three stars from New York magazine, two stars from the New York Times, and is consistently ranked as one of the best restaurants in arguably the top restaurant city in the world. Just as important, the reborn Mission Chinese is flourishing, with more business than it can handle.
Danny Bowien transformed his challenge into an opportunity. There are different types of challenges—the ones you choose and the ones that choose you. The key is to embrace them both with the same fervor and positivity. Most of us have similar reactions as those experienced by Danny Bowien when we encounter a challenge we perceive to be negative: panic, anxiety, fear. Thoughts of bad outcomes—worst-case scenarios—become overwhelming and paralyze us. Robert Downey Jr. explained it best when he said, “Worrying is like praying for what you don’t want to happen.” But you can shift your perspective and realize that the word possibilities inherently means multiple out

Practical Magic

Keeping our bedrock principles of manifesting in mind, now let’s get into some practical information, starting with a step-by-step look at how to manifest your ideas.

Step #1: Define Your Concept

The first step when manifesting an idea is to marry the emotional and practical elements of your idea into a defined concept. If you’ve worked through the process in Parts 2 and 3, you know your purpose and have a clear, concise statement of that purpose—one that should be entirely emotional. Now you need to connect that emotional purpose with a practical application.

As an example, let’s look back at Ikea. Their purpose is to “create a better everyday life” for many, but their concept is to “support this vision by offering a wide range of well-designed, functional home furnishing products at prices so low that as many people as possible will be able to afford them.” While the two are related, they are quite different. One is a feeling, and the other is an offering.

Purpose Statement = Emotional

Concept Description = Practical
To define your concept, write down two to three simple, clear sentences describing what you are trying to create. The best way to do that is to write down everything in your mind without overthinking or letting the monkey-mind limit or confuse you. You know your purpose; just let the concept that comes from that purpose flow.

Write Concept Description Below
Once you have done this, refine your concept description by considering the following questions:

1. Is this aligned with my purpose statement?

2. If not, how can I align it with my purpose?

3. Is this my highest and best challenge right now?

4. How can I set this up in a way where I can meet my short-term and long-term needs while making it a reality?

Let’s look at an example. Say you wanted to open a fried-chicken restaurant. Well, the first question would be: What makes your fried-chicken shop different from other such shops? We call this your unique value proposition, or UVP. For our purposes, let’s use the following features as the ones creating your chicken shop’s UVP:
1. We only serve chicken fingers.

2. We have 20 homemade sauces.

3. We use organic farm-raised chickens.

4. We only do takeout and delivery, no in-store dining.

5. We employ former foster children for all non-managerial positions.

With this in mind, your concept description would be as follows:

We are opening a casual, quick-service chicken restaurant specializing in organic chicken fingers served with our one-of-a-kind homemade sauces. The restaurant will focus on takeout/pick-up and delivery business. Our service staff will be made up of former foster children, 18-24 years of age, in order to provide them the necessary skills to succeed both personally and professionally and give back to the community.

Tracy Chapman’s music is a reflection of her life experiences, her purpose. Ian Schrager’s hotels are a reflection of his life experiences, his purpose. And Supreme’s hats and skate decks are a reflection of James Jebbia’s dreams and desires. Each of them took their own experiences—the ups, the downs, the good and the bad—and turned them into something sharable, a real-world reflection of themselves. And because it combined their purpose with their sin- gular talent, it flourished.
Jay-Z tells a similar story when describing the journey he took to share his purpose:

My first album [was] called Reasonable Doubt.... It didn’t sell massive numbers worldwide. It was still very niche. In my second album [I] tried to make [something that was] bigger and would be more popular, which was a failure. Going for that success really messed up that project and set a bad tone. It was a huge learning lesson for me—that if I was going to be successful I had to be successful at myself.... I had to do what I believed in and what felt real to me and felt true to me. Because the worst thing to be is to be successful as someone else.

Jay-Z went on to say:

I feel sorry for someone who has to walk out the house every day as someone else to make this art and to make something that people connect to. And whatever you have made is not you, you’re not happy about it, but it’s successful. Just to maintain that level of success has to be very draining and you know a very sad existence because at some point you have to go home. And when you go home all the lights are off and everything is off and you have to look in the mirror and look at yourself and say I like who I am or I am not very happy with who I am. By my third album I had the combination of failing with those pop records and the true and real music I wanted to make. And I blended those two together to make a song called “Hard Knock Life.” And that album is when I knew I could do it.

Just like Tracy Chapman, Jay-Z eventually reflected himself in his music. And it worked, both personally and in terms of listener response. As for Chapman’s amazing journey, it’s worth underscor- ing again what it illustrates.

Whether it was the kids in Cleveland or record executives in New York, she never allowed them to convince her to be something she wasn’t. That fierce commitment to her true self and vision made the music deeply resonate with her audience. She didn’t go out and say, I want to be a star; I want sell a million albums, and make money. Her aim was to make music that meant something to her, that represented her life experience, and this authentic spirit eventually spoke to millions. In the process, she fulfilled both her internal need to create, and her external need to support her art by selling records.

This core idea of reflecting oneself also applies to the audi- ence. People choose products, services, and, ultimately, brands because they see a reflection of who they are or who they want to be in them. We encountered this with Supreme. Yes, it reflected James Jebbia and the original skaters who worked in his store. But it just so happened there were numerous people with similar values and aspirations who grew up enjoying street style and skate cul- ture. And they chose Supreme because they saw parts of who they were or who they wanted to be in the brand, what it stood for, and how it felt. The more people identify with that energy, the more the energy expands. When a product is a pure reflection of a founder’s core values and the customer feels that energy, they’re attracted to that product.
We’re tribal beings. We build our identities through the people and communities we choose to associate with.

There’s really no secret about our approach. We keep moving forward—opening up new doors and doing new things—because we’re curious. And curiosity keeps leading us down new paths. We’re always exploring and experimenting. At WED, we call it Imagineering—the blending of creative imagination with technical know-how.

—Walt Disney

Lillian Disney could sense something big brewing in early 1952. It was one of those times, she would say, when “Walt’s imagination was going to take off and go into the wild blue yonder and everything will explode.” Walt began liquidating long-held family assets, borrowing against his life insurance policy, selling properties, and even selling the rights to his own name. Walt Disney was planning something new—he was planning to kick down the walls dividing his movies and real life.

When Disney’s children were very young, he’d tried to take them to places where their imaginations could run wild. But every carnival or fair seemed to be dirty, poorly run, and filled with vice. Walt wanted to create a place where people could take their family and forget the concerns of the everyday world—a place beautiful, safe, and filled with endless wonder. So at about the same time that he had started selling assets and conserving his capital, he pulled aside one of his art directors and had him begin working on concept sketches for a new kind of amusement park. The sketches started to illustrate the vision he had in his head, a utopian world where guests would enter a fairytale world.

Ever since his early days as a Kansas City artist and animator, Walt had a unique belief in the power of his thoughts. As time went on, he became expert at manifesting his dreams into physical forms, often creating the necessary technology as he went. But nothing prepared him for the challenge of manifesting Disneyland—taking the imaginary world of his movies and making it literally concrete. Disneyland would transport visitors into a captivating three-dimensional story, a sprawling material incarnation of a wonderland that began as a vision, then lived on screens.

Disney knew little about the experiential side of entertainment; his expertise and success was in storytelling through the mediums of animation, film, and television. To make his dream world a reality, Disney chose some of the studio’s most talented individuals, took a small building on the Disney lot, and formed a new company, WED Enterprises—an acronym for Walter Elias Disney. This interdisciplinary dream team would be tasked with creating the design, development, and construction of Disneyland—not only doing something that none of them had done before, but that no one had done before. They represented an extraordinary group of storytellers, engineers, animators, contractors, directors, writers, artists, set designers, lighting designers, sound engineers, and many others. WED employees would interpret the Disney stories by building beautiful sets and giving them the interactivity and resilience to wow thousands of guests daily.

The plans for the 160-acre site called for 5,000 cubic yards of concrete and a million square feet of asphalt. The designs included a replica of an 1800s main street, manmade riverbeds for steamboats and jungle cruises, a mile of railroad tracks, and a full-scale Bavarian castle. Walt was at the construction site pushing the WED team every day, giving his attention to every detail, every blade of grass, every leaf on every tree. As former Disney executive vice president and Imagineer Marty Sklar remembers, “The thing we worked so hard to avoid is letting people out of the story with discordant details.... Even the trash cans in the park are for that particular story or theme.” The attention to detail and level of execution were extraordinary.