Ep. 150 – The Story So Far, How We’re Growing, and Skills to Change the World

A lot happened this year. I started a company with two amazing people, I moved to Sacramento, I reconnected with old friends and I made new ones.

So some updates for My Food Job Rocks. Lots of fun things happened this year. I was able to talk to some really amazing guests that made its mark in the food science community. I would say the past 100 episodes focused much more on innovative technologies, and startups, as well as having even better technical people on the show, in all sorts of disciplines from blockchain to clean meat.

This was also the year where half of my guests weren’t people I had to hunt down and beg to be on the show. A big chunk of this years’ guests were actually from PR firms! And there were some really cool people. Susie Fogelson from the Food Network, Alan Reed from the City of Chicago, Claudia Sidoti from Hello Fresh, and so many more awesome people were pitched to me and I learned so much from them.

However, this podcast has gotten a bit tough to manage. On the article, a Better Bet, I sprinkled throughout the article that the point of My Food Job Rocks was to develop a network so I could have the resources needed to create a great company when I was 30. However, things happened 4 years earlier and I’m now co-founder of a rising startup. The podcast’s initial purpose is done, so what now?

I’m going to be honest with you, I don’t know. I still have a lot of fun doing it, and I find the learning experience like a routine. For me, it’s like jogging, or reading, or stuff like that. I learn and take away so much. Especially interviewing these CEO’s, I can now ask questions that are stumping Better Meat Co. For example, I asked Shelby Zitelman from Soom Foods and Sara Polon from Soupergirl, “how did you get your first sale?” And their answers were so good, I clipped them for our Smart Snack Bites (add bites). I learned a lot from that question, no one really expects their first sale, but when they do, it’s such a memorable experience.

So what does that mean for next year? No idea actually. I’ll still be maintaining the blog, because it’s an outlet for me to talk, and it’s an outlet for me to share. Share my challenges and share my story so others can not make the same mistakes I did. Recording and writing helps me think clearer, talk better, and show people I’m a legitimate person, so I keep on doing it.

We have a survey launching this week. It’s not about improving stuff, well it is, but the questions will be focused more on content variety. What do you want me to talk, or write about in the future? Who do you want me to interview? What would you want a T-shirt about Food Science to say? Stuff like that.

I also find the My Food Job Rocks blog as great way to give food industry professionals an opportunity to write and show what they’re made of, and the growth of the people who have wrote for My Food Job Rocks has made me so proud. Veronica Hislop still writes, Julia Lamphear who wrote the Why Series, has her own Non-Profit, Faseeh Rahman who participated in our Food Science Global event is now posting food safety clips on LinkedIn and is getting so many opportunities! Carrie Ardnt, our latest guest poster used to just post her amazing packaging analysis posts on linkedin and they’d be swallowed in the abyss, but I wanted them to be achieved because they have value. These posts do so well on social media.

Giving people who want to write the opportunity to write and see how their work is helping people is very valuable. If you’re interested, you know where to find me. However, I’m a tough boss because I want you to fall in love with writing on a consistent basis.

What’s also nice is that my articles are actually being found in google. My name is also googleable, which definitively means I’m the best Adam Yee on the internet, right?

Anyways, a handful of articles get a dozen views daily. Did I expect these articles to be searched so much? Sorta, I had a good hunch about them.

Basically, here are the top 5 articles on My Food Job Rocks

1. Food Science vs Nutrition
2. Why You Shouldn’t Be a Food Scientist.
3. What is Food Science, a Beginner’s Guide
4. Resume Tips for Beginning Food Scientists
5. The Graduate Student Series

If you like stats like I do, I’ll have you know that David Despain’s podcast about being a CFS is actually the most viewed shownotes. Dr. Gabriel Keith Harris’ has the most downloads.

In certain periods, Veronica’s articles also get a lot of views. For instance, this month, the Cotton Candy article is very popular. A couple of months back, Banana was trending and a couple of months before then, peanuts.

The fruits of My Food Job Rocks’ labor has bore its benefits, not just in credibility. Heck, I think it saved me from a dark time when all of my friends left me in Phoenix. I have an article on Friday that’ll explain all of that.

Many know the lessons of being consistent, and My Food Job Rocks is proof that if you do something everyday for two years…you’ll get better at it. But more importantly, people will respect you for it.

Being consistent allowed me to get speaking gigs. Not just in IFT, but in San Francisco, and soon, perhaps some other conferences in the works. This was a lot of work, putting one block at a time, every week until it’s finally building to something pretty cool.

To end on this, I wanted to talk about skills. Particularly, 5 of them

These 5 skills are designed to get you through a startup, but now that I’m reviewing them, these skills will help you in any aspect of your career. As I think about these skills, these skills allowed me to excel at my last job, and is proving their worth at Better Meat Co. If you want to rise to the top, or want to survive the startup world, I suggest working on these skills. We’ll be analyzing why they’re important, and how you can get better at them.

Top 5 Skills

Autonomy

Autonomy is the ability for you to confidentially do your job and deliver results without the help or permission of your equals or superiors. This is a very tough skill to master as it requires a lot of confidence in your craft.

In school, you had to ask permission to do something, all the way to perhaps college. I would even guess that people who are

We all go through this slope when it comes to acquiring a new skill. According to Wikipedia, we call this the four stages of competence. I actually learned about this when scanning through the brochure at my last job where it talked about how to sell nutrition products to your friends and family.

The four stages are:

1. Unconscious incompetence

The individual does not understand or know how to do something and does not necessarily recognize the deficit. They may deny the usefulness of the skill. The individual must recognize their own incompetence, and the value of the new skill, before moving on to the next stage. The length of time an individual spends in this stage depends on the strength of the stimulus to learn.^[5]

2. Conscious incompetence

Though the individual does not understand or know how to do something, they recognize the deficit, as well as the value of a new skill in addressing the deficit. The making of mistakes can be integral to the learning process at this stage.

3. Conscious competence

The individual understands or knows how to do something. However, demonstrating the skill or knowledge requires concentration. It may be broken down into steps, and there is heavy conscious involvement in executing the new skill.^[5]

4. Unconscious competence

The individual has had so much practice with a skill that it has become “second nature” and can be performed easily. As a result, the skill can be performed while executing another task. The individual may be able to teach it to others, depending upon how and when it was learned.

Everyone deals with this when it becomes a skill.

Yet learning how to be automomous this can become a problem, A bad boss who helicopters around you can traumatize you into always asking your superiors if your option is the right option to do. A bad boss can really affect your career just because they can cripple your ambitions. You never know if what you do is right and it really affects your psyche. It’s a really terrible thing.

The best way I found to solve this is to read books about this type of stuff. Reading helps you understand different perspectives. In many books, the saying “It’s better to beg for forgiveness then ask for permission”.

What helps in this regard is to publish or ship something on your own. By creating something where you can give out or even better, sell on your own will give you more confidence in terms of doing work. What giving out or selling something does is validates that what you do is valuable to whomever you’re giving it to. Knowing you have full control over what people find valuable, and not your superiors makes your job a lot easier.

Resourcefulness

Phil Saneski and I have had a great talk on the power of resources.

The podcast has also given me a very powerful resource pool and I’ve used some of my guest’s services and products to get work done at the startup.

Using your resources is directly connected to how well you network. As many know, networking is an art and takes time to cultivate, but the benefits is like your garden actually growing food for you to eat.

Podcasting, or in general, interviewing, is the ultimate networking tool because you cater to two people in particular: the people you’re interviewing have a close connection to you and if it was a good, legitimate interview, they remember that. But also the people who read or listen to your stuff.

Yet let’s look at this through a microscope. With podcasting I learned how to cold call people to get on the show, advertise on social media, leverage and work together on other networks to amplify value on both sides, learned how to not be afraid of my own voice, to be consistent and deliver value every single week. Those are the skills, the crevices that get filled when you do a podcast and all of it, helps with being resourceful.

Humility

Back in college, I had a huge ego. I didn’t want to be wrong, and I made people cry. It took a lot of time working with different people to slowly break that down. Working in the multicultural center chipped it down, working with young, high school educated workers in the factory chipped it down, supervising coworkers who were older than me and were in a company longer than I was chipped that down. My coworkers are sometimes very surprised when I admit I’m wrong when the data shows that I’m wrong.

Humility is a vital skill, and it requires a great amount of confidence and self-awareness for it to actually work. When you’re humiliated, shame or the perception of shame overwhelms you and you are paralyzed, or worse, you make things worse. Working on being shameless improves so many things.

When shame stops affecting you, two things happen: you can share everything, and you have the vision that surpasses you being right or wrong.

In the grand scheme of things, does your opinion matter? This is a big question. Nobody wants to look incompetent, or weak, or embarrassed, but everyone’s gone through this before. You won’t ever be fired for admitting your wrong if no damage has been done. In most cases, you’ll be thanked for your humility.

Training for humility is hard, but it of course, involves risks. Failing high risk generally builds up humility but only if you can reflect on why your call was a bad one. I was fortunate enough for my CSO at Isagenix to throw me into very high risk situations. Sometimes, they didn’t work out the way I planned, so I reviewed what went wrong and tried again. Having a sort of Nihilistic or Stoic mindset when it comes to humility also works wonders. Reading books from Ryan Holiday, or Seth Godin helps wonders in understanding Humility. Understanding humility will help you put yourself out there more, and will allow you to sympathize with anyone.

Curiosity

This is a skill that always pops up on almost every interview with a passionate food scientist. They are generally curious on how things work. But on this episode, I want to emphasize the importance of learning the whole process.

For the food industry, that means learning literally everything. This was resonated from Alan Reed from the Chicagoland Food and Beverage Network. This guy got an MBA and did marketing, but he was so interested in the whole process, he recently took a role of Executive Director. Will Holsworth started in Pepsi, where Pepsi knows the importance of knowing the whole process and many food companies develop leadership programs to explore the whole process. Maybe you don’t have the luxury to do this, but that doesn’t matter. You can still talk to your colleagues about learning what’s going on. You can still force yourself to attend meetings that bridge the knowledge gaps. You can still listen to My Food Job Rocks podcasts to see a glimpse of the day in the life of what goes in your food.

Curiosity killing the cat is a threat. It doesn’t work anymore because now, the floodgates on gaining knowledge is now infinite. Even if someone will harm you for their knowledge, there are many ways to get around it, connect the dots, and create a different recipe.

Secret formulas don’t make sense any more because brand is associated with flavor. Who cares if your product tastes like Coca Cola or your product tastes like KFC’s chicken? Will coke or KFC lose market share because you found their formula? Maybe 50 years ago, but now, their brands are so strong, it doesn’t matter.

Instead, what if you just learned the process, or how the flavors work in products and make your own masterpiece? This takes curiosity to dive in and find our how to do things. Curiosity isn’t about copying products, it’s about discovering systems. Curiosity allows you to connect the dots and create innovation for the sake of innovation.

Craft

There is a difference between treating your profession as a job versus treating your profession as a craft. Treating your profession like a job is just doing the same thing, waiting to just be done, get money and spend it on whatever. And the cycle repeats. Treating your profession as a craft means that you want to improve the work you do enough where people will notice and love what you do. A job is a cyclical process, you do things for the sake of compensation, and that’s fine.

A craft is like a spiral. You do things, but every day, every week, or every iteration, you want to improve.

Making your job your craft delivers a lot of things that help see your life as a bit more palatable. For one, you deviate from the fact that you aren’t doing it for the money anymore. Most artists don’t do things for the money, you don’t have to either. Perhaps the payoff of improving your craft is appealing. That one day, you will get what you deserve through hard work and improvement.

But most of all, improving on your craft gives you a sense of purpose. By slowly imporving what you do to make people’s lives’ better, for a chance to be the best of it is a very satisfying goal, that gives your life meaning.

It’s a blessing if your job and your craft is one and the same, but it doesn’t have to be.

In fact, I would say that if it wasn’t for podcasting, I wouldn’t have ever made food science my craft. Podcasting allowed me to dive deeply into this meta-learning state, reading more about the art of crafting. Now both food science and podcasting are a craft to me, and I wouldn’t have it any other way.

Having a craft means having a goal where you will keep on improving it until you get to that goal, and then achieve a bigger goal. For podcasting, it was “make 6 episodes”, then “get sponsors” then “get 100 episodes”, and now, “get 300 episodes”.

For Food Science, I started my job in a granola bar factory. The goal was to “get a product development job”, then it was “make really good products”. Then it was “start your own company”, now it’s “make an impact”.

All of these skills can be cultivated all at the same time very easily. All you need to do is start something you’re passionate in.

Someone last week came up to me and talked about trying to change the healthcare system. Instead of drugs, he wants turmeric, medicinal mushrooms, etc to solve our health problems. He mentioned in his question to the speakers “when can something like turmeric-mushroom mix, be sold in the stores instead of drugs?”

Afterwards we talked, he said that he knows that our healthcare system is a big problem. I told him if he wanted to fix it, of course, he did.

After I told him the story of the podcast, and the Better Meat Co, and how that all got started, all I said was “If you can’t sell your own turmeric-mushroom mix, what makes you think you have a shot of changing the healthcare system?”. People have the power to change things, but sometimes the problem is so big, nobody starts.

This is the current issue with climate change. We’re getting close, we need more help.

So finally, this is the final ask. You might be able to work for 8-12 hour a day, but afterwards, you have 8-12 hours to make an impact. You just have to start something. A blog, a podcast, an event every weekend, a food stand in a farmer’s market.

Elon Musk said it takes 80 hours to change the world. There was a lot of backlash from his post, but I am a firm believe you have to work hard to make an impact. So do more than the 100 people I’ve interviewed. A lot of people don’t make an impact in their life. If you don’t want to, that’s fine, there are many people like you.

But for those who do want to leave an impact, we need you. We need more heroes. And we’re all here, happy to support you.

And I’ll be so happy when I can say “Welcome to the community”