Purpose Lab Resources

I realized that no matter who you're cooking for, they appreciate it. And you can show love through it. Whether it was somebody that I knew or a member of my family or someone in the community, it just became this thing that gave me such a good feeling. And even now, whether I'm cooking for my kids and it's a five minute situation, or I go volunteer and I cook for kids doing something around a charity organization, the act comes from in my heart and soul. It's just the thing that lights me up, whispers it.

Part of knowing my purpose has always comes back to serving others in the way of food. And I find I can get unaligned any time I do something just because I thought, "it's going to pay really well. That'll remove some burden there." We all love money but it's a shallow path compared to the fulfillment of the soul. And so the more you listen to yourself, the easier it becomes to stay in your flow.

If life calls you away from stability when you're following your passion and that can be scary. I think that it's super scary to have the courage and to always follow it. There were a couple of times where I was making really decent money, great benefits and things like that, but it no longer felt like the right thing to do. So even when I was going to quit to go to cooking school, I had just been promoted. And I had to be self aware enough to think, this isn't part of what I really want to do or didn't feel like it was really calling to me as I was moving up the ranks. And you have to be willing to see that, willing to see past the monetary gain. So I think the biggest challenges have been just knowing when you have to trust your gut. And even when I left Williams-Sonoma, people thought I was crazy because I had just been promoted to VP. I had all the amazing benefits. And here I've got two young children to support and with everything that comes with that. But I was like, "I can't...

I found my passion through pursuing what makes me smile. I think the most interesting thing is that I started in a job that everybody thought I was crazy to take because it didn't pay anything. And I always had this connection to food and I wanted to move to San Francisco, two things seemingly unrelated. I lived in Arizona, and I just kept telling my family "I'm moving to San Francisco." And a week before college graduation, Williams-Sonoma came to campus and interviewed and they said, "Yeah, if we hire you, it'll be for a training program for no money. And you'll start in our retail stores." And I said, "I don't care. It's going to get me to San Francisco." A week later, I got a phone call saying, "Come to San Francisco." My parents weren't so on board, asking me, "What are you doing? You're going to work in a retail store?" But it turned out to be the most amazing training! I learned about all of the products. I learned how to choose knives and cookware, and I'm laughing because I...

Following my gut also helped me to determine if the path I was on was the right one for me. For example, after I took a job in retail working in san francisco, I found myself climbing the corporate ladder, and I ended up as the project manager from the corporate side. I learned a ton from that experience. And then I realized the projection of my job was taking me further away from my passion for cooking as I moved up the ranks. I decided I wanted to go to cooking school, so I walked away after seven years and went to cooking school for six months. And then just by happenstance, I was asked to just test some recipes for a cookbook to the owner of the cooking school. And it was 200 recipes in six weeks. That was just completely insane. But that led to her calling someone called Marion Cunningham, who was a really well-known food writer and cook. And this woman gave me a job on her last cookbook. Then it was just word of mouth, then I started testing recipes for books, and then that le...