2024 April 2 Plan like the only possible outcome was total success

 Hi, this is Jim Cranston from 7EveryMinute and 7EveryMinute com, the podcast and website about reimagining your life. Thanks for joining me today to talk about thinking without limits. If you like what you hear today, please leave a like, tell your friends, send me a message.

Thanks for joining me tonight to talk about looking at life through the lens if you couldn't possibly fail when you started to do something. In tonight's episode, we are going to go back and revisit Jose Andres from World Central Kitchen.

We talked about him  quite a bit back on November 15th of 2022. He's still active. I mention his organization pretty much every week. They're active in Ukraine and other places in the world. I was planning to feature him tonight because he just did an amazing job.

He has an amazing ability to motivate other people to perform the most amazing things--much bigger than they ever thought they could. We've talked about how his team of people were able to coach some local kitchens in Kiev, Ukraine, to increase production by an amazing 18x--to 18,000 sandwiches in a day. Another place was an incredible 68x increase in output. They were able to feed 34,000 people a day. 

In both those kitchens, the owners initially thought they couldn't even double their production--and yet he managed to encourage them and get them going to these amazing figures. There's a whole train of thought called 10x is easier than 2x thinking methodology. It's the sort of thinking that if you try and incrementally improve, you get little incremental improvements, but when you throw out the whole playbook and just start from scratch, then you can really make huge gains in your life and in what you're able to accomplish.

World Central Kitchen and Jose Andres became the focus of tonight following  an erroneous attack on a small convoy of three World Central Kitchen vehicles who are working in the Palestine Territory. Seven volunteers were killed. That was in today's news, including some senior World Central Kitchen staff members. That's very, very sad. It made me think I wanted to revisit the stuff that they are doing and their whole approach to life.

In this particular circumstance, it seemed like everything they'd been doing had been done correctly. The vehicles were clearly marked. The route and the schedule were coordinated with the IDF. But something went wrong somewhere and tragedy happened. 

Even before that happened, the Wall Street Journal had planned an article on him, talking about all the amazing things that he's been doing  in the Palestinian territories. In the article, they called out what he and his wife, Patricia, have accomplished through World Central Kitchen.

Since its founding in 2010, which is when they started up following the big earthquake in Haiti, the one characteristic that absolutely just cannot be missed is that nothing in the whole world is considered a barrier to its success.

Everything is just a challenge to be overcome. The ultimate goal for them is to make sure that they're able to feed as many people as they can. He's obviously a person of action. We can complain all day, or we can find alternative methods. If there's an obstacle, you don't just give up. You find a way around it. He has one goal, and he works towards that one goal. Everything he does is to support that one goal. 

He's a huge fan of getting things locally, because if they're local, you can probably get them easier. It's cheaper to get them, so it means you can feed more people. That's one of the big things that he does. In another situation, they tried to get deliveries into the country by truck, and it couldn't happen. He called up a buddy of his who had a waterborne humanitarian delivery service, and they got tugs and barges, and they started getting waterborne deliveries two months before the U.S. They had already built their own landing areas from building rubble. Again  use what's available locally. Nothing stops this guy. No matter what is going on, he will find a way around it to get to his goal. The whole time he's doing this, of course, he's negotiating with both the Palestinians and the Israelis at the highest levels, in Jordan and Egypt and everywhere.

He's everywhere all at once.  How does he do this? It's because he's focused on his goal. He acts and runs his whole life to support his vision. To put it in perspective, since last October, World Central Kitchen has produced and delivered over 43 million meals.

I think they're the largest group providing food in Palestine after UN food programs. He's only 54 years old, and Andres has learned that nothing is insurmountable if it stands in the way of your goal and your vision.  Being a chef is really managing a small business within the business, and sometimes it's not a very small business. You might be doing a couple million dollars out of that kitchen, or more.  You have a whole staff, you have planning to do, you have short term planning, advanced planning, emergencies. It's actually a very demanding job  with a very variable set of audiences. If you make a product you sell into the market, you're pretty sure what your audience is going to be like. A chef can change from day to day what people are looking for. He's obviously at the top of his game in that, and then goes ahead and to revolutionize the emergency response methods to food disasters.

He's worked in two war zones now and brought aid to many natural disaster areas. It's always done with creativity and adaptability. What is adaptability? It's just using the skills we've developed moving through our life to move towards your vision. The path may change a little, it might even change a lot. But the real goal, your passion, remains fundamentally the same.  

Unfortunately, as a result of the killings of the staff, World Central Kitchen has decided to  pause the humanitarian efforts for the moment. They feel they have to get things under control, and who can fault them for that? 

It has also probably refocused Jose Andres on how to make sure such situations don't happen again. Given his track record, I expect that he will probably come up with a creative solution that is right in front of everyone else. He'll figure out a way, I'm sure. I have a lot of faith that his humanitarian efforts will take a different path to support  getting to his real goal, which is getting food to people in need. The reason I'm such a fan of his is that he truly exemplifies all that we talk about. 

In every situation, especially when operating in war zones, he is hyper focused on his vision and his goal of helping those in need. He isn't thinking about doing things one particular way or waiting until the situation is right.

So  when the situation changes, his response changes, but he is always focused on his vision and getting the result that he envisions. The path may vary. The goal remains the same.  This is a real world example in stunning detail in living color. You can look him up as what you can accomplish if you live your life towards your vision. 

He's not a magician. He's just a person who totally believes in what he's doing and operates from the perspective that he absolutely cannot fail. There's just no other outcome. It's going to be success. There's no backup plan. It's his vision, and this conviction gives him incredible power to always keep moving forward. 

He has 24 hours each day, just like all of us, but he's gotten to the point of making everything align with his vision, and he won't accept failure. It's not that he has a firm way, one way to do things--quite the opposite. He has a firm goal and a firm vision, and then he just adapts as need be to get to that point.

We can all do that same thing. It didn't happen for him overnight, and I'm sure he often feels that he could have done more. Yet he continues on towards his vision every single day. We all have our own vision of how we want our lives and the world to be.  Once you truly define your vision, if you work from the attitude that you're not going to fail, you just can't fail.

As a matter of fact, the only possible outcome is success. Think of the amazing things you could do to reach your own vision. Envision what you want for your future. Imagine if you started working towards it and just the only option was success. And then imagine what you could do and become.

Your homework (always optional) is to envision that huge vision that would define your perfect future. Write it down. We've talked about this before. Write down that one vision, then write about it. Make a vision board about it. Think about it, imagine it, smell it, taste it, feel it. Totally immerse yourself in that vision of perfection that you want to see in your future.  Now, extra points if you take that vision, now so clear to you, and take the very first little steps along your path to accomplish your dreams.  

Please remember the many active wars going on, and World Central Kitchen at WCK.org. Please remember and pray for the aid workers from World Central Kitchen who perished in Gaza yesterday. 

The World Central Kitchen is totally humanitarian, and they often work in pretty poor conditions. The volunteers are dedicated to what they want to do. It is a really terrible situation there, so please keep them in mind. Pray for them, meditate on them. Whatever you can do to bring strength to the families and friends and to the group in general. 

Remember, one of the best ways to care for yourself is to care for others. If it's monetary to help others, that's great. If it's just moral support, that's great. Whatever you do, always try and keep other people in your heart. It gives you a different perspective on the world. 

As always, thank you for stopping by. If you found something interesting and useful, please pass it along. Please hit that like button. If not, please drop me a comment as to what you'd like to hear. Have a great week. Remember to live the life that you dream of, because that's the path to true contentment. Love and encouragement to everyone. See you next week on 7EveryMinute and 7EveryMinute com. Thank you.