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You have a brain; a brain full of KNOWLEDGE and EXPERIENCE...
NEVER imagine that words on a piece of paper are more important
than what's in your BRAIN.
In semi-related news, here's a funny story from my family history:
My Stepdad's great-great Uncle (Let's call him BOB, not his real name)
started a very successful butcher shop/Delicatessen in rural Central PA
right after WWII.
The "butchershop" aspect of the business was pretty normal for the area:
he'd personally buy one cow or pig at a time from a local farmer,
slaughter it and sell fresh beef or pork 12 hours later. Great stuff,
but no different from any other small rural butchershop in the '50s.
The real draw that made the business successful was his "cold cuts".
Sausages, salamis, bratwursts & hot dogs; You name it, he mixed them all himself
on-site from his own secret recipes, and they were just BETTER than
any other shop for miles around, so his business THRIVED.
A few local restaurants advertised (BRAGGED!!!!!!!!!!) on the fact that
they bought their products exclusively from his business;
his stuff was just that good.
In the late '60s, he brought his son and nephew into the business
& groomed them to take it over when he was gone...but he kept mixing
all the prepared meats himself, alone, in secret.
When they asked about his secret recipes, he told them that all of
his recipes were in his safety-deposit box, and they would get them
when he was dead, not a moment before.
Well, he eventually passed away, and his longtime Accountant/Lawyer
went into his bank box and handed them all his handwritten 'secret recipes'
the very next day.
And his recipes were not written in scientific terms;
for example, the one sausage recipe my Stepdad referred to when he
told me this family story called for:
"20lbs medium-lean beef, 30 lbs ordinary pork, 2lbs thick pork backfat,
1 handful Black pepper, 1/2 handful coarse salt", and a bunch
of MISC stuff measured in "handfuls", "1/2 handfuls", pinches, and etc.
So, Great-Uncle Bob's son and nephew went to work making sausages
according to those recipes...and NONE of them worked. They followed the
hand-written recipes PRECISELY, and the results weren't even "bad" sausages,
they were utter crap that wasn't even "sausage" at all.
They wasted many hundreds of pounds of beef and pork on those recipes,
meeting with bland, non-sausage FAILURE every time,
and losing more longtime customers every day for weeks...
They were at a family get-together discussing their fears that the business
would soon go bankrupt when my step-Dad's older brother (a teenager then)
took a look at the recipes and asked them an important question:
"Um...you guys -do- remember that Great-Uncle Bob was six-foot-seven
and had hands THE SIZE OF FRICKING DINNER PLATES, right?"
So, they went back to the shop and started mixing again.
Everywhere his recipes called for a "handful" of black pepper,
they tossed in a HEAPING double-handed scoop from the black pepper barrel,
and a full cup of salt for his his "half handful Salt";
so on and so forth, and suddenly all the recipes were as good as ever
and they were back in business!
And they are still in business today; folks like me who are "in the know"
don't drive through that county without taking a few $$$ and scheduling
15 minutes for a quick stop there to buy a pound or three of EVERYTHING
they have on hand.
(Except for "scrapple". Oh my dear sweet LORD, that shit is just NASTY!
I grew up where it was INVENTED, I've eaten ROADKILL many times, and
even I know enough to NOT EAT any alleged meat-product that's DARK GRAY-GREEN,
fer God's sake!)
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