Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance

football, baseball, basketball, golf, and tennis, in that order, before I went for swimming. I kept plugging away. I figured I’d just keep going from one sport to the next until I found something that I could really fall in love with.” Swimming stuck, but it wasn’t exactly love at first sight. “The day I tried out for the swim team, I went to the school library to check out track and field because I kind of had a feeling I was going to get cut. I figured I’d try out for track and field next.”

As a teenager, James Beard Award–winning chef Marc Vetri was as interested in music as he was in cooking. After college, he moved to Los Angeles. “I went to a music school out there for a year, and I worked nights in restaurants to make money. Later, when I was in a band, I worked mornings in restaurants so I could do the music thing at night. Then it was like, ‘Well, I’m making money in the restaurants, and I’m really starting to like it, and I’m not making anything in music.’ And then I had an opportunity to go to Italy, and that was it.” It’s hard for me to picture my favorite chef playing the guitar instead of making pasta, but when I asked what he thought about the road not taken, he said, “Well, music and cooking—they’re both creative industries. I’m glad I went this way, but I think I could have been a musician instead.”

As for Julia Child, that ethereal morsel of sole meunière was indeed a revelation. But her epiphany was that classical French cuisine was divine, not that she would become a chef, cookbook author, and, eventually, the woman who would teach America to make coq au vin in their very own kitchens. Indeed, Julia’s autobiography reveals that this memorable meal was followed by a succession of interest-stimulating experiences. An incomplete list would include countless delicious meals in the bistros of Paris; conversations and friendships with friendly fishmongers, butchers, and produce vendors in the city’s open-air markets; encounters with two encyclopedic French cookbooks—the first loaned to her by her French tutor and the second a gift from her ever-supportive husband, Paul; hours of cooking classes at Le Cordon Bleu under the tutelage of the marvelously enthusiastic yet demanding Chef Bugnard; and the acquaintance of two Parisian women who had the idea of writing a cookbook for Americans.

What would have happened if Julia—who once dreamed of becoming a novelist and, as a child, possessed, as she put it, “zero interest in the stove”—had returned home to California after that fateful bite of perfectly cooked fish? We can’t know for sure, but clearly in Julia’s romance with French food, that first bite of sole was just the first kiss. “Really, the more I cook, the more I like to cook,” she later told her sister-in-law. “To think it has taken me forty years to find my true passion (cat and husband excepted).”

So, while we might envy those who love what they do for a living, we shouldn’t assume that they started from a different place than the rest of us.