Dedicated to the Amazing Peter Chieco

A friend said, "I never look at a recipe." I get what she meant. She meant to infer that she likes to create. She meant for me to understand that she wanted to make the dish her own. It was her attempt to distinguish herself. After all, anyone can follow a recipe, can't they? The measurements and steps are all laid out. All you have to do is read it and do what it says with the amounts and times it dictates. So why have I tasted so many bad batches of Bolognese? Why do I still see so many nascent salespeople perpetuating well-documented mistakes?

If I gave my friend my recipe for Bolognese (which is actually from the fantastic chef Giuliano Bugialli), what would she do? Improve it?

Am I to believe that some pedestrian, untrained, part-time, non-Italian home cook will better Bugialli? She has a better chance of winning Powerball.

I get the need to put your mark on something. I've even altered some amounts in Bugialli's Bolognese to accommodate the ingredients I have on hand or my family's preference, but I still follow his recipe. By now, it is from memory, so it feels like mine, but it's not. I learned it from one of the best.

It's like that with success. My good friend Peter Chieco once answered the "what does it take to be successful" question perfectly. Pete said, "Find someone crushing it at what you want to do and ask them how they did it. Then do what they did." DUH. Get the recipe and follow it.

Sure, you'll want a bit more pepper than some and less salt than others, but if someone hands you a recipe for success, is it wise to burn it and start your own from scratch?

Bugialli is a world-renowned Italian chef. It's safe to assume that the recipe I see in his book isn't his first iteration. It's safe to assume he spent decades making thousands of Bolognese sauces with thousands of variations and finally settled on one to publish. Why would I spend decades going through thousands of variations to create something similar?

Success leaves clues.

In fact, success leaves books, podcasts, articles, webinars, and YouTube videos with blueprints and systems. Pick one up and follow it. Then, once you have it down, go ahead and use red wine instead of white or replace the veal with venison to make it your own but remember that the master already made the mistakes, so you don't have to.

Own Your Sales Gene