Season To Taste Is Not An Instruction

The first real recipe I ever tried to cook repeated three words that have followed me around for years. Season to taste.

To taste. As if I had one. As if somewhere in my mouth lived a calibrated little library of how this dish was supposed to land, and all I had to do was look it up. I stood over the pot holding a box of salt like a man holding a map of a country he has never visited, written in a language he cannot read. (Was it even the right kind of salt?!)

The person who wrote the words had made that dish four hundred times. Their tongue knew the destination. Mine had no idea. And in three breezy syllables they had handed me the single hardest decision in the whole recipe, the one bit of judgment that actually separates food from disappointment, and strolled off assuming I already had what it takes to make it.

That is the quietest failure there is, and you are doing it to someone today. (Maybe even to yourself…)

The onboarding screen that says “just connect your account.” The deck that says “align the team.” The senior marketer who tells the new hire to “make it pop” and walks away feeling generous. Every one of those is season to taste. Every one assumes the reference already lives in the other person’s head. And when the new person freezes at the stove, we decide they are slow, when all we really did was hand them a map in a language we forgot they could not read.

The move is simple and it is the entire job of a professional… Be the one who tells them what it is supposed to taste like.

A lot of advice for young marketers assumes you already know why any of it matters, so it skips straight to the clever part. This won’t.

The unglamorous truth that most experienced people glide right past is that the person who explains is worth more than the person who impresses. Explaining feels junior. Naming the obvious feels like admitting you are not in the club yet. So almost nobody does it. They are all too busy seasoning to taste and quietly assuming you can taste too.

Which is exactly why teaching stands out. Not as a tactic. As a near-vacancy.

Walk into a room full of people performing how much they know, and the one who stops to hand you the actual palate becomes unforgettable in about nine seconds, for the embarrassing reason that they were the only one who bothered.

You wanted to be different. This is the door. Difference is not a louder version of what everyone is already doing. It is doing the plain, useful, slightly tender thing they all decided was beneath them. And the beauty is that you get to… you’re not a book!

It is also the only honest way to build a team. You do not hand a new hire “season to taste” and then grade the salt. (Again, which kind of salt? Pink Himalayan? Blue Persian? Salt precisely picked out of beach sand?)

You stand at the stove and let them taste yours first. You give them the reference, the right salt, and then their own judgment has something to grow from. A team that has been taught the palate goes on to teach it to the customer. A customer who has learned what good actually tastes like will pay for it for the rest of their life. It runs in that order or it does not run at all.

Right now there is someone at the stove holding the salt, convinced that everyone else was simply born knowing how much. They weren’t. You weren’t. I stood there with the box in my hand and no idea, and the only thing that ever fixed it was somebody letting me taste theirs and saying, there, that is what we are aiming for.

Tell them. Say the part you assumed they already had. That is nearly the whole secret of being useful to another person.

Stay Positive & You May Even Find That Taste Is Actually A Feeling