The Second Batch Is What Makes The Recipe

Doubling a recipe was never really about having more food. It’s about having enough left over to walk down the block with it.

I don’t know who started this, whoever first stood over a pot of chili and thought, “might as well make it a big pot,” but they weren’t doing math. If you needed six servings, doubling gives you twelve, and twelve is exactly the kind of number that gets a jar carried next door instead of just eaten alone at the counter. The extra isn’t waste. It’s the whole reason you doubled it.

I’ve been doing the same thing at work lately, on purpose, with customer conversations instead of onions.

Every positioning call, I push past what I actually need for the deck in front of me. I ask one more question. I let the customer ramble a beat longer than the agenda wants. Most of it goes nowhere. But every few calls, something sticks, a specific line, an objection nobody had written down, the exact moment a customer’s face changed when the framing landed. Those become pocket stories. Small enough to carry, sharp enough to use. I’ve got a handful sitting in my pocket right now for this week’s offsite. I’ll still have half of them left for the next one.

Plenty of good customer conversations end exactly on time. They confirm the pricing, answer the objection, close the ticket, and stop. Nothing wasted, technically. Also nothing left over. The team that only ever cooks exactly what the meeting needs never has anything to bring to the next meeting (or, where I prefer, the hotel bar later). They have to start from scratch every single time, re-litigating the same positioning with the same thin evidence, wondering why nobody in the room seems convinced.

You can’t share a jar you didn’t make. You can’t pull out a customer’s exact words if you never stayed on the call long enough to hear them say something unscripted. The surplus has to exist before you can be generous with it, and generosity, it turns out, is just planning that happened early.

None of this is really about being a nicer person, either… though it doesn’t hurt. It’s cheaper than the alternative. Making a little extra costs you almost nothing in the moment, a few more minutes on a call, a slightly bigger pot on the stove, and it buys you months of not having to start over. The people who seem effortlessly ready with the right story at the right time usually aren’t quicker thinkers. They just made a second batch a while back and now the opportunity to finish and share it is here.

Stay Positive & Doubling Up On Purpose