Note to self – spend less time cooking next Christmas!

Christmas dinner laid out on the table

Christmas turkey

Sprouts

 

5-10 minute read

“Adjusting my plans to give my son what he actually wanted meant we enjoyed a wonderful Christmas Day playing together AND we still got a great Christmas dinner!”

Some takeaways…

  • Understand the demand – think about whether your audience really wants what you are producing.
  • Be prepared to change tack if what you are doing is not what your audience wants.

 

Some thoughts on the relative merits of cooking an enormous Christmas dinner for children who just want to play….

 

•   This Christmas day, I did too much cooking FOR my family, instead of spending time WITH my family.

 

•   I realised as the day went on, no one was as bothered about Christmas dinner as they were about playing with their new toys, with daddy.

 

•   So I scaled back on the cooking, did more train building and learnt a valuable lesson about catering to what your audience REALLY wants, rather than what you THINK they want.

 

 

Apologies to any Christmas dinner purists out there, but this year I slacked off, cheated a little bit and cut a few corners. I used instant gravy as I ran out of time to make some, and, shock, horror, I didn’t even bother to make the sprouts!

 

I had started off with lofty intentions, as I do every year, and my wife groaned as I dragged huge quantities of everything into the house. There were only the four of us this year, but, as she rightly pointed out, I had bought for 400. I had plans for several different types of stuffing, potatoes served more ways than you can imagine and every vegetable under the sun, including quite a few my two- and six-year old little ones were just never going to eat.

 

Undeterred, I set out on my cooking odyssey Christmas morning, after the presents, fully believing my efforts would be appreciated and I would be rewarded with the sight of the whole family tucking in joyfully at meal time.

 

This year was different though. My son had received a Lego train from Santa, and wanted nothing more than to build it, with me. He kept grabbing me, pulling me away from my roasting chestnuts, and clamouring for attention. As the day went on, I slowly realised that he didn’t care a jot about Christmas dinner. He just wanted to play. With his daddy and his new toys. At Christmas.

 

So I shelved some of the stuffings, gave up on all the potatoes other than roasties and ditched the sprouts completely. I interspersed bouts of frenzied kitchen time with train building and monorail construction, and tried to give him more attention than the food.

 

And guess what? It worked! Adjusting my plans to give him what he actually wanted meant we enjoyed a wonderful Christmas Day playing together AND we still had a lovely meal, we still ate far too much (well, I did), the children still got to experience ‘a traditional Christmas dinner’ and everyone was very happy. Apart from the sprouts, which sadly missed their moment of glory this year.

 

Where I went wrong:

 

I had not thought about what the people I was cooking for actually wanted. My intentions were good, and my efforts were coming from a place of love – I really wanted to make Christmas dinner special for my family – but it was not what they wanted. In reality, only I would appreciate all the extra details – they would have been happy with a bit of turkey, some potatoes and some carrots. I could make all the effort in the world, but it was not what they wanted, and would never be appreciated.

 

What I did right:

 

I changed. I realised as the day progressed that my son was much keener to play than to eat six types of stuffing, so I changed what I was doing, and adapted my offering to match what he actually wanted.

 

What I learnt:

 

Matching demand

Whether in business or just cooking for the family, it is easy to get so caught up in perfecting the details of your offering that you lose sight of why you are trying to do it, or whether it was even needed in the first place. When you have such a mismatch between what you are trying to provide and what your audience actually wants, you are heading for only partial success at best. You may get some take up – they may eat the turkey, and leave all six types of stuffing – but this is likely to end with you feeling under-appreciated and certainly the reward will not match the effort you have put in. More likely is total failure – what you are offering is rejected by your audience, and your efforts are wasted.

 

Opportunity cost

You cannot do everything, and spending precious resources in one area precludes you from investing them elsewhere. Christmas Day is special, especially with young children. My son was super excited, had new toys and wanted his daddy. His daddy, however, was shut up in the kitchen, cooking a dinner he didn’t want, and ‘missing’ Christmas. At that point on Christmas Day, unless I changed tack, I would forgo something magical in pursuit of something that ultimately would not be valued.

 

It is not always easy to recognise these pivotal moments, however, and this event has reminded me to be more sensitive to the value of what I am doing, why I am doing it, whom I am doing it for, and what they actually want. Keeping the bigger picture in mind can help prevent you from getting carried away – when I look back, what would I have wanted to have spent my Christmas doing? Playing with my son, laughing, building, and enjoying, or cooking?

 

Three takeaways:

 

Understand the demand – is what you are doing actually wanted by your audience? Are you trying to give them what YOU think to be the best thing, without considering what they ACTUALLY want?

 

Be prepared to change tack – if what you are offering is not actually wanted or needed, you should not be spending effort on it, or persevering to get it right, so change. Do not hold on to an idea if it is the wrong one, just because it was your idea.

 

Keep the bigger picture in mind – when you look back at this moment, will you think the outcome warranted all the effort?

 

Thank you for reading.

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