Lessons from The Bear
Perfectionism is terrible for boundaries
A week or so ago, an article by Eboo Patel appeared on Philanthropy.com and started making the rounds through the nonprofit world. In the article, Patel lamented nonprofit staff who are, “too busy calling each other racist to properly tutor the underserved 9-year-olds who come to our organization.” And then he went on to talk about the television series The Bear, and how nonprofit staff can take inspiration from this show about “a team of people who commit themselves wholly to a mission — even though the mission is modest and the path is arduous.”
It hit a nerve. So let’s talk about The Bear.
The Bear is a show about restaurant workers in Chicago.
In the first season, we watch Carmen ‘Carmy’ Berzatto return to Chicago to take over the family’s sandwich shop after his brother’s suicide. Carmy is a young but experienced chef with a proper culinary education, a James Beard award, and a resume that includes Michelin restaurants.1 He immediately sets his mind to transforming the shop. A lot of the conflict of the first season comes from (1) the fact that he is an excellent chef but doesn’t have much experience actually running a business, and (2) his attempts to bring a fine dining culture into a humble sandwich joint.
In the second season, we watch the crew of this restaurant close the sandwich shop and work on opening a fine dining restaurant called The Bear. This includes sending two of the staff to culinary school, sending another staff member to Copenhagen to learn from a chef there, and sending another staff member to stage at a three-starred Michelin restaurant in Chicago. A lot of the conflict of this season comes from (1) the general stresses of opening a restaurant with a looming deadline, and (2) the difficulties of finding a balance between having a personal life and working in a restaurant.
It’s a wonderfully realistic and—if you’ve worked in the industry—slightly traumatic show.
Let me start again. The Bear is a show about costs of artistic passion.
As Patel points out in his article, Marcus the pastry chef “sleeps in the restaurant so he can conduct experiments with sugar and flour at all hours of the day.” He also takes his trip Copenhagen while his mom is in hospice. And, on the night of The Bear’s soft opening, he misses several calls from his mother’s nurse.
Syd, the sous-chef at the original restaurant and chef de cuisine at The Bear, “tastes different dishes from restaurants across the city and then tries to re-create them from scratch at home.” She also constantly has to shoulder Carmy’s responsibilities when he gets distracted by a personal relationship. Oh, and she defers her salary for six months while they are working on opening the new restaurant, relying on the promise that she will get that money later if the restaurant is successful.
Carmy himself “is committed to making the restaurant a place that is worthy of his staff’s dedication.” He also gets into a relationship with an old girlfriend while trying to open the restaurant, leaving most of the responsibility on Syd and the other staff, and then absolutely burns that relationship to the ground when he realizes that it is interfering in his focus on his craft.
And that’s just looking at a few the examples that Patel uses.
As Patel points out, “There is only one standard at The Bear: gold. You don’t need to be at that standard when you walk through the door, but you need to be willing to do what it takes to get there.”
Patel is a little wrong here. The standard at The Bear—and a lot of other fine dining restaurants—is not gold. It is perfection. Every table, every dish, every fork should be perfectly laid out, perfectly crafted, perfectly polished. Every time. And do it quick, because we have to turn that table, because the next reservation is due in thirty minutes.
That can be great for eager young chefs. And that can be great for the people at the top who get to decide what ‘perfect’ is. But The Bear shows us the cost of that standard again and again: emotional explosions, broken relationships, professional burnout, and more. It is true that the thing that ties the characters together is the mission of the restaurant. But it is also true that the thing that ties the characters together is shared trauma.
Something similar is true in the nonprofit sector (and in the church). Maybe not as true, and maybe not true everywhere, but true all the same. We live in industries with a lot of people—some underpaid and others not paid at all—trying to meet the demands of the most important missions in the world to the highest standards possible.
A lot of those people give everything they have. And a lot of those people flame out spectacularly. There are emotional explosions. There are broken relationships. There is professional and volunteer burnout. And there is so much more.
The answer to that is not buckling down a little more and working a little harder and achieving a little more. It is building communities where everyone can be healthy and whole even as we work towards the most important missions in the world.
I am, admittedly, writing this while having an internal debate about perfectionism.
I am writing this on a day that I work from home. I am also writing this on a day when the administrative assistant at the church that I serve is out (and she will be out for a couple of weeks).
And I just discovered that the wrong hymns are listed in the bulletin
The part of me whose standard is perfection wants to drive to the church, toss the old bulletins in the recycling, put the correct hymns in, and print new bulletins. And that would involve nothing more than rescheduling my day, losing a couple of hours on some other projects, and feeling resentful.
So I am letting it go. The fork on the table will have a streak on it and be in the wrong position. It will poke at the back of my brain and I may even lose a Michelin star.
But the excellence that I aim for is not found in having a perfect bulletin. It isn’t found in being a perfect pastor or having a perfect church. It is found in being a whole and healthy bearer of the divine image, adding love to the world, nurturing God’s reign of love.
And I can do that better by spending those couple of hours on other things.
This seems like as good an opportunity to point out that Michelin stars are not given to chefs, they are given to establishments. If the chef has a star, then so do the server, the busser, and the dishwasher. And the moment any of them leave that restaurant, the star is no longer theirs to claim.