How cooking helped me at work.

Most of my life I considered cooking a chore. I carried this belief until I started working and living alone in my one-bedroom apartment. To kill my boredom, I started to do some basic cooking. Eventually, I got better at it. Surprisingly, I saw improvements in my professional life too. Here is how it helped me.

1. It inspired me to be creative

Some of the multi-cuisine dishes that I prepared

As a software developer, I have to be creative especially when I think about ways to enhance the user experience of an application. Cooking inspired me to experiment with different ideas fearlessly. Now, it is natural for me to mix Mexican cuisine with Indian cuisine.

2. It taught me to plan ahead

In cooking, planning is essential for getting the best results. A lot goes before actually cooking food — getting groceries from the tore, marinating the meat and so on. The same goes for building an application too. I learned to ask relevant questions from myself before I start to code — What technology will I use? What features will I build? Asking such questions is critical to successfully create an application.

3. It taught me to learn from my mistakes

I rarely make a perfect dish in the first go. It is through a continuous cycle of improvements that I make a great dish. Cooking taught me to handle failures at work and keep improving myself.

4. It helped me reduce my stress level

Working on a trading floor is stressful, and regular stress is not good for both physical and mental health. For me, cooking acts as therapy by taking my mind off from work and getting me ready for the next day.

5. It taught me patience

Though there are many easy to cook meals, the most delicious meals take a long time to cook. Take for example — Chicken Tandoori. It starts with marinating the chicken overnight with yogurt and spices and then slowly baking the chicken in a tandoor(a cylindrical clay oven) the next day. By cooking such dishes, I learned to be more patient. Programming also requires extreme patience in a lot of situations such as debugging code, fixing never-seen-before syntax errors or learning a new javascript framework.