Mindset: Great Eggspectations

Imagine. You just arrived home from the farmers market with a batch of cage-free organic natural etc. etc. eggs from a local egg producer. You're anxious to see the crystal clear whites and the deep orange yolk destined to be the greatest tasting and most nutritious omelet you've ever made. You get all your ingredients ready in your kitchen, fire up the stove, pull out your Amish butter and are ready! You crack your first egg open, dump the contents into your mixing bowl and you cannot believe how strong the shell was. You move on to the second egg and just get giddy over how golden the yolk is. Now for the last egg of your three-egg omelet. With your mouth absolutely watering, you crack open to empty the final egg into your bowl and discover that the last egg was completely filled with deep-red blood.

Are you going to remake your omelet?
Are you done eating eggs for a week, month, forever?
Are you going back to that farmers market?

Last week, I was cracking about 5 dozen eggs to put up for storage when I came across an egg I have never encountered before. At least a '1 in a couple thousand' egg. An egg that I am glad I have never encountered before. Not a spoiled egg, not a fertilized egg, not a double yolk egg but one that was mostly filled with blood.

I cracked the seemingly normal egg open and dumped its contents into my mixing container to find the whole batch to have been contaminated with a large amount of deep dark red blood from this single egg. Eggstraordinary!

This eggnomaly had me thinking that perhaps I had bled into the egg container through a laceration I had somehow acquired on my hand during the egg-cracking process. This just did not seem possible. I am not in the ICU, I am working in my kitchen! My emotions went from bewilderment, to concern, to super disgust! I decided to dump the contaminated batch of eggs down the drain and move forward with the remainder of my egg processing. After 3 dozen more eggs processed without another blood egg, I was back on track.

Later on that afternoon, I developed some thoughts that have been bouncing around in my head all week. What if someone whom had never experienced farm fresh eggs had come across an egg as filled with blood as the one I came across that day? Would they ever eat eggs not from the store again? What is your threshold of negative experience to completely write something off and never go back to it? I'm not gonna lie, if my experience with eggs wasn't so filled with positivity, this bad experience may have left me searching for other means of nutrition.

"There was a long hard time when I kept far from me the remembrance of what I had thrown away when I was quite ignorant of its worth."

Estella to Pip - Great Expectations - Charles Dickens

In life, eggnomalies are going to happen. Are they a sign that you are on the wrong path? Not eggsactly. This is only true if you decide it to be so. In the world of personal skill development, it is impossible to improve without encountering some failure. In fact, muscles will not grow if they are not broken down/exhausted/used first. An anomaly paired with great expectations within a personal endeavor can result in a derailment. So how do we weather these set-backs?

Stay on track with your goals using these three tips;

  1. Try another egg, and then another.  (Not every nail will pound in straight, but you must keep building.)
  2. Grant more time. (A peach tree that begins producing in 4 years is far superior to the peach tree never planted.)
  3. Forget Great Expectations and Live in the Now. (Time spent pondering the future must be subtracted from time spent building toward that future. Think about it!)

People give up fishing because they went with a guide who was annoying. People give up gardening because their first season of tomatoes was destroyed by a windstorm. Heck, I did not start eating vegetables until after college due to poor vegetable experiences I had when I was a kid. Blood eggs are as rare as an individual who follows his own dream to a satisfied end. Don't fall into the expectations trap nor let an anomaly destroy something of great value.

Have a wonderful breakfast.

James