The Early Education of a Chocolate Critic | #PSC 158
After questions about lead/cadmium and white chocolate, one of the most common questions I get asked during live AMAs is, “How did you become a chocolate critic?” Episode 158 takes a deep-ish autobiographical dive to get to the bottom of that query. [updated]
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Episode 158
I grew up around computers and computing. My father specialized in academic computing throughout my childhood, working at UCI (University of California, Irvine) and Victoria University (Wellington, NZ). This was in the days when personal computers were still only a gleam in the eyes of SciFi writers.
We even had a teletype terminal connected to the UCI mainframe via a 300-baud acoustic-coupled modem in our home in 1967-ish.
Whenever I asked my father about computing back then he would hand me books about programming in COBOL or FORTRAN. But I did not make the connection back then between learning to program and my interest in artistic endeavors.
I spent my college career (at Evergreen and RISD) studying fine art photography. I moved to NYC after graduation and started exploring that path, freelancing for studio and architectural photographers. About three months in, through a RISD alumni connection, I was introduced to the VP Marketing for a startup building custom computer graphics systems.
A month later, I found myself a full-time job helping specify, design (UI/UX), test, market, and sell computer graphics systems. That job continued for four years, until the company was bought out. I then spent most of the next fifteen years as an independent consultant.
About a decade after I graduated, I discovered single-origin chocolate during a business trip (Feb 1994) to the South of France. Little did I know at the time that that discovery would launch the third, and longest-lasting episode of my career. One day, less than a month after returning from that trip, I had an epiphany: “While there were professional critics for just about everything, there were no professional critics for chocolate.”
So, there I was, one day about a month later, standing in a bookstore on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, deciding that I would become the world’s first professional chocolate critic – “The Robert Parker of Chocolate” is how I thought about it to myself.
I am now in my mid-30s, and I have pivoted from a career in the fine arts to a career in high-tech, and was considering abandoning high-tech for chocolate, about which I knew very little and there was no clear path to it even being a career: Did the world need chocolate critics? Did it even want them? Could I get paid?
But those are not the three questions I am going to answer today. The questions I am going to answer are about my background: what led up to my:
- Noticing the opportunity, and
- Committing to the course change
Why This Topic?
The Japanese concept of Ikigai combines what you love, what you’re good at, what the world needs, and what you can be paid for, into a coherent sense of purpose.
Ikigai is less about career optimization and more about cultivating daily meaning, joy, and social connection.
Living TheChocolateLife extends this traditional concept to include the idea of paying it forward; it’s not enough for me to find daily meaning, joy, and social connection, I want to inspire others to find and follow their ChocolateLife, and in turn for them to inspire others they come into contact with. It’s not a question of invention or reinvention, it’s a process of discovery or rediscovery that begins with self-reflection and self-awareness.
Resource Links
brian
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Clay Gordon
Clay Gordon
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