Life is Too Short to Make Butter

Consider this entire post a metaphor for just about everything in life. It has ideas that I feel are really important. Life is full of so much to do, it truly is impossible to do everything. However, it shouldn't be impossible to decide what to do. One of the really big traps I have personally fallen into from time to time is trying to decide what is worth doing, and this is pretty well symbolized by making butter.

You have so much to do every single day. Generally, as you get older, life is a series of increasingly open doors of things that you can do and places you can go. Your finances get freer if you've lived well, and you have access to a greater pool of resources. Your experience makes finding out how to do things you want to do more accessible. Doing things things that let you better understand the basic building blocks of all the tools you have to explore everything you want to do becomes really important. Exploring your world like that makes you better able to do what you want to do when you want to do it and more effectively, and this is where making butter comes in.

Cooking may be the most important thing for every human being to learn how to love to do. It is essential to how you live and how you enjoy your life. If you never learn how to cook, you become limited to eating what other people have made when and how it's convenient for them to make it and it is by far one of the best ways to live how you want to within any means you have available. Chefs from around the world will inform you that one of the most basic and important building blocks to cooking good food is butter.

The thing about butter is that not only is it such a fundamental ingredient to making good food, it is also incredibly easy and accessible to make. I'll just go ahead and leave a good link for how to make quality butter right here:

• How to Make Butter

As I believe everyone should learn how to cook, it then can be followed that I believe everyone should make butter... once. Learning how it's made, what it can do as it's being made are both very important, and you get to enjoy a real treat that is the product of your own two hands.

After you have done all of that, though, it's time to ask the important question: Did the time I invest in this produce something that is better than anything I could have bought?

Maybe for you it might, but I chose butter for this example for a very particular reason. I greatly doubt that you will reasonably produce butter better than what you can get, readily available, for a cost in time and money that justifies what you're going to use that butter for. Your time is limited, and your money is limited, no matter how much you have of each, they're all still limited. Given that, you can better invest your time and money into other aspects of what you're cooking. 

If you have resources like time and money left over that you could have made the butter you used, you could have better invested those resources into other aspects of what you made. You could have picked a harder recipe, worked with other higher quality ingredients, pioneered new ground. You can always pioneer new ground, even if it's just new for you. That's why you should make butter once, because at that time, it's new ground for you.

But after you've made butter once? After that, it's time to pioneer new things, because if you don't, who would have the time to get to the things that no one has ever done before? Who will have the time to do the things that change the whole world, and not just your world? I'm not saying don't do it, but I want to encourage you to use it as a stepping stone to bigger things, and that means you don't have time to make butter.

But who knows? Maybe you'll find a way to make butter than anyone has ever made before, and if you do... please tell me how.