Forks

I don’t watch a lot of TV, but it’s possible that “Forks,” the season two, episode seven of The Bear might be my favorite episode of any show of all time. 

I love the entire second season of The Bear because it follows a team on their journey to open a new, high-end restaurant in Chicago. Each episode invites us into the messy chaos and overwhelming emotional arc of entrepreneurship, team-building, and leveling up. Some people I talk with say The Bear is too stressful for them to watch; for me, it’s a welcome reprieve to sit with someone else’s transitive stress, if only briefly.

“Forks” is one of those “payoff is great” kind of episodes, so I won’t spoil it for you if you haven’t seen it. The premise is that one of the longtime employees of the restaurant (“Cousin Richie”), who, over the course of two seasons, developed a particularly complicated and thorny reputation among the rest of the staffers and teams, is sent to one of the best restaurants in Chicago to work in their kitchen for a week. He perceives it as punishment, which is how he initially rationalizes that the only thing he’s permitted to do in the kitchen for days is wash and remove smudges from a near-endless bin of forks. But of course we realize there’s a bit more to it than that.

Over the course of the episode, we see cracks form among Richie’s cynical, closed mindset. We see him consider the possibility of another paradigm, and then, finally, we see his whole-hearted embrace of a new mindset. (You’ll fall in love too, if you’re not careful.)

This learning-by-immersion is a consistent pattern in how the head chef of the restaurant invites his entire team to level up to prepare for the next challenge. Throughout the course of the season, we follow each character on their own independent learning journeys of honing their radar for higher standards—whether in business operations, top-notch desserts, or something else entirely.

This process of fine-tuning your radar for legitimacy and quality is an essential component of any new learning journey, whether you’re trying to drop your anchor in crypto or in the restaurant business.

It’s something I’ve been spending a lot of time doing over the past four years, across many types of projects and teams and businesses, and let me tell you, it’s a lot more nuanced than you might think. Tune your radar against the wrong inputs, and you’ll perpetuate trends of mediocrity. (Garbage in, garbage out, after all.) But tune your radar on high-quality in one area helps you identify and find high-quality in another area.

One of the best things you can do to help someone learn is to give them a proxy comparison on which to model their behavior. When you’re earlier in your career, you might refer to this as a mentor or a coach. When you’re later in your career, you might look toward habit-forming rituals and behaviors among peers or leaders of other companies. 

The hard thing about greatness is that you can't really pinpoint what it looks like, until you’ve seen it for yourself. This is probably why, when first-time founders look to build out their executives teams, oneof the first things that a recruiter will encourage them to do is to identify a “closest comp” persona for the role. They might encourage the CEO to meet with a particularly strong Chief Marketing Office, or Chief Financial Officer, someone who’s not even on the market, just to give them an anchoring benchmark. 

“This,” is what you want that person to walk away thinking after that conversation, “now this is what really good looks like.”

If you ever look at the story arcs of super-successful people and ask yourself, “How do they do all of these things? In all of these different areas? All at once?” It’s because they have spent a lot of time fine-tuning their radar for quality. And once you know what high-quality feels like in one area, you don’t have to look for the what as much as the how.

What you start to notice is that high-quality teams have high-quality habits. Things like quality control, accountability, and consistency not only matter, they are the bedrock of how things get done. They are nice-to-have’s. They are non-negotiables.

Maybe at a certain point, in unfamiliar domains, you can stop focusing solely on the output itself (e.g., what does a good company look like? What does a good dessert taste like?) and instead seek to understand the habits of the group that created it. After all, high-quality teams have high-quality habits.

I think it’s hard (maybe impossible?) to have a high-quality team composed of people who have never experienced high-quality before. In my experience you need one person as the lead quality expert – call this the Chief QA Officer if you will (a title in vibes only) to set the direction – but you also need a strong second. The second is the “first follower,” the one who actively models the target quality for the rest of the team, who enforces the rules and does not compromise.

The reason why “Forks” is so good is that we get a glimpse at what it feels like when every single person on a team holds themselves to an insanely high bar of quality. We see the unacceptable cascading consequences of a single smudge on a single plate in the flow of the restaurant operations. And we see what it looks like to have a quality enforcement person, meticulously checking every last fork for smudges.

The timing and pacing of this entire season is nearly perfect, and this episode in particular is offered to us like a decadent dessert following episode six (“Fishes”) which, while at face value is only about a single family holiday dinner, somehow manages to be the most gripping and stressful hour of TV I have ever watched. To take us from that stress and anxiety to the payoff of “Forks” is a brilliant move of controlled cadence and flow. 

You could watch just that single episode, but it’s better if you know all the stress and headache and headache and trauma from his whole story up until that point. So, buckle up, it’s a wild ride.