The day I stopped splitting quarters in the walk-in, Kansas City 2017

I worked at a big shop in KC for a while, and we used to break down whole hogs every Thursday. One older guy, Earl, he was maybe 65, he always had this pile of trimming scraps and he'd spend an hour going over each piece, making perfect little cuts. I thought it was a waste of time, who needs that game with pork shoulder? But then one morning we got a call from a local sausage joint, they wanted 40 pounds of fatback and bacon ends, all hand cut, no grinder. We were slammed, and Earl just slid over and did that thing he always did, made those scraps into exactly what they needed in under 20 minutes. The owner saw it and started charging double for those trim packs. I still think about that whenever I'm tempted to rush a cut. Has anyone else had a moment where the slowest guy in the room ended up teaching you the most profitable habit?

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noahgreen9d ago

Earl basically turned scrap into a product line nobody knew they had, and that's the part people miss when they say slow is just slow. Forty pounds hand cut in 20 minutes only worked because he'd already put in hundreds of hours learning where the good fat was, so the speed came from the reps, not from rushing that day. The habit worth copying isn't being slow, it's knowing your material so well that the fast version is still the clean version.

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