I woke up this morning and went to make eggs. Six of them. A thirty-second job on a normal day—crack, crack, crack, whisk, pan, done.
My oldest daughter had other plans.
She’s six, and she is eager. Eager to cook, eager to clean, eager to help with anything that remotely resembles a chore. It’s a lovely quality. It’s also, on a Sunday morning when you’re half-awake and just trying to get breakfast on the table, a test of your character.
Because here’s what happens when a six-year-old helps you crack eggs: thirty seconds becomes ten minutes. There are questions. There are follow-up questions to those questions. There’s the careful, two-handed grip on the egg, the tentative tap against the rim of the bowl, the slow pry of the shell, the inevitable fragment that falls in with the yolk. Then the fishing expedition to get it out.
We use a two-bowl system in our house—crack each egg into a small bowl first, inspect for shells, then transfer to the big bowl. That way you’re never fishing through six eggs’ worth of mixture for a rogue shard. It’s more economical. I learned this method from Thomas Keller’s Masterclass.
So, there I am. Watching her work. Telling myself: Be patient. If it takes ten minutes, fine. Twenty. Thirty. Let her learn. Let her fail. Let her drop one on the floor.
I knelt down and told her—hey, it’s okay to make mistakes. Nobody wakes up knowing how to do something. Sometimes it takes fifty tries, a hundred, before it clicks. Before it becomes muscle memory. Before you stop thinking about it and just do it.
She looked at me, nodded, and then said something completely unrelated about her friend at school.
She wasn’t listening. And that’s fine. She’s six.
But I was.
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How often do we rush things? How often do we expect perfection on the first attempt—from ourselves, from the people around us, from anyone we’re supposedly teaching?
I think about this at work. You bring someone new onto a team, and there’s this implicit clock that starts ticking the moment they sit down. How fast can they ramp up? How quickly can they stop asking questions and start producing? How soon before they’re not a cost center anymore?
And I wonder how much room we actually give them. How much patience. How much tolerance for the broken eggs on the floor.
I’m not trying to turn a Sunday morning breakfast into a lesson about B2B sales leadership. I’m not a LinkedIn lunatic. But there is something worth sitting with here—this question of how we treat time, and how we treat failure, and whether we’re losing our willingness to invest in either.
I read an article recently about the skilled trades—electricians, plumbers, welders—and how companies can’t find anyone trained and willing to work. The headline salary was eye-catching. Then you read the fine print: that number is after ten years. Day one? You’re making a fraction of it. And the company isn’t training you. You even need to buy your own tools. They want you to show up fully formed, with a decade of experience and the willingness to work for entry-level money until you’ve proven yourself.
Then they’re frustrated when no one applies.
Pick your poison. Either invest in training people, or pay a premium for experience. But this thing we’ve built—this expectation of maximum experience for minimum money, minimum training, minimum patience, minimum investment—it’s a hellscape. And it’s endemic.
We want the eggs cracked perfectly, in thirty seconds, by someone who’s never held one before.
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Anyway. That’s what making eggs with my daughter got me thinking about this morning.
And since we should end on a high note—here’s how to make the best scrambled eggs you’ll ever have. Adapted from Thomas Keller’s method, the man who built a career on taking eggs seriously.
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Thomas Keller’s Scrambled Eggs
Adapted from his MasterClass technique
Makes 2 servings
What you need:
6 large eggs (the freshest you can find—it matters here)
Kosher salt
2 tablespoons unsalted butter
1–2 tablespoons crème fraîche (sour cream works in a pinch)
Fresh Italian parsley, minced
Maldon salt (or another good flaky finishing salt)
Brioche or sourdough toast
What you do:
Crack each egg into a small bowl—one at a time—checking for and removing any shell. Transfer to a larger mixing bowl. This is the two-bowl method. It’s worth the extra ten seconds. Or ten minutes, if your six-year-old is helping.
Season with a pinch of kosher salt and whisk until completely homogenous. If you want to go the extra mile, pass the whisked eggs through a fine-mesh sieve. This removes the chalazae and any inconsistencies, giving you a smoother, more uniform curd. (I’ve never done this but Keller recommends it for further refinement.)
Set a nonstick pan over very low heat. This is the whole secret. Low and slow. Add the butter, then pour in the eggs before the butter melts.
Now wait. Be patient. As the eggs just barely begin to set at the edges, use a rubber spatula to gently push them toward the center in slow, broad strokes. You’re not scrambling aggressively—you’re coaxing. Think of it less like cooking and more like shepherding.
Pull the pan off the heat before the eggs look done. They’ll keep cooking from residual heat. This is where most people go wrong—they wait until the eggs look finished in the pan, and by the time they hit the plate, they’re overcooked.
Stir in the crème fraîche. This serves two purposes: it adds richness and tang, and it drops the temperature just enough to arrest the cooking.
Spoon immediately onto warm toast. Finish with a pinch of Maldon salt and the parsley.
Eat slowly. You’ve earned it.
the counterfactual 