Last year my wife and I traveled through Italy. We swam off the rocks of Riomaggiore, drank wine in the vineyards of Val d’Orcia, and walked our way around the streets of Rome.
We also discovered something that ended up being one of my biggest aha moments of 2022.
That is: pasta can be the first course. ‘Primi’ as it’s known over there.
Now, it’s entirely possible this is obvious to everyone reading this and I’m the only one that missed the memo, but in my mind, at least down under, pasta is a straight-up main meal. The kind that is served in a huge bowl and leaves you walking (or rolling) out of a restaurant struggling to breathe and tapping your stomach gently as if to say “I know, I know, I’m sorry.”
Knowing that it’s possible to have a small, lighter serving of pasta before embarking on a main meal completely reframed something I had forever assumed to be a norm.
Naturally, I’ve used this as a metaphor to noodle on the following question:
What other rules or norms am I following that I might challenge?
E.g. Do I really need 60min for my next meeting? Is it necessary to have Slack notifications on? Does work need to feel ‘hard’ for it to be worthwhile?