Gordon Ramsay's Playing with Fire

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Gordon Ramsay's Playing with Fire
Harper and Collins 2007
hardbound, 296 pages

I followed the earlier seasons of Masterchef US and there I got to know the hyper and fast-mouth Gordon Ramsay. Though he swears (Swearing is a turn-off for me), I seem to agree with him in his reactions over food mishaps in the kitchen. Though his sentences are peppered with swearing in the adult contest, he is adorable in the Masterchef Junior. He's endearing actually but I'm sure he's an obsessive personality when it comes to his craft. So when I saw his first autobio called Humble Pie, I grabbed it. There, I understood him, his history, his motivation and I came to appreciate him in traversing his journey in life as a chef, as a son, as a brother.


In this sequel, Playing With Fire, I am not as amused as the first storytelling but I really appreciated the book. It was really a tribute to people who helped him along the way, but with some business sense on the side. What I liked about Gordon here is that he is ready and willing to clap hands for people whom he admires and he does not mope long on failures caused by wrong people and wrong decisions. He tends to bring his hyperactivity and good energy to his business interests. 

Well, he cannot deny that he is displaying "workaholism" as his addiction indeed. But I think I liked Gordon because he did not set out to make money, to be rich. He set out to do best in what he does, cooking in his being a chef, mentoring in his being a manager. I really relate well with him when he talked about his desire to be good in what he does first and the money is only secondary. I always think of money as a fruit of doing what I liked to do. If I hate what I do, I can get easily distracted by money, by small problems, by uninspired people around me. I believe that my choices in life is motivated by my hunger for experience, not just direct experience of pain and happiness but hat rawness of experience coming from other people's own experience. I am happy to help and my work enables me to do that and that matters more to me that ensuring lots of money for myself. 

Back to the book, I highly recommend this read to entrepreneurs and corporate people because Gordon takes seriously customer service and responds to every letter, as one example.



  




Location: London, UK

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