Now that I'm about to enter society, I realize that my identity is no longer that of a student, and I also realize that the days of having a standard answer for everything are gone, and that you can't find a rational basis for a lot of life choices without asking why. For example, a friend told me that he wanted to stay in Beijing, and that he wanted to have a car and a house in Beijing through his struggle. I was puzzled by the fact that I wanted to have a car and a house instead of becoming the president of the country, so why should I pay such a big opportunity cost to realize this goal in Beijing, which is easily achievable in any third-tier city. At this point, my friend would throw out another argument, that there are many opportunities in Beijing. However, in my opinion, there is a threshold for opportunities in Beijing, for example, before you have a hukou, all the benefits of Beijing have nothing to do with you, so there is still a question of opportunity cost here.
After asking a million questions, I began to fear the life of a lawyer, who commutes two hours a day, and the life of a civil servant, who follows the rules, and finally I just didn't know what I was going to do. After half a year of this, I figured it out because of a few things.
The first thing is that I went to the driving school to learn how to drive, and the driving school instructor to chat, the conversation is as follows: Coach: you college students are good to find a job, right? I'm not sure if you're going to be able to find a job, but I'm sure you'll be able to find one in the future. Coach: What is your salary level after graduation? Me: Seven or eight thousand almost. Coach: Hey! It's not easy to find a job. I graduated from elementary school, think the national employment situation is good, everywhere is a job opportunity. This is also my figure comfortable, when the driving school instructor, the original open taxi earn more. That is, I can not do anything, go to the construction site to move bricks, but also 300 a day tube food it. How to find a job is not good!
This thing makes me worry about the sense of enlightenment, if the positioning of finding a job is only a means of livelihood, then I found that my means of livelihood has more than 10,000, and is by no means limited to so two or three. Of course, the ideal is easy, but it is not easy to do. Just like the pork alumni of Peking University, even if it has been made into a business, the speech still have to keep saying that I'm sorry for my alma mater, to shame my alma mater. After all, people are social animals, have to care about their families, the expectations of people around them and eyes: is a college student, you have to do college students "should" do things.
One of the things that touched me even more was the teaching I received from my advisor, Mr. Wu Zhipan. In the acknowledgement of my master's thesis, I wrote this: "No matter what the future holds, I can do what I love, experience the process rather than the result, and live rather than survive. Even if I go to sweep the streets in the future, if I can get peace of mind, I still consider it as a life of great warmth." This passage, in my opinion, expresses my thoughts about life. As a result, when Mr. saw it, he criticized me. He told me that sanitation workers were no different from other professions and were an indispensable part of society, so there was something wrong with my expression. It was then that I remembered one of Mr.'s frequent teachings to us, "There is no higher or lower position, just a different division of labor."
Through this incident, I read out that there is no such thing as "what college students do" and "what college students don't do". If you do something well and put your heart and soul into it, you will be able to make a contribution to society.
My other concern was that it would be a waste to study law for six years and then work in a job that has nothing to do with law. However, I soon realized that, in my opinion, apart from the specific provisions of the law, what is more important behind it is its spirit and thinking. Six years of legal study brought me, in fact, not a specific knowledge, I have long forgotten most of the law, but more importantly, I dare to say that I have mastered some of the law, jurisprudence thinking and way of doing things. With a kind of thinking to do things, I think the industry is not necessarily so limited, just like the Internet thinking, you can take it to do the Internet, you can also take it to do financial, real estate, catering. In that way, assuming there is a lawman mindset in the world, it seems okay for me to take it to catering.
Mental burdens were almost removed, and I began to seriously consider the question of opening a restaurant. I began to ask myself, what is my ideal? Here we have to mention again the "position is not high or low, the division of labor is different" this sentence, the reason everyone understands, but to do is not so easy. Probably this is the elementary school culture of driving school instructors feel good to find a job and I such as college graduates feel that the root of the job is not good to find, but a lot of work can not see.
I think, if one day, our society is no longer to "North University students selling pork", "Tsinghua students as security guards" such news as hype and gimmicks, we respect every way of life, respect for each career position, our This society is considered a normal society, perhaps many of our problems will be solved. At least, the employment of college students, will not be so difficult. This is my ideal, to go and open a restaurant and stick to my own choice and way of life. Just like Jiro in "God of Sushi" who sold sushi for his whole life, and gained the respect of others because he respected his profession, probably my goal in life, even if it is realized. I ended up contacting three friends to do this with me, which also inspired and touched me. In this team, there is a master's degree, an MBA, a civil servant, and we run a rice noodle business as well as a lifestyle.
What kind of restaurant do I want to open? I've already run two small restaurants when I was an undergraduate, so I have experience in opening small restaurants, so can I do something a little different this time around? I have to mention here that the popular restaurants such as Eagle's Beef Brisket and Huang Taiji, which are operated with Internet thinking, have given me great encouragement and inspiration. However, after eating a 100 yuan bowl of brisket rice and Huang Taiji pancake fruit, I found that the first two use the so-called Internet thinking only through strong marketing to raise customer expectations, but did not substantially improve the customer experience, while the customer still need to pay the bill for the cost of marketing. Internet thinking to make products is essentially a fast, explosive thing, while the restaurant is actually a slow accumulation of things. These two combined together, between fast and slow, it will be easy to disconnect. Huang Taiji's reputation is big, but the product may not be improved so satisfactory. To find a balance between the restaurant industry and the Internet, I think the key lies in what products to sell: is there a kind of food that is easy to standardize, that represents the tastes of a significant portion of the population, and that embodies the traditions and connotations of our culture?
In the end, Changde beef and rice noodles came to mind. Rice noodles are a staple food for southerners, and in some ways can correspond to noodles in the north. And it is the rice noodles that my hometown, Changde, makes a daily breakfast staple. The streets and alleys of Changde are filled with such rice noodle stores: a dozen tables and chairs, five or six small stewing pots, in which the soup rolls over and the beef smells fragrant. Cooking powder water, cattle soup, always keep a small boil, the spices of the multi-layered flavor, butter mellow flavor, soup freshness, chili pepper flavor, beef meat flavor, all in the slow simmering in the circling steam, entangled endlessly. If there are guests into the store, a bowl of rice noodles in a thousand calls in the boiling water boiling one or two, pouring soup, butter code, sprinkled with a few pinches of scallions, a few drops of sesame oil, wiped one or two pepper,, red, white, green three-color mingling, is really a great enjoyment of life. What's more, the preparation of Changde rice noodles is mainly in the early stage, beef, beef bone broth needs to be boiled about ten hours in advance. And when it comes to the real operation, the whole process from boiling the noodles to serving the meal takes no more than 30 seconds. The long simmering time and complex ingredients are the soul and philosophy of Chinese food, but the extremely fast delivery speed makes it possible to standardize the operation to some extent. If someone can run pancake fruit and meat buns as China's hamburgers and hot dogs, then I think it is also possible to look forward to the finalization of rice noodles, a food with a huge regional representation, to be run as China's spaghetti. Preparations began in February 2014, back to Changde, street to street to eat every rice noodle store in Changde, a day to eat a bowl is enjoyable, a day to eat ten bowls is a nightmare, one of my partners and I joked that eating rice noodle has eaten chrysanthemums on fire. In the end, we chose the most authentic taste of a rice noodle store, went through a series of processes of apprenticeship, learning the art, and standardization and refinement, bought a small scale in the countless nights inside a small spoon a small spoon weighing each kind of herbs, ingredients, and through the Changde Catering Association, invited to the chefs of the most famous local rice noodle store tasting, and then finally produced these formulas.
Returning to Beijing in mid-February, I started looking for a storefront, traveled all over the city, and eventually snailed my way into the World Financial Center in Jintaixizhao. And then count the time of the relevant procedures, April 4 officially opened for business. This speed should be God's speed, because in order to do this thing, has hitched all the savings of the university, not as soon as possible business, food money is a problem. In preparation for the opening of the time, in order to earn a living, but also do not have to sit in three part-time jobs, an unexpected pleasure is the weight down nearly 15 pounds.
Opening a restaurant in an office building is sometimes busy until midnight, but the heart is full of joy.
Fu Niu Tang is a small test bed for me. In this store, there is no waiter, we have three garbage cans, customers finish their meals, collect their own bowls, the garbage will be sorted according to the order of residual soup, plastic bowls, chopsticks confetti. As a reward for working together to fulfill our environmental responsibility, we then give back a piece of fruit. This experiment is very significant for us, and I would like to explore a win-win model for both stores and customers to do this: on the one hand, the environment is protected through garbage sorting, on the other hand, the customer enjoys the fruit at the end of the meal, and the store saves on labor.
Or maybe in the future the store can be like a fast-food restaurant in the U.S., where it takes four people to run the operation, and in the end it only takes one or two people to do it. The cost saved will be used to improve the treatment of employees, provide training and career development for employees. If a model can be formed, perhaps the restaurant industry will slowly attract more college students, making rice noodles will become an art, and the restaurant industry will become a respectable industry, right? This is a small unreliable wish of mine. In addition, Fushitang has also done a lot of interesting things I am interested in, such as cooperation with Greenpeace, cooperation with the Senator Project, etc. His future is like an operating system with infinite possibilities, and can be loaded with many apps. I respect my rice noodles and the catering industry, so we watched the God of Sushi nearly ten times, and strive to do a good job in every aspect, to the best. With respect, we also wanted to do more interesting things.
Yesterday, someone asked me if I ever thought about what happens when things fail. I thought about it, from the first day this restaurant opened, maybe for myself, I've been successful. I think that the external things, no can fight again, not difficult, difficult is to break their own inner bars.