The Sushi Chef Principle

a little-known secret of effortless action

One night several years ago, my friend, his girlfriend and I were out at a truly excellent sushi bar, celebrating my friend’s birthday. We were sitting at the counter, and had ordered omakase, so the chef was serving us whatever he felt inspired to. It was some of the best sushi I’d ever had. We’d also bought an expensive bottle of sake and kept pouring cups of it for the chef, so he was being extra generous with us.

At one point, we got a little distracted by a lively conversation with some Japanese businessmen who were sitting next to us at the bar. We’d left a plate of nigiri sitting in front of us for more than a few minutes. At that point, our chef friend chastised us: “Don’t just let that sushi sit there! Right when I put it down”—he made a decisive motion with his hand—“you should eat it right away. That’s when it has ki in it.”

My eyes widened. My friend and I hurriedly apologized to the chef and set to work on the sushi. 

Ki. As someone who’s studied martial arts, I knew what he was talking about. Ki, in Japanese, or qi, in Chinese, is energy. It’s a word that can have different meanings in different contexts. But in this case, I imagined it as a kind of kinetic energy: the chef chopping the fish, forming the rice, garnishing and plating the sushi, and setting it down on the bar. He was putting his energy into the sushi—transferring it to us—and we were letting that energy dissipate.

You could also think of it as momentum. In physics, momentum is a product of the mass and velocity of an object in motion. As we all know from Newton’s first law of motion, an object in motion tends to stay in motion, while an object at rest tends to stay at rest.

In life, momentum is about harnessing the force of what’s already moving.

I’ve come to think of this as the Sushi Chef Principle. It’s a way of getting more done with less effort by harnessing momentum and timing. 

It’s like the old saying: strike while the iron is hot. Only instead of blacksmithing, our metaphor here comes from eating sushi—which I personally find a lot more relatable.

So, what if we applied this principle to other areas of life—would it hold up? I’m still experimenting with this, but here are a few ideas:

Reading: If you’re anything like me, you buy way more books than you actually have time to read, and end up with stacks upon stacks of unread volumes. (There’s a word for this phenomenon in Japanese: tsundoku). In her book The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up, Marie Kondo recommends reading a book right when you first buy it, because that’s probably when you’re most excited to read it. After purchase, our enthusiasm for a book naturally decays, almost like it was radioactive and had a half-life. What if we applied the Sushi Chef principle by starting books right when we first buy them? And waiting to buy books until we’re ready to start reading them? Could this be the antidote to tsundoku?

Writing: I was recently on a Zoom call with a handful of other writers. A couple of us were lamenting that the longer an article idea spent sitting in our queue, the less excited and motivated we felt about writing it. I immediately thought of the Sushi Chef Principle: what if the time to write about an idea is right when we first think of it, when we’re most excited? Not only could this result in more, and faster, writing, but perhaps our writing would reflect our feelings of enthusiasm and carry over to the reader as well.

Productivity: Some people seem like machines: they can work steadily all day, somehow managing to maintain productivity until the evening, when they finally get tired and ready for bed. But personally, my levels of energy, motivation, and focus tend to ebb and flow. I feel more like a cat—my natural tendency might be to rest 20 hours a day and hunt for 4. Applying the Sushi Chef principle to productivity might mean working with, rather than against our natural rhythms, and using the times when we have the most energy to do focused work on our most important tasks.

What do you think? Have you experienced the Sushi Chef Principle in your life? Where could you experiment with applying it in order to find more ease and flow? Let me know in the comments!

---

Thank you for reading Mindful Mondays! As always, I appreciate your feedback on my writing. Please feel free to reply to this email or leave a comment on Substack to let me know what you think.

If you’re not already subscribed, enter your email address below to get my latest writing delivered straight to your inbox every Monday:

And if you enjoyed today’s newsletter, please consider sharing it with a friend. Personal recommendations are still the best way for me to grow my audience and share the benefits of mindfulness with the world. Thanks!