A few years ago, I was having lunch with a colleague. She was talking about trying to find her calling. At one point, I asked her what she thought my calling was. “I don’t know” came first, followed by, “Help people. I think your calling is to help people.”

I hadn’t thought about that kind of question in quite a while, but her answer seemed right. I’ve learned sometimes we need help figuring things out, including what we think about things.

During a different lunch conversation (I really miss having lunch with people!!), my companion asked a powerful question I hadn’t contemplated before: “How did you get to be you?”

Once upon a time, a long time ago, when I was about five years old, I was visiting my great-grandmother in Savannah, GA. One day she asked me what I'd like to have for dinner that evening and I answered the way I'd answer, even today. "Fried chicken," I exclaimed.

That afternoon, she went into the back yard, into the chicken coop, and executed a chicken. I wasn't there to watch that, or the plucking and cleaning.

What I do remember was learning of the event and not eating a single bite of chicken. I don't know if great-grandma was mad or anything; I was only five and, growing up in the city, I thought chicken came from the store.

I also remember eating her big fluffy biscuits. They were available, freshly baked, for every single meal, breakfast, lunch, and dinner. I already loved them. But I think that night, eating biscuits and avoiding the meal I ask for every time, I became a bread freak.

This recipe has evolved over the last 35 years. My wife Bari substituted vegetable oil for the lard in Paul Prudhomme's original recipe and adapted it for the food processor. I decided to use honey rather than sugar and started weighing things out, so it kind of became mine.

Enjoy!

P.S. Preparing this recipe inspired me to write, "How I Became a Bread Freak." Enjoy that too!

Makes 2 dozen rolls

I'm reminded of a question I used to ask, "How does music make you feel?" Not how do you feel listening to this music, but exactly HOW does it do that? How does it make us feel the way we do when we hear it? I now know that's a trick question. The music doesn't make us feel … anything. It's our brain's interpretation of what we're hearing, our brain connecting what we hear to our history, our emotions, our past, our culture. That's how music makes us feel.

I now know that's a trick question. The music doesn't make us feel … anything. It's our brain's interpretation of what we're hearing, our brain connecting what we hear to our history, our emotions, our past, our culture. That's how music makes us feel.

Once upon a time, I was fixing to get ready to walk into a leadership team-building workshop. While improving the team had sorta been my idea, past retreats hadn’t gone too well. They all seemed to focus on why I wasn’t like everybody else and I decided I wasn’t doing that again.

Before leaving home that morning, I wrote in my journal. The basic idea is to clear my head, empty my thoughts onto paper, and contemplate what I want to do that day. I always start with the date, followed by the name of a song that’s reverberating in my head. This day I chose a Eddie Harris song called “Listen Here!”

In keeping with the theme, I wrote myself the following instructions…

Whenever we'd cross paths in San Francisco, Jim Jefferson would always ask me the same question: "When are you going to fix this?" By "this" he was referring to everything in a pretty dysfunctional organization, so I always laughed. I thought of it as just a joke. A rhetorical question shared between two people who knew how hard fixing all this would be. Hard as in, "impossible!"

While Jim is no longer with us, his question now haunts me. Suppose he wasn't being rhetorical? Suppose Jim saw me as someone who really could fix it? At least put a big dent in it? Could that be true? Have I been underperforming all these years? Not trying enough (or hard enough)? Biting off less than I can chew? And, if so, why exactly?