There is an old saying that there are many ways to skin a cat. Like many old sayings, it has managed to survive long after the world that gave birth to it disappeared. Most of us have never needed to skin a cat, yet the saying continues to find its way into conversations.
Perhaps because it was never really about the cat.
One of the quieter joys of travelling across India is discovering how familiar food keeps changing. Walk into ten homes and you may find ten different ways of preparing the same gravy. In one kitchen, onions and tomatoes form the base. In another, coconut does the job. Elsewhere it may be peanuts, sesame, yoghurt, mustard or tamarind. The recipes differ not because one family decided to be different from another, but because generations learnt to work with what the land offered, what the climate encouraged and what experience quietly refined over time.
Nobody seems particularly bothered by this diversity. We don’t spend much time searching for the one authentic recipe that every household should eventually adopt. Somehow we understand that the meal remains familiar even when the recipe changes.
It is interesting how easily we accept this in our kitchens, and how reluctant we become to extend the same generosity elsewhere.
Take work.
A startup asks very different things from people than a mature organisation. One rewards speed, experimentation and comfort with uncertainty. The other depends upon coordination, consistency and managing risk. We often compare the people without first comparing the problems they are trying to solve.
Life seems no different.
What matters deeply at twenty often gives way to different priorities at forty. The responsibilities of a parent are not those of a student. The questions of retirement are rarely the questions of a first job. It would be surprising if the answers remained unchanged while the questions kept evolving.
Success follows the same pattern.
Some people optimise for wealth. Others for craftsmanship. Some seek influence, others independence. For many, success is found in raising a good family, enjoying meaningful work, remaining healthy or simply ending the day surrounded by people they care about. These are not necessarily competing ideas. They are often different destinations altogether.
Yet much of the advice we encounter arrives as though there were only one destination.
Successful people naturally describe what worked for them. There is nothing unusual about that. Their experience is genuine, their effort undeniable and their insights are often valuable. What quietly disappears, however, are the circumstances that shaped those experiences—the stage of life they were in, the problem they were trying to solve, the risks they accepted and the trade-offs they were willing to make. Remove those from the story and advice can begin to sound far more universal than it was ever meant to be.
Perhaps that is why advice often feels contradictory. Two people may both have succeeded, yet they may have been answering entirely different questions. One execution need not invalidate another if the destination, the constraints or even the definition of success itself were different.
Old sayings seem to age rather differently. They rarely prescribe a recipe. Instead, they point towards a direction and quietly leave the execution to whoever inherits the problem. Every generation receives the same broad direction, but discovers its own way of living it. Perhaps that is why they continue to survive while countless methods quietly come and go.
By the time the meal is over, very few people are thinking about whether coconut would have been better than tomatoes. The family has shared a meal, conversations have lingered a little longer, and everyone has been nourished.
Perhaps advice is meant to work in much the same way. It can point us towards a direction, but how we arrive there depends on our own kitchen—our circumstances, our strengths, our habits and the ingredients available to us.
After all, the purpose may be shared.
The cooking rarely is.
Quiet Reflections 