The five-year silence.
In December 2020, I deleted every social media account I had.
No farewell post. No announcement. I did not write a piece explaining why. I just stopped. Logged out. Deactivated.
Covid had pulled the emergency brake on the world. The hotel I was running had emptied out. The kitchens I had spent my life inside had gone quiet. And for the first time in almost two decades, I had something I had completely lost track of along the way.
Time. Proper, uninterrupted, mine.
I did not have a plan when I disappeared. I just knew I needed the silence. I had spent twenty years performing in some form or another, and I needed to stop performing for a while and just think.
And in that silence, I started connecting dots I had been collecting for 36 years inside professional kitchens. I went back through my own career. The careers of friends. The careers of people who had walked into kitchens with me at twenty and quietly disappeared by forty. Patterns I had never had time to look at properly.
Five years later, in January this year, I came back. With a book.
It became a number one international bestseller faster than I ever expected.
I am still slightly amazed that disappearing was the right answer. But it was.
📖 Book: https://www.richchefpoorchef.com/category/all-products
📺 YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@yusufyaran
🌐 Website: https://www.yusufyaran.com/
Yusuf
