The Perfect Puzzle Piece: Our Job as Connectors, not Gatekeepers
Is it easy to define what you do? We've landed on a pretty random title...
Last year an industry pal reached out to us and asked “Lads, how do you do that? Can you teach me?” and without a second thought we freed up a date in the diary and organised an afternoon of sharing skills at their kitchen table.
This is a person for whom this specific up-skilling was in some part because of expectation of a client they work with closely. The zinger is: this is a client we also work with closely. Instead of guarding skills and keeping our slice of pie, under knee-jerk threat that their work could potentially overshadow ours, without hesitation we took time to share the skills we had with them, no questions asked. Why? Because we’re not in the business of gatekeeping.
Welcome to another long-read on Chip Paper, from Patrick Hanlon and Russell Alford. Chip Paper is our space on Substack where we share long-form food writing features, deep dives, snappy travel guides and recipes, all punctuated by hand-drawn illustrations. We started as bloggers, built our brand on Instagram and are now freelance food and travel writers plus the restaurant critics for The Sunday Times Ireland. We’re also over at gastrogays.com.
There’s a certain primitivity in the world of content. Hunter-gatherer vibes. “If I found it it’s mine, not yours; go find your own”. Just like our ancestors had to evolve and fight to survive, the present day isn’t much different, all ‘survival of the fittest’ and protecting one’s own patch. It definitely exists in other industries too, in fact the entire ecosystem of the business world is basically built on it: eke out your territory, grow, be profitable and crush all competition, undercutting or sabotaging if necessary. Never let them get the upper hand. Dog eat dog.
Gatekeeping can take so many forms: gatekeeping skills and knowledge. Gatekeeping opportunities, contacts or access. Gatekeeping respect. For those more established or already in positions of power - literal gatekeepers - we have witnessed and observed a lot of pulling up the ladder behind them, which is continually disappointing and speaks volumes of character.
Oxford defines gatekeeping as: “the activity of controlling, and usually limiting, general access to something”. Cambridge defines it as “the activity of trying to control who gets particular resources, power, or opportunities, and who does not”. Merriam-Webster puts it even more succinctly: “a person who guards/controls access” while Collins nails it to the wood, dubbing it a “practice” of “controlling access to information, advanced levels of study, elite sections of society, etc”. A “practice”, ongoing, rather than a one-time activity.
Vogue dubbed ‘gatekeeping’ as the word of the year 2022 and this article on The Cut delves deep into the practice, arguing that a certain level of gatekeeping can be good in this internet era of oversharing and influence. This piece on Indy 100 about gatekeeping restaurants is a funnier take on the issue, told through memes.
That hunter-gatherer mentality trips us up all the damn time, too. In the hustle economy as a freelance writer or content creator the gut reaction when something is offered to you is ‘TAKE IT!’, ask questions later. It’s a primitive, natural reaction to grab what’s in front of you before it’s gone, like anything as necessary to basic needs as food and shelter. So it feels counter-intuitive to consider what’s in front of you, deem it not to be the perfect fit, then pass it off elsewhere. “I’m not the right puzzle piece, but they are –– here’s their email”. When this exact situation has happened us in the past and we’ve direct elsewhere often what results turns out to be far more successful than we could have ever achieved.
And then one considers: “would that person do the same for me, or others?” If we let ourselves wallow in that uncertainty we would pretty certainly never again share our piece of pie because the odds are, no, other people wouldn’t do it for you, or anyone else. It requires a certain level of security and confidence which most people don’t possess.
Does what you do define who you are? Does who you are define what you do?
We really struggle defining what we do because we don’t fit in a neat box. We write for print publications and regularly appear on radio, like traditional journalist/broadcasters - the very thing we trained in - but often aren’t taken seriously because certain people only consider us influencers. We don’t consider ourselves influencers, mind, (let’s delve into that in a whole other long-read soon because we have many thoughts) but we do a lot of work on social media, because we built our brand digitally –– us, as hunter-gatherers, using the tools available to us at a time mid and post-recession when the job landscape was a barren desert and kept building upon that.
What we’ve landed on as a title though, and don’t laugh, save that for our future mortgage broker, is that we’re ‘connectors’. Our role, in so many ways, shapes and forms, can be distilled into one neat phrase –– connecting the dots. Between people and places, peers and contacts, clients and agencies, businesses and customers, publications and readers, restaurants and diners, stockists and producers.
Many think exposure or “influence” is our currency but information actually is. We intro, we facilitate, we demonstrate, we link. We share skills, we pass off opportunities, we shine a spotlight off ourselves and unto others –– even those we don’t particularly enjoy or gel with but we recognise what they offer. We’ve gotten people clients, been the stepping stone to producers getting stockists, even the direct link for people authoring their debut book. In the five seasons and 50+ episodes of our podcast Chew The Fat maybe two episodes ever featured our own personal stories.
We’ve held out a hand to induct into a guild, provided blueprints for trips, suggested perfect restaurants to fit a brief, you name it, and this reaming off of accomplishments is not an ego stroke, trust us. In fact – we’d wager most people who benefitted from an opportunity we passed their way aren’t even aware where it came from or who blew the wind over the sails.
The fact is we have found ourselves so often connecting two or more things in our careers, rather than anything else. Finding the fitting puzzle piece for the empty space, perhaps even the missing puzzle piece. That is what seems to be the constant in our world of change and our shape-shifting career. Have we missed our true calling in HR?
It’s funny, in an ironic way, that we mentioned graduating into a post-recession world. It was all back-to-back internships, paying your dues and staff roles scarce as hen’s teeth. The freelancer, non-permanent, contract worker era had well and truly materialised by 2012 and your progress was at the whim of established gatekeepers. People in power who, if you crossed or they just didn’t like the look or sound of you, would provide a forceful barrier to your success.
But social media had just emerged too, and that spelled opportunity. Fast forward less than a decade to 2020-2022 and our digital footprint, authority and voice became the biggest asset imaginable during Covid. We became something of a communication conduit: from our where to order online for home delivery megapost to the 50 best meal kits in the Irish Times or top takeaways in the Irish Independent. Named within the Producer’s Champion Bakers Dozen for Blas na hÉireann 2021 and featured on Cook-In with Mark Moriarty on RTÉ One.
Again, amongst our biggest successes to date has been about connecting A and B, or connecting A-Z with the rest of the country in some ways. Using our knowledge and contacts to connect people. None of the above even scratched the surface, income-wise, during a time where all our work was obliterated, but it was important to use our platform for connection when we had nothing left but that.
Even our debut book, Hot Fat, a small, A5-format, illustrated cookbook with huge heart dissecting a deliciously niche topic, was so much about others. What probably should have been very self-centred as our first ‘product’ was consciously jam-packed with shout-outs for others, from oyster farmers across the coastline and traditional black pudding makers like Inch House to potato farmers like Ballymakenny Farm and cherished cheesemakers like Kylemore Farmhouse Cheese. Precious space for illustrations of our own food were heartily swapped out for glorious sketches of cult-favourite products worth coveting, like great big blocks of beef dripping or jars of Smoked Onion Mayo.
“Why Did You Do That?”
Gatekeeping feels alien to us but is worryingly normalised, yet gate-opening is much less talked about.
A chef we admire so much, Samin Nosrat (of Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat fame) in conversation with Helen Rosner for Cherry Bombe’s podcast said:
“I have had a lot of really good role models who have set this example [of gate-opening] for me… I remember when I started [food] writing I took a class at the School of Journalism at Berkeley with Michael Pollan and one of the people in my class, Malia Wollan, was still in college but already writing for the New York Times, and I worked up the courage and asked her: “Wow, how did that happen? Do you think that could happen for me?” and thought she would be like “Oh, you need to do this, this and this before I’ll connect you” and she was like “Of course! Of course I’ll connect you” and I remember thinking “she doesn’t even know me and I’ve asked her for this thing”… [that] sat with me, it felt so powerful that she was so secure in her own thing that sharing a resource with me didn’t threaten her at all.”
Nosrat concludes the story saying “years later - we’re really good friends now - I asked her, I said “do you remember that you did this thing? Why did you do that?” and she responded “It’s not my decision to make, if my Editor doesn’t want to respond to you they just won’t respond to you, but I don’t need to be another barrier in your way on your journey”.
She explains that she has always tried to practice that going forward, but is quick to underline that she still gets that natural stab of jealousy (“It’s mine, I don’t want to share”) but is quick to talk herself around and remind herself “there’s enough for all of us… it’s better for all of us –– I don’t want to be remembered as the person who got in the way of other peoples’ dreams”.
So what are we trying to get at here? Our career, so far, in communication - content, writing, broadcast, whatever - has been about fostering connection. Championing and spotlighting, empowering and showcasing others far above ourselves. Sharing skills, opening doors, being open-hearted rather than closed-off.
Becoming less hunter-gatherer and more evolved human being, secure in the knowledge of what particular piece of the puzzle you are, and knowing where to direct opportunities elsewhere or suggest the more-perfect fitting puzzle piece than yourself, which takes a lot of guts and self-control.
Connectors, or gate-openers, rather than gatekeepers.