The Same Plate: Bridging Cultural Divides Through Food With Kayla Ferguson

Food's a great way to get to know people. Stephen Jaye’s guest in this episode is Kayla Ferguson, founder at The Same Plate, an organization that addresses two critical human needs: connecting with others and exposure to new ideas. The organization was built as a result of Kayla’s international travels and experience bridging cultural divides over shared meals. The success of The Same Plate also demonstrates that not all ideas need to be super complicated and highly technological to have a significant impact! Tune in! --- Listen to the podcast here The Same Plate: Bridging Cultural Divides Through Food With Kayla Ferguson I’m happy to be talking to you about this. Thank you for joining me. How are you doing? All good. I’m convincing myself that I enjoy the seasons. Sometimes you have to make the best of it. I was in Crested Butte where the weather was good. It was sunny and pleasant. There wasn’t enough snow there for a good skiing experience. There were a lot of bare spots. It reminded me that sometimes you need some of the good and some of the bad to make everything flow together. They have to have the dark and the light, the good and the bad, warm and the cold, the sun and the snow. It’s what makes the world function. Tell me about The Same Plate Denver, what experiences people have and what the purpose is. I’ll start by saying how the whole thing got started because that provides some valuable context. I was born and raised in Denver. I love this city, for one. That’s a huge reason why this is a passion project for me. I also went out to California for school. I studied film. I worked in Hollywood for a while. After a couple of years, I decided that wasn’t going to work. I saved up as much as I could which wasn’t much on a Hollywood assistant salary. I bought a plane ticket to Japan. I decided I was going to do a 26-country trip around the world. That was in 2015 and 2016. It straddled those two years. I ended up back in Denver because I ran out of money. I had to move into my parents’ basement. I’m still here. It was about 1.5 to 2 years after getting back that I was not particularly fulfilled by the job that I was doing and wanting to take off on another round the world trip but I didn’t have the time, money or resources. I was sitting at an Indian restaurant one night with my now fiancé, then-boyfriend. It was like a lightbulb moment of you can travel the world through food. I’m not saying that eating at an Indian restaurant in Arvada, Colorado is the same as going to India but it can open you up to that experience and create some intrigue that can push you towards that adventure. I decided I would start putting together dinners for my friends. I pick a different culture every month and invite my friends to dinner. It would be like a gathering thing. We could all talk, eat good food, catch up with each other not over beers at a brewery because I found that it’s a little hard to connect with people in that environment. By the third month of bringing together, I had close to 30 people coming. It was amazing that many people wanted to try the food. I realized that sometimes impeded the conversation people were able to have with each other. That’s when I started thinking about doing more curated experiences with the chef, with some intentional conversation and turning it into a whole ticketed event for people. It grew from there. That’s the quick story. "If everyone adapted that, that their life journey and their life experience makes what they want to share with the world unique, regardless of how common we think it is, I think it would just be magical." First of all, it sounds like an idea that you had a lightbulb moment at that time at the Indian restaurant but also an idea that came to you in a couple of different segments. Tell me about that first experience when you were at an Indian restaurant. Was there something that made you think about this experience? The first thing was I want to go travel again. If I could have my choice in life, I would be a total nomad. I’m certainly working towards that. That’s all I wanted to do. It was an immediate, almost knee-jerk reaction to what I wanted my life to be. I was like, “I want to travel.” Immediately after, “How do I make that happen in my current reality?” I didn’t have the money to buy a plane ticket around the world. I didn’t have time off of work to go do that. It was like a ping pong ball of, “This is what I want. How can I make it happen with what’s available to me?” That’s how it sparked. It was a quick, “Why not try it? Why not see what happens?” There are two great mindset points for the readers in that particular story. One is that people oftentimes get trapped by the gap between where your life is and where you want to be. It could be this insurmountable gap. A good thing to remember is that oftentimes, a step in the right direction is worth the effort. As part of what you were feeling that day in the Indian restaurant, you were like, “Am I in India?” That’s probably not going to happen for one circumstantial reason or another but I can get a little portion of that experience. I have to go back to that almost every single day. It’s one step in the next direction. Even people who run a marathon do it one step at a time. No one launches from the start line to the finish line. It’s impossible until the Marvel Universe shows up here. That’s how you do life. Why not apply that to everything? I can get intimidated thinking about wanting to scale this to other cities to look at what supply chain I need for some new product I want to launch. That’s all super intimidating and it can stop me. After that, I’m like, “The next thing that there is to do is find someone who can do X, Y, Z for my website.” I have that done. “The next day, I will do this.” Taking it back to the super incremental steps and having a vision of what could be out there to pull you forward is like a little dance to do. You have to flex that muscle and practice that muscle. That, to me, is the key to building anything. The famous saying, “Rome wasn’t built in a day.” There’s some real wisdom behind that even though it’s a cliché saying. How do you go about getting to that mindset where when you look at things and you see where you are, you have to be okay with being in that intermediate step like, “I’ve gotten these things done. That doesn’t mean I’ve launched. That doesn’t mean I’ve gotten to the point where my life is exactly perfect for who I want to be?” Also, still happy with the progress that you’ve made in the past week, month or year. That’s another muscle to flex. I practice this in a greater context through meditation and gratitude practice. At the end of the day, once you get that, you’ve never gotten there even once I did an around the world trip. I had gone to 26 different countries and got back to the United States. I did this whole thing, this whole experience. That was the peak of the mountain in my life at that time. There was still the next thing to do. We’re never done until we die. I’m applying that mindset to, “My business is never done. This product is never done.” Having a meditation practice and a gratitude practice of the fact that we’re always a work in progress and everything we’re touching is always a work in progress can make it more fun. It’s like, “This is a painting that I keep painting that I love so I’m going to keep adding these colors to it that I love.” It’s cool that it never gets to be done because I get to keep reiterating it for wherever I’m at and whatever it’s important to me in my life. That comes with practice. I haven’t always thought that way. I’ve had to train myself to live in the joy of the unknown. I always imagine what it would be like to have everything be complete and have your life not be a work in progress anymore. Sometimes, I wonder if that’s secretly a little bit scary that, all of a sudden, there’s not that next mountain to climb. The Same Plate: We're meant to be social beings as a species. We're designed to do things together. It’s this weird thing about being human where we think that that’d be great to have our entire to-do list done. We’re like, “It would be amazing to have all these things that I want my life done.” You then talk to some people who are retired, who says they have it all, made money, had the career, their kids are off to college and whatever it is, having it all in whatever context. There’s a certain dissatisfaction and boredom to that. Our brains trick us into thinking that is what we want. There’s more joy to be found in the living, which involves never being done. I say it’s not done until we’re dead. Even then, it’s probably not done. There might be people who put the pieces of your business. Life isn’t done until we’re dead. I like to think I’m living it as fully as possible. At least, I like to tell myself that. One of the questions I love to ask people at a random party or random bar is let’s say you win that billion-dollar Powerball jackpot. You suddenly don’t have to work anymore. You can lay around at the beach or do nothing but party. How long do you think you can do that before you’re going to need something else? Everyone needs that party time and that relaxed time to take a break. Also, no one can do it forever. Some people might say, “After a week, I’ll be bored. I’ll need to get to do something.” Some people will try to say they can do it forever. Maybe there are some people out there who can but it’s an illusion that we tell ourselves that we could do it. I know, for me, I love taking time off, going to the mountains, being disconnected, going to the beach on vacation when we can travel again. I can’t wait to do that. I love that disconnected time. It’s essential if you’re trying to create something or be creative. You have to have that unplugged time because going all the time depletes that elusive energy source