How the Four Hour Chef Created the Four Hour Shaykh
I love food.
I love it so much, that I’m one of the reference points for good restaurants when people visit Dallas. I get asked about it so often that I had to collaborate with my good friend and fellow food snob, Adam, to create a website to make it easier to share our recommended restaurants.
My phone has pages and pages of bookmarks of restaurants and coffee shops to try along with notes about which dishes others have recommended.
You could say I know a thing or two about good food. Unfortunately, none of that knowledge translates into the skill of cooking.
A few years ago, an author who attained fame from writing a life-hack style business book wrote a book about cooking. The Four Hour Chef was released. The premise behind this book was that you could “hack” your way to learning how to cook.
This was done by promoting the idea of meta-learning. All you had to do to learn a skill (in this case cooking) was break that skill down into discrete components, find the ones that yield the most results, and then practice them. The promise was that this process could make you world-class at anything from cooking, to learning a second language, to shooting three-pointers (yes, really).
We should pause here for a moment to acknowledge the absurdity of this. If anyone could become world-class at anything, like shooting three-pointers (of which there is a section in this book) - then every single NBA player would be a 40%+ shooter from long range.
Back to the book release. Naturally, I was pumped. Cooking is something I had always wanted to tackle but never knew where to start. Watching it on television always made it feel overwhelming. There were too many things to master to be able to cook well. I didn’t know cooking techniques or terminologies. The promise of being able to deconstruct this into small components, mastering them, and rebuilding them was alluring.
I got the book and suddenly felt that same sense of overwhelm. Yes, the skills were deconstructed. Yes, there were places to focus. It did not matter though. For a person with no real experience, it was still hard. I was not sure what tools I needed, so I started ordering what he recommended. The recipes that looked easiest to try were made with ingredients I did not have, which meant more shopping.
After hours of effort and a few Amazon deliveries later, I cooked my first dish from the book. It was so hard that I never attempted it again. I tried making a few more of the easier ones, but they never seemed to come out right or taste good. That much work for this little pay-off was demoralizing. So I quit.
When the pandemic started, I decided to revisit cooking. This time, I took a different approach. I reached out to friends who were cooking regularly to get their advice on the easiest way to start. They added me to group chats where others were on the same journey and helping each other. From there came recommendations of YouTube channels of people (who had expertise in cooking, not business efficiency) making food in an easy to follow way.
Instead of trying to deconstruct the skill of cooking, I was forced to take a much more practical approach. What kinds of things did I want to make, and who could teach it the best? So the cooking started with immersion. Figure out a way to cook a complete meal for one evening. See what went well and what did not, and then adjust. While cooking, questions come up - reach out to people for answers. Find tutorials explaining the parts that were confusing. Then try again.
After over 6 months of doing this, alhamdulillah, I can chart tangible progress. I still have not mastered some of the skills the Four Hour Chef may have emphasized, but functionally, I can successfully make different types of meals.
Clearly, this does not make me some type of culinary genius. There is still a lot of room to grow and improve, and I am nowhere near world-class. However, one approach helped me to learn cooking, and one did not.
Here’s the problem with the one that did not.
A life-hack approach to learning sets false expectations that mastery is easy to achieve.
It’s the intellectual version of a magical weight loss pill. The internet exposes us to unprecedented amounts of information. We consume that information in bite-size nuggets like tweets and fleets and snaps and stories and TikTok’s. This gives off the false illusion that learning the content is as easy as consuming the content.
And it is that false illusion that has plagued the dissemination of Islamic knowledge online.
What does a world-class chef look like? To start, they have traditional (formal) training, or they have spent years or decades working in the kitchen of another world-class chef. It is after years and years of practice, feedback, guidance, and learning that they attain mastery.
Despite this, we have people who are able to dupe the public with best-selling books convincing them that they can attain that same level of mastery by learning some hack that teaches them to deconstruct a skill and apply the 80/20 rule to it to learn it.
The sacred pursuit of Islamic knowledge cannot be hacked in this fashion. Memorization of Qur’an, the mastery of the Arabic language, and the understanding of the body of Islamic jurisprudence cannot be attained through shortcuts.
There is a reason the traditional modes of learning have successfully existed for hundreds of years. They work. They produce people who are world-class in these subjects.
The problem we run into now is the misconception that learning all these subjects should be easy. There must be a way to hack memorizing Qur’an, so we seek out all different types of apps. We want to seek out ways to apply the 80/20 principle to Arabic in an effort to shortcut the learning process, only to spend years learning Arabic without the ability to actually read and comprehend a classical Arabic text. We see a 60-second video online on a complicated subject like Islamic finance and assume the complexity of the topic should not require more than 60 seconds of thought.
When in-depth classes are offered, people repeat the same objections like a broken record. We have short attention spans, you need to cater to it. A 20-minute video is too long, it needs to be less than 5 minutes. No one reads books anymore, write short articles.
For some reason, we have heard these statements so many times that we accept them at face value.
In this (longer than it needs to be) article, I want to challenge those assumptions.
Instead of dumbing down content to fit people’s short attention span, we should refocus our efforts. Those in the position of teaching must ensure that they are producing quality content. If the content is bad, even 2 seconds is too long. If the content is good, then people will watch for an hour.
On the other side of it, the general community needs to be challenged. Why are you accepting your short attention span as some type of insurmountable obstacle? People need to find ways to put in the work needed to learn if they really want to attain any level of mastery.
We expect people like the physicians who operate on us, or the engineers who design the bridges we drive on, to have deep mastery of their respective subjects. We would never accept someone “hacking” their way into learning ophthalmology by watching 60 second TikTok’s of eye doctors.
And yet, we find people online pressuring Islamic scholars into doing exactly that - make 60-second videos so we can learn from you.
Just because that method has become popular does not mean it is effective.
A one-minute Islamic video may be great as a reminder on a general spiritual topic, but not a learning tool. The fact that this differentiation is lost is a sign of a learning approach shaped by fleeting consumer interests more than an expert-driven approach with specific outcomes in mind.
Effective learning is messy. It requires a lot of time, effort, and sacrifice. It requires the room to make mistakes and having access to people that will help you fix those mistakes and guide you along the journey.
Meta-learning gives the false impression of a finish line. If you apply the techniques just right, you will eventually reach the finish line of accomplishment. This might be true of something inconsequential, like learning how to pour latte art in your daily coffee. For more serious subjects, the mindset of a student of life is required.
And this is perhaps the most important lesson of all. The life-hack, give me nuggets, I want to learn it quickly approach removes the element of humility from the equation. It makes the self feel that it can accomplish anything.
The character of those who truly learn and master something at a world-class level is to always be hungry to learn more and never be satisfied.
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