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Anthony Bourdain's Grandma Rule
And how to step out of "doing mode" during the holidays
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Anthony Bourdain's Grandma Rule
In 2011, Bourdain sat down with Australian food writer Jill Dupleix at the Sydney Writer's Festival. She asked him about the extreme foods he'd eaten while traveling.
Beating cobra hearts. Sheep testicles. A part of a warthog so unsavory he only accepted it to "take one for the team."
His explanation has become known as Bourdain's Grandma Rule.
"If I am at Grandma's house, I will eat what Grandma offers, and I will say 'Yes, Grandma, it's delicious.' And I will have seconds."
In his book Medium Raw, he describes the rule in a more familiar setting.
"You may not like Grandma's Thanksgiving turkey. It may be overcooked and dry, and her stuffing salty and studded with rubbery pellets of giblets you find unpalatable in the extreme. You may not even like turkey at all. But it is Grandma's turkey. And you are in Grandma's house. So shut up and eat it."
The Grandma Rule sounds like it's about food.
It's really about respect.
When someone offers you something they made, they're offering a piece of themselves. The appropriate response is gratitude, not critique.
Bourdain traveled the world eating things that would make most people gag. He did it with a smile because the food was never the point.
The relationship was.
Holidays and Rest
The holidays are one of the few culturally sanctioned pauses when you can step out of "doing mode" long enough to recalibrate what actually deserves your time and what doesn't.
These thinkers do not see rest as escape. They see it as strategy.
1. Oliver Burkeman: Rest resets your relationship with time itself
"The limit on your time is not a problem to solve. It is a reality to live with, and resisting it is the source of much of our anxiety."
Burnout comes from trying to outrun constraints that will never move. The holidays offer a rare pause where the world stops asking. You finally get to see which obligations are real, which are self-imposed, and which you can release entirely.
Rest gives you perspective to enter the new year with better priorities, not better intentions.
2. Dr. Claudia Hammond: Most people rest incorrectly
"Rest isn't simply the absence of activity. There are many kinds of rest — sensory, creative, emotional, mental — and most of us only practice one, which is why we rarely feel restored."
High achievers stop working but never stop managing. They never reach detached rest, where the mind releases responsibility for holding everything together. The holidays, used intentionally, can lower cognitive load to zero. Even briefly.
The rest that restores you isn't the break from work. It's the break from being the system that runs everything.
3. Cal Newport: Rest protects the quality of your attention
"To produce things that matter, you must cultivate your ability to focus for long periods. This ability is fragile. It must be protected and trained."
Long stretches in execution mode train your brain toward shallow thinking and constant context switching. The danger isn't fatigue. It's cognitive rewiring. Rest is the only pattern interrupt strong enough to reset your mind back toward depth.
Time off lets your mind recover its capacity for deep focus, the rarest skill in modern leadership.
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