In Malcolm Gladwell’s excellent 2005 book “Blink”, he interviews two food tasters who have just excellent and perceptive pallets.
During the interview, it’s sort of a minor piece of the interview, but they talk about something called “rework”, which is when prior ingredients or ingredients from another product are included in the making of a new batch of something.
Their example was cookies that they had the night before where they could tell what was reworked into the dough.
Although it’s considered bad in the food taster’s opinion, I started to think about how we are all in life like reworked cookies, in the sense that we have prior experiences and other things that have happened to us throughout life that become part of who we are, and if we use those intelligently, it actually makes us better people.
So although “rework” is bad in the baking of cookies, I think in human beings “rework” makes us smart cookies, indeed.