The Bravo hit series Top Chef launched a new Masters spin-off last week.  With a nod to the original show, the world’s real top chefs compete in various challenges to advance in the series and ultimately win $100,000 for their favorite charity.  Being addicts of the original Top Chef show in all its train-wreck reality TV shtick, we tuned in.

It was interesting that this show had none of the manufactured drama of Top Chef which probably had to do with the players.  Unlike the original, this was not a field of relative unknowns, but some of the most well known culinary artists in the world.

Besides Hubert Keller’s Dorm Room Mac and Cheese, made partly in a dorm-room shower (ewww), what was most striking about this show was the humility of these chefs.  Having become tops in the restaurant industry, they still competed with vigor but were self-effacing and amiable.  They ran into similar challenges that the chefs in the original series do, but it washow they approached the challenge that was different.

Contrast that with the backbiting, posturing and puffery that is the regular Top Chef competition and an interesting comparison begins to emerge.  The great chefs don’t gloat, the greats just do. Sure, they have problems like all of us but they literally turn mush into masterpieces.

Maybe their ease is because they have nothing left to prove?  If anything, the greats have more to prove.  In cooking, you’re only as good as your last dish.  But once you know that you know–experience breeds confidence.

The same is true in marketing.  When choosing the right marketing firm, experience and confidence are helpful.  Ego is not.  Sometimes it’s a fine line, but frankly, I’ll take uncertainty over cockiness any day.  In a room full of people I question why one person in the room is talking louder than everyone else.  Maybe he or she is the top, best choice, but generally speaking, the loud people are shouting to drown something out.  The great ones don’t have to say a word.

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