In 1944, a thirty-one-year-old woman spent her days in a cramped OSS research lab, mixing and testing shark repellent for downed pilots in the Pacific. Seventeen years later she published Mastering the Art of French Cooking, and became America's first celebrity chef. This is often relayed as the story of a late bloomer, someone who found her true calling only after wandering through 'lost years' of little value.

This episode makes the case that those years were immensely valuable. The habits Julia Child built to test and perfect hundreds of recipes for eight years, one variable at a time, as well as the traits she exemplified in her meticulous records and refusal to take shortcuts were critical to her later success.

She had already spent a decade honing them in different ways. We walk through what her actual history of success looked ...