This week on Five Rules for the Good Life, I sit down with Josh Donald and Kelly Kozak, the duo behind Bernal Cutlery in San Francisco. For twenty years, they’ve built a world-class knife shop rooted in craftsmanship, curiosity, and community. What started with a few sharpening stones has evolved into a creative hub for makers, master craftsmen, and cooks alike. In our conversation, they share their Five Rules for Staying Teachable, which include staying humble, opening yourself to new ideas, and moving forward even when you think you’ve mastered your craft. It’s a reminder that no matter how far you’ve come, there’s always room to grow if you stay curious.

There’s something about hearing Josh and Kelly talk about staying open—after two decades in the game, that reminded me why I still love doing what I do. I’ve built shows, books, podcasts, and brands, but I’m still learning every day. I still want to get better. Still want to be pushed. Whether it’s cooking, writing, or parenting, I’m always searching for that edge, that feeling that there’s more out there to master if I lean in and stay teachable. Their story isn’t just inspiring, it’s grounding. A reminder that growth isn’t a milestone, it’s a mindset.

Photo by Molly DeCoudreaux

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Hello and welcome to Five Rules for the Good Life. I’m your host, Darin Bresnitz. Today, I sit down with two icons from the world of knife making, Josh Donald and Kelly Kozak, who are co-founders and co-owners of Bernal Cutlery, which is celebrating its 20th anniversary this year. They join me today to share their five rules for staying teachable. They talk about their continued practice of sharing knowledge, how they keep their original intent in their daily mindset, and that the only way to grow is to keep pushing yourself into uncomfortable territory. This is a great conversation for anyone who is interested in learning a skill, running a small business, or anyone who is looking for inspiration to keep learning new things every day. So let’s get into the rules.

Josh and Kelly, so great to see you two again. Congratulations, 20 years of vernal cutlery. Always a pleasure to sit down and chat with you too. Thanks for having us. Thank you so much for having us. You started the business two decades ago, sharpening knives, which is an artistic skill unto itself. When you got started, how did you learn those initial skills? What was your mindset back then?

There was making ends meet and there was having fun and they were kind of both interplaying with each other. Initially it was, hey we have 40 bucks let’s get this business going a little bit, bought a second stone to sharpen with. And then it was, hey it sucks only sharpening with two stones, let’s try and find a little machine that will work with this. And then it was, hey we’ve got 80 bucks that we could bring down to the flea market and see about buying some knives to resell.

I just remember it so much differently because he was really frustrated with that learning process. And I remember him staying up all night, sharpening a pair of pruners and a lot of, how are we going to ever make money at this? I remember you telling me to stop going to the flea market at one point too. You’re like, can you just skip it? Why don’t you go later in the morning? But it was like, no, man, you got to get there at 5am. You don’t find the good s**t if you get there at 10. Yeah. That frustration, especially early on, could keep you from going forward.

But you go from sharpening knives and refurbishing knives to getting the idea to make your own. What was that deciding factor to start making your own knives? What were some of your earlier mistakes that you had to push through? Oh. We’re still pushing through them. Yeah. The thing with pushing and with doing new stuff is that you have to get really comfortable with doing things badly. Especially if you’ve gotten used to doing something well. If you’re doing new stuff, if you’re trying to push it, you will find yourself doing something you don’t know how to do. None of this is anything that we’ve done 100% by ourselves either. Whether that’s having people on our crew that we’ve done this with, whether that’s reaching out to outside help in one way or another. Being stubborn and not being too stubborn, it’s a funny formula.

What I love about how much you guys have done is that you continue to teach and give back to those who want to learn. Why is it so important to you to pass along what you’ve learned and to teach the next generation of knife makers? For me, I have a real general mantra is that I can’t keep what I have unless I give it away. There’s this sense of generosity, kind of all the senses of the word generosity, right? Generosity with allowing people to change and grow. Generosity with maybe not knowing a full story or a full aspect of a process. Or generosity with, I see that you’re a budding line cook. Let me try to hook up a nice deal with these three things for you so that you can get started at your job. All the senses of generosity.

I really enjoy teaching because I didn’t have anybody to teach me when I was learning how to sharpen. And there were certain things that took me a really long time to figure out that I’m able to share with people in my classes that makes me happy to be like, hey, just so you know, if you do this, you’re going to skip over two years of trial and error. Right. And then there’s just the sharing of knowledge with our customers about just dorky stuff if they’re interested. Then I think then people can kind of get another sense of appreciation for old stuff and they’ll be excited to see what I found. Or they might think that you’re being too generous. Usually I can tell when they’re trying to inch away.

For those who haven’t been lucky enough to be in the store or learn directly from you, I’m really excited for you to share your five rules for staying teachable, which can be applied to either knife making, knife sharpening, or just life in general. You have picked such an elevated craft. Your first rule gives you this mental approach to let you really have fun with it. What’s your rule number one? Rule number one is don’t take yourself too damn seriously. And it’s actually rule number 62 in the recovery community. It’s a very well-known rule. Having the option to be wrong is always really important with learning. You kind of stop learning if you stop questioning things a bit.

Outside of the main categories of what we do here, we also run a store. Yes. We are a small business. Of course. This rule is really important to me just in the context of working in a community with people and trying to do our best work, to be our best selves when we show up at the door. And what this rule means for me is to like, don’t forget the joy. Don’t forget these are the things that really matter: creating a great place to work, creating good products that we’re putting out there in the world, good experiences, and that we’re able to maintain good relationships with each other.

As you have grown and you have the store, you have a reputation, you’ve become a leader in the industry, it’s sometimes easy to forget where it all started. But remembering your origins is a guiding principle of your rule number two. That’s right. Shorthand in Japanese is Shoshin, beginner’s mind. Remembering what it was like to learn the stuff in the first place, bringing yourself back to your original intention, remembering the learning process and that you are still part of it. And then also folding in the perspective of having succeeded at something when I’m trying something that is potentially not going to be easy and that I will have missteps. It allows me to be a little bit kinder to myself if I don’t get it 100% right the first time or the second. Even if it seems like, oh, 20 years is a long time, it’s like, nah, 20 years really isn’t. A lot of these things people have been working on for hundreds and hundreds of years, and it’s all an ongoing process, right?

Being in any profession for 20 years, someone might immediately write off people just getting started or those younger than them as not knowing anything and not listening to them. But I’ve always felt that fresh perspectives keep you learning and keep pushing your own ideas forward, which ties directly into rule number three. Learning from young people and people who are beginners when you are not is f*****g bomb. I wrote that rule and I wrote it thinking about the teenagers that I’m currently living with. But specifically to our industry, sometimes we have people that come through and do a stage with us and then they go off and open up their own operation. You’ll see them get something or get good at something and then it’s contagious. The joy and the confidence boost that they get is contagious.

Being able to appreciate what people are good at and not feel threatened by it is really important to you as a business person, as a craftsperson. Being able to be stoked by people getting something right and seeing somebody do well brings to mind that we each have different things that we’re good at. Maybe if I don’t hate somebody that’s doing that kind of work, I can watch them work and learn something from them. That openness to learning, having that flexibility is a great way to keep moving your own skills forward, which is a big part of your rule number four, which also does dovetail with rule number three.

What’s your fourth rule? Teach to be teachable. For me, when I’m teaching people how to sharpen, I have to put myself in their shoes and I have to think about what would it sound like for them to hear what I’m saying? So how do I better say what I want them to do? It helps me to stay in that mind frame of somebody learning. That resonates with me with teaching people how to sell at the counter. Whenever we hire somebody, inevitably, we get this almost deer in the headlight where I have to remind people, you’re never going to get to be at a place of being the expert behind the counter. And we don’t really want necessarily experts behind the counter. We just want you to be an expert of your own self and your own experience. And that’s a good place to start to learn.

And then when you start from that place behind the counter, you’re going to pick and choose things that you do actually know about, whether it’s the recipe in the cookbook, in the book section, or a knife that you own at home. And you’re going to be able to build off of that. And then you’re going to be excited to learn rather than intimidated and afraid of saying the wrong thing.

Given how much you two are doing as knife makers, small business owners, knife sharpeners, teaching everyone. Don’t forget parents. And parents. You stepped on it. And the most important thing being parents. Yeah. That explains the teenagers that we live with better. Your time is extremely limited and it would be so easy for you just to stay in the lane that you know works, that brings in money, that keeps the business afloat, that keeps you attentive to your teenage children.

But your fifth and final rule preaches the benefits of trying something out of your comfort zone. What is your rule number five? Experiment and do things that you are not good at. The business has always been in a certain kind of expansion mode. It never reached a certain place where we’re like, hey, this is great. Let’s just kind of hit cruise control and we’ll do this like this. Mostly it’s by necessity because having a small business... In San Francisco, probably in a lot of places in the country, the broad majority of small business owners probably share our experience, which is that you’re riding a shark that needs to keep swimming to be able to get oxygen and it needs to keep being fed. It’s something that you can’t just sit still with.

We definitely hit a place a while back where we realized if we just coast from here, then we will topple under the weight of itself. We did get to this place where we also felt like we were mid-career and like had a whole lot to say. We had so much to say about what we had learned, our experiences, and then we had so much more that we wanted to do.

It also has grown out of this genuine sense of enthusiasm, not just from us, but our crew too. So like people are finding things that we want to carry and then we’re researching it and then we’re doing all the testing and the tasting and all of that stuff. We’re prototyping different things. I think that all our prototypes come out pretty good, but as to whether they’re economical to make, that’s the other part that we have to fit into it. Now we’re just finding ourselves fundraising to stand up a manufacturing operation that actually can do a large amount of stuff. And we could actually have a volume of things.

We’re not looking to do very one of a kind bespoke kind of knife making. We’re looking at doing the kind of production knife making that integrates skilled handwork and industrial process. And that’s been the backbone of the major knife making centers of the world. That’s what we’re kind of trying to bring back here in San Francisco. And we’re wanting to do that in conversation with all of the folks that we’ve been building relationships with in Germany and France and Japan and here in the States. Yeah, it’s exciting, but it is doing something new. It is really exciting and it’s so incredible that you continue to push yourself 20 years after you’ve sharpened your first knife.

If people want to come to the store or to see what you’re working on, or I will presume get on a waiting list to get their own knives, where can they go? BernalCutlery.com. We have a couple shops in San Francisco. We have one at the Ferry Building and we have one in the Mission District. We’re one of the few owner operators here on the Valencia Corridor. No waiting list necessary if you just want to come in and say hi. Just come say hi. Hopefully I can come and say hi in person very soon. We would love that. Josh and Kelly, thank you again for the time. So great to see you. It’s great talking with you. And it was a fabulous exercise to have to make five rules.

At first, I wasn’t quite sure. I was like, we’re either going to come up with three or we’re going to come up with 20. I like this exercise a lot. Thank you so much for a great conversation.

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