Dan Gilbert in his book, Stumbling on Happiness
So if humans are so terrible at predicting what will make them happy, how can one reliably look into the future? His solution is surrogacy. Find someone who is currently experiencing the future you imagine for yourself and ask that person how she is feeling.
Gilbert addresses the objection that leaps first to mind, “but they’re not me” with the news that we’re not so unique. Whatever you may feel about his contention, his research at Harvard does show that asking a random person having the experience you seek can better predict what it will feel like for you, better than your own imagination could.
So I took Gilbert’s advice to heart and decided to apply his surrogacy concept to a career idea I had been entertaining: becoming a pastry chef. It’s funny how when you focus on something suddenly that something seems to be everywhere. Turns out there are a number of pastry chefs in my social circle.
I called up one of my favorite, Mary. Growing up in Mary’s house, the rule was she could bake all she wanted but she had to clean up. These were rules she could follow, so she baked and learned she loved the process. Eventually, a catalytic event in her life: cancer, sent her back to this passion from a life as a doctor.
She started where common sense dictates – a bakery. She went into a bakery and filled out an application and because small bakeries are always looking for warm bodies (to hear her tell it) she was hired.
Eventually she went to New York and enrolled in the Culinary Institute of America. There she discovered that 80% of the students were right out of high school. She ended up switching to the French Culinary Institute and found the students more her speed: 80% of those students were career changers. She also tacked on an additional nine months to get a culinary management diploma. She’s an over-achiever.
One of the things she learned is that unless you’re in a high-end restaurant, the people you will encounter are likely not to be the Type A, star performers someone who works in Silicon Valley is used to. She said that management skills and work ethic are completely different from the white collar professional world.
She knows because after school she went on to intern at LeCirque, a renowned restaurant in New York, in pastry. There she said that when working you are flying. If you’re no fast, efficient and good, you’re gone. It was a sink or swim environment.
She explained that the kitchen is intense and fast moving because that’s one of the ways a restaurant can make a profit. The kitchens make trays and trays of food (volume) and they don’t make everything from scratch each day (timing). Understanding both is what allows restaurants to eke out very slim profit margins.
Something she realized herself when she left Le Cirque and started her own pastry catering business. She wanted to do high end pastry but that required technique and that means labor, a space to house the labor, etc. There were a million compromises she had to make to make the business work and she found that one of them was lifestyle. When you run a catering business or even work in a restaurant, you work weekends. Which also means it’s really hard to travel and take vacations. The cakes don’t bake themselves, so in pastry you are very much a part of the product.
Literally. Baking is also very physically demanding. She tried her culinary dream when she was in her 40s and now in her 50s she can’t believe how much her wrists hurt when she was working in pastry. She said there’s a lot of attrition with age.
She still loves baking. She finds it relaxing, it feeds her soul. But ultimately, she found the pastry business to be an uphill battle where the chances for a big success are slim. She wanted to go into something where she felt her ability to be successful in the end was more assured, so she went back to her medical career.
Her ultimate advice to me was to have the courage to follow a dream but realize it may not turn out as you planned.
For part II of this post click here.
