Discovery.
To give a bit of context, I used to work at a pizza place in San Luis Obispo, CA, called Flour House. It was started by a guy named Alberto; quickly joining him was another Italian legend Antionio. These two developed a dough that transformed their pizza joint into one of the best in the United States (Top 50 Pizza's 2022). Well, it turns out that Antonio (even though he developed the dough alongside Alberto) stayed stagnant within his role as a pizza chef, while Alberto made big money. Antonio realized this, and did something very admirable by leaving his role as the head pizza chef.
Mind you Antonio has two very young kids, meaning he had to make something else work, and quick. So, he decided to go back to his roots, and create focaccia like his grandmother used to make for him back in Italy.
This brings me to the point of my first rekindling with Antonio, I saw that he was making focaccia and wanted to support his business (Little did I know it would be the best bread I’ve ever had in my life). I noticed that he had a half strung together logo. I was at the beginning stage of discovering the world of graphic design so I asked him if I could make a logo for him. With the help of my grandmother, I put together a logo that I felt pretty happy with at the time.
We parted ways and I took off on my graphic design journey while he continued to bake his focaccia. Turns out, his focaccia was a market fit, which meant he needed some extra hands. He reached back out to me at the end of 2024, and I happily agreed to help him scale his focaccia business.
I’m the type of person that really likes to learn new skills, whether that be design, writing, baking/cooking, manufacturing, etc. I like to try it all just to give myself a baseline knowledge in a variety of subjects. So this opportunity in my mind, was the perfect time to learn about the restaurant industry, more specifically the baking industry.
To put it simply, baking is excruciatingly boring, it requires very little skill and thought (I think it drives both Antonio and I a bit mad at times). Which brings me back to my initial point of, “There’s something to be said about finding lessons in monotonous tasks”. The manufacturing industry is incredibly complicated and many consumers don’t realize how difficult it is to actually manufacture something.
For me baking is the baseline example of manufacturing. It requires making dough, folding dough, and baking dough. Pretty straightforward right? Well, there’s much more that goes into it, and that is the beauty of trying something new. I firmly believe that most people are way too comfortable with complacency. That’s why you have all these business gurus talking about how easy it is to outcompete the competition. What the gurus don’t talk about is the work that is required to actually create a meaningful business.
Let me try and break this down a bit. The reason I think most people work their traditional 9-5 is because it’s easy, the pay is right, there are benefits, and you can slip into complacency. I don’t know for sure, but I can imagine most meaningful work can get completed within five hours. Meaning you have a solid three hours of work that isn’t explicitly benefiting your productivity. What these gurus talk about is maximizing the output of your work efficiently, and that means focusing on tasks that are the highest priority. Let me tell you it’s extremely difficult to do this, and that is why they say you have to outcompete each other. Realistically, it’s hard to maximize output, that’s why we are developing AI as quickly as we can, because it can do that.
To bring back the point, what I think these gurus aren’t emphasizing, is discovering lessons in the minute tasks lead to optimization. What I mean by that is you have to be obsessed with learning, in the hopes it can create something beautiful. As much fun as it is to eat the bread, the process leading up to it is monotonous. I have two options when I get the “boring” train of thought, I could either agree that this work absolutely sucks and is a waste of my time, or I could find ways in which I could learn a lesson from the experience. I choose the later 10/10 times because the end result is the pursuit of something larger than myself, and that is discovery.
This La Teglia focaccia is a beautiful thing, and for every hour I feel like I’ve “wasted” I get to see first hand how it physically transforms the people around me. People CRAVE it.
There’s a larger point that I’m trying to make, and that is there are times when you may feel unhappy performing tasks at work. If these tasks supersede your ability to learn lessons, it may be time to look for something else to do. I’d highly recommend working for yourself, and find something that you can continue to learn from. The best businesses, friendships, relationships, societies, are the ones in which we can continue to learn from so we can eventually discover.
If you’re feeling conflicted about what to do with yourself, guess what, you’re not alone. I still do graphic design, I still work a 9-5, I have an amazing relationship, and adding this token into my repertoire has only made me more….. busy. That being said, the pursuit of knowledge is worth it, because I know these lessons will lead me to discovery.
Thanks for reading.
With love,
Kai
Weekly Poem:
When we succumb to our most basic emotions
We lack understanding
When we breach the membrane
Only then do we realize what we are here for
