Things I Learned at the Bakery This Month: Notes From Entrepreneur Land

 

1. Garbage blows around, so contain it. The very best way to contain it is to keep a lid on it. This applies equally to garbage that resides in dumpsters as the detritus that resides in human minds.
2. Complaining about the heat, no matter how irrefutable, doesn’t improve one’s ability to bear it.  Better to just turn on some tunes or an e-book, keep a bottle of water handy at all times, and forget about it.
3. Everyone needs a quality vacation.  If you think you don’t chances are the people around you need a vacation from *you*.
4. Your success as a manager is apparent in how your employees act when you are around, your success as a leader is apparent in how they act when you’re not.
5. It’s often more expedient to be pleasant than right.
6. Optimism is fine but make decisions with clear-eyed facts.
7. “The customer is always right,” my dad liked to remind me. When I was a kid, I thought this sounded pretty unfair – I always felt sorry for the clerk at the other end of dad’s complaint.  Even if he wasn’t exactly yelling, the threat of yelling was there, like an odor, and everyone cringed away from it, me included.  I didn’t really understand how customers could act like dad and  be ‘right’ about anything, much less always be right.  But the business owner who treats every customer as though they are not only right, but valued for being so, is gong to have far more customers than the business owner who keeps score.  In fact you should go out of your way for customers as often as possible. It’s not enough to say you are passionate –  words are easy.  You have to actually be passionate. And active passion requires you to get your hands dirty. For me, this month, it has meant….
   • Getting ready to go for a run  and then instead jumping in the car to run down to the bakery to meet a customer who wants to have a tasting for an upcoming wedding but is only in town for the next two hours.
   • Getting a text from a customer who has pre-paid but won’t be able to pick up due to a sick husband, so after working farmer’s markets from 5a to 5p, driving to that customer’s house to deliver the order myself, along with a get well pack for hubby too.
8. Learn to control your stress or it will control you.  Even in the most difficult circumstances, you can choose to be happy. It’s a much better state of mind in which to find solutions to problems.
9. Music makes everything better.
10. It always takes twice as long and costs twice as much as you think it will.
11. One of the great benefits of being a vendor at a farmer’s market is the opportunity for barter.  June is the season of stone fruit, cherries and avocados and plums shine darkly from the stalls.  I remember our plum tree in the backyard at the old house. So many plums, we couldn’t keep up. We were plum full of plums but still didn’t like it when three raccoons came to feast on them at night. The raccoons were really fat, and sassy.  They knew, even then, that the best plums are stolen plums.
12. Our experience of fun is not unique to humans.  All animals have fun.  if you don’t know that you just aren’t in a place where you can look, and see.  On a recent trip to Norway my daughter accompanied our hostess to buy milk.  They bought milk not from the store but at the store, you might say – directly from the farmer who’d recently gotten it directly from the cows, and they’d been waiting for Sophia and Ingilvde to arrive to witness the annual rite of releasing the cows from the barn in which they’d weathered the famously long and dark and cold Norwegian winter.  The farmers  waited as a form of barter – because they get their herbs and blueberries from Ingvilde – but also, mainly, because they wanted to share the rare joy of the cows tasting springtime freedom.  The cows emerged nose first, sniffing then smelling the air deeply. Then they did something that can only be called dancing. The cows felt the springy ground beneath their hooves and the green spring air in their nostrils and they kicked up their heels and danced around.  Their joy and pleasure were  evident and unmistakable, just as it was unmistakable that experiencing it together, as a cow community/family, made the joy that much greater. In other Animals Experiencing Joy news, I have seen the following videos on the internet: a small wren inside an airport, flying to the start of the escalator, perching on the movable handrail and riding it til the end, then repeating the process. I have a seen a crane playing with a golf ball, bouncing it on the paved cart path to see how high it would go; I have watched a baby hippo running down the road with a baby goat, hilariously trying to imitate the springy little jumps. Joy is everywhere, when you look for it.
13. It’s never a good idea to start a sentence with “Like I said…”. It’s passive aggressive, whiny and defensive whether you mean it to be or not.   It says “You weren’t listening to me, I shouldn’t have to repeat myself.” When in fact, maybe  you should – maybe it’s your own darn fault you weren’t heard or understood the first time.  Like I said…don’t do it.
14. It can all – and will, at some point – change in an instant. Stroke, heart attack, the headache that turns out to be a brain tumor, the stomach ache that turns out to be cancer, the unseen pancreas diseased, ceasing to perform it’s unseen job.  Losing control of the car, an oncoming driver texting and losing control of their car, a hospital acquired super infection.  A sinkhole opens up beneath your house in the middle of the night. A black bear strolls onto the trail.  You could be living your last normal day right now, and not even know it.  If you did know it – would you keep doing what you’re doing? If the answer is yes, you have passion.  If the answer is no, maybe it’s time to go find your joy.