Failing with fire

A reflection on burnout, growth, and slowing down

I’m a pretty good cook. It’s true. It didn’t feel like that at my restaurant, though.

To be honest, it might have been a mistake to open a business. One could question if I was ready. I knew how to cook and how to lead. Understanding the nuances of business is an entirely different animal.

How do you price an item? Where do you find sources? Are they reputable? Who should handle accounting? What’s the opportunity cost of your time? Will I see a return on investing in a high-tier employee?

The list of questions you need to ask — and answer — is seemingly endless. If your business opens before you even know you have to ask those questions, you’ll be behind the eight ball for a very long time. Maybe until the business shutters its doors.

I was supposed to run the business myself, but the stars didn’t align. I needed to continue working a full-time job and put faith in employees. Consequently, I was putting in insane hours and struggling to find balance. The immediate outcome was a fried brain. I couldn’t think straight; the simplest questions left me stumped. In short, I failed.

A former employee once told me that the only thing he learned during his time with me was not to buy a knife on Etsy. That stung and stuck with me. He wasn’t wrong, but it took me a long time to realize that.

It’s not that I had nothing to teach. There was plenty he could have learned from me, but I wasn’t capable of teaching anyone at that point. I was in over my head. Making a simple aioli from memory was a struggle at that time.

I can’t imagine the impression I made on others. I don’t doubt that I sounded like an incompetent buffoon. To be candid, everything between 2008 and 2023 is a blur. Fifteen years of life amount to little more than a haze of fuzzy shapes and drowned words. Nothing came in, nothing went out.

I let down those who were eager to learn. They deserved better.

Something I have come to learn is that I have been having an increasingly difficult time under pressure. It is a constant with business ownership, and the cumulative effect of it will continue to eat away at me. My mind was filled with radio static, my eyes with glass.

There has to be a lesson to learn from this. What’s the upside? How am I a better person now? Am I even a better person?

It all played into the breakdown I had in 2022 and the lesser one I had this year. Those experiences were points of growth. But eventually, the tradeoff of time for experience stops tipping in your favor.

When enough time passes, you can’t keep up with the experiences. You hit a saturation point and slow down. That’s where I’m at now in life. But is that a good thing? It’s about how you adapt.

You have to learn how to work within yourself; that is the lesson. In my case, that meant slowing down.

Some medications make my hands shake. So, blowing through tasks like dicing onions, peeling potatoes, and slicing with a mandoline gets dicey fast (pun sort of intended). Something I could once whisk with by hand may need to get done in a stand mixer now.

The things I could once do in my twenties were tough to do 20 years later, and it continues to trend in that direction. Slowing down has vastly improved my quality of life. Rather than continue to fight it, acknowledging and accepting it has yielded incredibly positive results.

I just wish I had that recipe back when I could have been a better teacher.