Although apparently, it dates from the 1950s, growing up I never heard the term “side hustle.”
My mom, though, had several side hustles, my favorite of which was her decorating wedding cakes.
(Thinking back, this is no doubt because extra batter and frosting yielded a bounty of cupcakes for us kids.)
There was, however, always a lot of drama around the cakes.
(Martha Stewart actually has an article giving eight reasons why you shouldn’t bake your own wedding cake HERE.)
Part of it is the scale––it’s vastly different than baking a birthday cake that serves 10-12 people.
More than that, the pre-delivery storage is challenging and, quite frankly, it’s easier to transport a guided missile safely than a delicately-frosted tiered wedding cake in a station wagon.
Besides some cash, however, this side hustle was an outlet for my mother’s vast creativity.
(And again…the spare cupcakes!)
What I want to share today though is a simple observation that’s helped me and many of my coaching clients over the years.
Namely, that when you’re baking a cake, it only starts to look and feel like a cake during the very part of the process.
Whether we’re bakers or not, we all know the basics of cake-making.
Imagine, however, if you were explaining cake baking to an alien.
(And given 2020’s events to date, obviously, that’s what we have to look forward to next…)
Anyway, just think about how nonsensical it would all seem.
When you line up all your ingredients together, somehow a cup of flour, eggs, milk, and sugar just don’t seem like they would add up to much of anything.
When you start combining them, it gets even worse.
All you’ve got is a gooey liquid.
It’s not much better when you heat the mixture either.
You have to wait patiently, aware if you open the oven too early, you’ll cause the whole thing to collapse in on itself.
For most of the process, you’re either dealing with a weird clumping of uncombined ingredients…or a gooey mess…or tempted to examine it prematurely and cause its collapse.
It’s really in maybe only the last 10% of the entire process that things start to come together.
Only then does what you’ve created look anything like what you’ve been aiming for.
And yet, since we know this process, we trust it.
(In my experience, very few people freak out about the uncertainties of baking.)
Yet when it comes to new, uncharted territories in our lives, however, I’ve found out that most of us (especially me) are not so great at this kind of trust.
That’s why I’ve found this analogy extremely helpful whenever I’m in the midst of a project that seems completely scattered and entirely unlike the vision I had when I began it.
I remind myself that, almost always, it’s only in the last few moments that it all comes together.
And right now, beyond whatever creative projects you’re in the midst of, this is my hope for our world as a whole since:
• Everything is disorganized and fractured.
• The middle part is very messy.
• Patience is required.
And yet, with creativity, luck, and a little faith, something fresh, maybe even delicious, might eventually emerge.
Namaste for Now,
P.S. Maybe cakes are on my mind because my birthday is this week.
I’m feeling very blessed these days, but if you want to celebrate, consider one of the charities my team and I support HERE.
