📘 Free Time Excerpt: On Cake Baking 🎂

This is an excerpt from Free Time: Lose the Busywork, Love Your Business by Jenny Blake.

Photo by Deva Williamson on Unsplash

Chapter 5: Let It Be Easy, Let It Be Fun

“All our sweetest hours fly fastest.”
—Virgil

So many business owners start with The Statistic in mind. You know the one I’m talking about: that one, the one that offers some variation on the sobering perils of taking an entrepreneurial risk, that nine out of ten businesses fail within their first five years. Or that of one hundred start-ups, only twenty will remain after five years, and after fifteen years, only one will remain.

If the majority of small businesses are doomed to failure before they even start, The Statistic goads us to buckle down and get ready to work. Hard. Build sweat equity the grueling way, with your blood, sweat, and tears.

Before you affirm that all great accomplishments inevitably involve hard work, and that the qualities of grit and tenacity are what separate those who make it from those who don’t, consider that there are two types of challenging work: hard work and Hard Work.

Lowercase hard work is rewarding. It’s challenging, and it pushes us to the edge of our stretch zone, where we discover flow. Uppercase Hard Work is worn as a badge of suffering, one that mostly leads to burnout. There is a better way, and this better way begins with us.

How you build is as important as whatever you create. Easeful work means aligning with your natural talents and holding a positive attitude; it does not mean that the work itself is easy or without challenge, especially for others who do not share your particular gifts and interests.

To illustrate this, pretend you are traveling to see a friend, and they baked you a cake in celebration of your visit. Imagine a split-screen that shows two outcomes unfolding side-by-side.

Cake Baking: Scenario One

With sweat dripping down his brow, and batter splashed on his cheek and across his now-soiled favorite shirt, your friend dons an oven mitt and pulls a yummy-smelling cake out of the oven. Fatigue and frustration building in his voice, he hands you a fresh piece.

“Here,” he sighs with exhaustion. “I made this for you.”

No sooner have you taken a bite, he collapses onto the couch, complaining about how hard baking is, and how concerned he is about what you will think of his cooking skills, and how it tastes. He is desperate for praise.

How does this hypothetical cake taste? How do you feel eating it, knowing that your friend has completely exhausted himself attempting this “gift”? Perhaps you would feel equal parts grateful and guilty, and become a bit distracted by the consequences of this well-intended confectionary gesture on your friend’s mood. It is hard to enjoy the fruits of his labor, given that the process itself seemed so stressful.

Cake Baking: Scenario Two

Now imagine returning to your friend’s house for a second baking experiment, one year later.

As soon as you walk in, his favorite holiday music is playing even though it is only June. He’s dancing, singing, and having a blast! With delight in his eyes and glee in his voice, he pours you a glass of bubbly as you sit and converse. He is immersed in baking, yet exudes warmth and focus as you tell him what’s new with you. He’s listening deeply, and investing care into you as he tends to his latest creation. You can tell he’s improvising, sprinkling all manner of random pantry sweets into this one-of-a-kind cake, tasting joyfully along the way.

He doesn’t set an oven timer. As he relaxes with you in the living room, he’s leaning on his sense of smell to know when the cake is done. At last, when the kitchen smells irresistibly delicious, he gets up to turn the oven light on. Sure enough, the cake has risen perfectly in the middle, with a golden brown crust forming along the sides. Your friend pulls out the cake, sets it on the counter, and pours you a glass of almond milk, his curated beverage to match the taste and experience he’s creating for this particular cake.

“Here you go!” He says, eyes sparkling. “I made this for you!” It is clear that he can’t wait for you to try it, as he is staring with eager anticipation as you try your first bite. “So, how is it?!?”

“Incredible!” You respond, taking another bite. “What is that, a blueberry?” you ask of the secret ingredients that ended up creating a cake you have never tasted before. “Yep! And there’s coconut oil, almond butter, chocolate chips, and banana—and, wait for it—popcorn!”

How does this cake taste? Are you enjoying imagining eating it?

In the two scenarios above, which cake tastes better? Surely the second, and not just because of the ingredients—because it was made with care, joy, and creativity. Because you know that it was made with love, just for you, and that eating a slice not only energizes you, but your friend who made it as well.

The DNA of a business, relationship, creative project, or any living organism is set at the outset; how it starts, and how it develops. Those energetic fingerprints are embedded into every fiber of the final product. Two final products may look the same, but how they were created matters, even if imperceptible to the recipient. Perhaps not all recipients, or customers, or readers, or listeners will notice, but many will—even if they can’t quite put their finger on it.

I have been the cake baker in both of these scenarios, and not just in the kitchen. Who are we kidding? My cooking skills more often mirror scenario one. My husband, Michael, is the one who models inventive, joyful cooking with scenario two. As a synesthete, someone who perceives information through multiple senses, Michael cooks like he paints, “tasting” colors to create unique flavor combinations. He feeds our dog with the same reverence, producing each and every bowl as a product for his fictional restaurant, Ryder’s Plate. Lebanese culture celebrates food as love, as generosity, and as self-expression. I come from the land of food as function. I admire seeing others cook with in-the-moment abandon, as Michael learned from his mother, Aida, and from his grandmother Archalouis before that.

I have also been both cake bakers with my two previous books. As I mentioned in the introduction, my first book, Life After College, launched in 2011. As a first-time author moonlighting while working at Google, by the time I started my sabbatical and launched the book, I was already in desperate need of a break. I remember talking about how hard it all was. While that book did well, I was determined not to make it feel so heavy next time.

When Pivot launched five years later, I made a point to enjoy and be grateful for every part of the process. In my podcast and newsletter where I shared behind-the-scenes updates on my process, I made sure never to complain or call it hard. Writing a book, after all, is a privilege, as is launching it. Sure, it is complex, but I started to appreciate and embrace the creative problem solving involved. Nobody wants to attend a launch party—or read a book!—where the author seems haggard, overworked, and overwhelmed. Nor will that book have a “special sauce” quality if the author dragged themselves through writing it.

With this third book, Free Time, I had so much fun during the writing process that I was sad just before the final edits were turned in! Over a span of ten years, by repeatedly reminding myself of these cake-baking principles and putting them into practice, my relationship to book writing transformed. It evolved from a pressured, anxiety-ridden, inner-critic-fueled burden into an immersive creative playground that I didn’t want to leave.

Close The Loop: Indecision Is Your Decision

Don’t trade time for money, as the saying goes. Don’t trade time for open loops either. Open loops are like record skips; niggling glitches, thought-itches that aren’t scratched yet. They represent unresolved questions requiring an answer that lead to rumination when left unsolved.

Sometimes no amount of spinning will yield fruitful results; the indecision itself is a signal. It consumes energy that could be put to better use. Decision fatigue is real. We only have so many creative-thinking cycles each day.

At a major inflection point in my business, I spent six months trying to figure out how to move a private community off of a certain social media platform whose growth-at-all-costs practices grated against my values. At first, I thought it was a simple question of which new software to use.

Only after months of churning, indecision, and even taking a community design class, did I realize that my tech indecision—this open loop—was not actually about software. Software was only the surface-level issue. It reflected qualms about my time and next direction. I spent six months burning energy debating which tool to select, before realizing that the indecision was its own decision. The best course of action was downshifting the program to focus my energy on fewer projects, reducing the need for new software altogether. My indecision helped me see that I could not juggle everything I was responsible for in business and family, while also pouring energy into something new, at least without being mediocre at all of it. The new projects would be getting leftovers, fragments of frenzied attention. If I had not made that tough choice, this book would not exist. As I say in Pivot, “Decisions are data.” Sometimes indecisions are data too.

If something is too hard, take it as a signal to pause, regroup, and revise your approach. If the process of what you are doing, building, or creating is no longer fun, stop.

One of my mantras is “Let it be easy, let it be fun.” Every time I have paused a project to remind myself of this, I have come up with something even better. Those upgraded solutions are more innovative, creative, and authentic than the original direction beset by friction.

Remember: Don’t do us any favors! Nobody wants to eat a cake that you hated making.

✌️ Two-Sentence Summary: How you bake is as important as what you make. Enjoying the process imprints positive energetic fingerprints into the final product.

📝 Give Yourself Permission: Pause when a project feels hard; regroup to find an even more resonant approach.

💭 Ask Yourself: How can you transform or release what is burdensome in your business? For a problem area: What new, next approach would be easy and fun?

✅ Do (or Delegate) This Next: Identify the project that is draining you most. Do something delightful as a next step, no matter how tiny.