well it’s good to be with you on a
Saturday in my Saturday clothes see
monday to friday i we have two pits to
click that’s the runway but either
friday i’m a business consultant and I
where the consulting uniform you know
button-down shirt nice pair of pants the
occasional sport coat but everything
changes on Saturdays when my family and
I rent a commercial kitchen and crank
out about 100 loaves of bread for a
growing number of customers in our town
our customers pre-order their bread
online and pick it up on Saturday
afternoons in a gourmet shop in town
that kind of makes our business model a
mash-up of your local farmers market CSA
where you pick up whatever is fresh from
the farmer’s field each week and Dell
computers where you can you know
pre-order and pre-configure a computer
online in our business I go better
handle the bread dude my wife Gretchen
she’s the boss obvious reasons our
customers we call them bread fans and
those loaves of bread their bundles of
joy now nobody gets rich making
handcrafted bread in suburban America
that business model is just flat-out
busted you’ll never have to worry about
seeing me on a stage with Bill Gates and
Warren Buffett trying to figure out how
I’m gonna give away my billions that’s
never gonna happen but I love bread
don’t ask me why you like yoga or
football or golf I like bread and
there’s no one in our town no bakery in
our town who makes the kind of
handcrafted bread that exposes
supermarket bread for the plastic wraps
lie that it is
so about five years ago I started
thinking we got to do this bread thing
both thinking that love bread and
because I want to try an entrepreneurial
venture that was both for-profit and for
the common good so after wiping up a
website on a weekend we launched our
doughy adventure and we’ve met hundreds
of people in our community that we would
never have met without a bread
connection we also get to participate in
weekly moments of joy that we just love
like when you shaped bread there is
nothing like a big beautiful hunk of
dough and the end the kind of
choreography of a crew turning 120
pounds of dough into a hundred pounds of
deliciousness we love shaping bread and
then what happens next see we our
customers pre-ordered their bread so we
know before any ingredients hit the bowl
about how many lows we have to make each
week but it’s hard to make exactly a
hundred and two loaves of bread so we
usually throw a couple extra in the bowl
when we’re done baking we know exactly
how many extra we have that’s when we
put a message on our Facebook and
Twitter feeds inviting bread fans to
text my phone if they want to pick up an
extra and then we wait and then this
happens within minutes usually we sell
out but my favorite weekly moment of joy
is when our bread fans come and pick up
their bread in the gourmet shop they
amble back through the store and we
chitchat and they taste the samples of
the day’s bread and then I give them a
fresh loaf of bread and a paper bag
peeking out through with little plastic
window it’s still warm usually and many
bread fans do something instinctive they
create a little bread it’s why we call
them bundles of joy you see we’ve
discovered something which is that while
we started this whole thing for the joy
of bread our joy has been multiplied by
bringing joy to others and that recipe
is intoxicating now I’ve always dreamed
about scaling up noonday bread in my
mind’s eye I can see hundreds of
read fans up and down the commuter train
line in Chicago picking up their bread
at kiosks bringing bundles of joy home I
imagine employing hard working people
who need a leg up and helping them with
opportunities for ownership and nobility
and the work I imagine going to schools
and working with students from the age
of 10 through high school helping them
see how everything you learned in school
math science social studies art
everything is useful when you want to
start an entrepreneurial business I
imagine from our profits funding micro
loans for food entrepreneurs in the
developing world so they can lift their
families from poverty in my mind’s eye I
can see the headlines in the business
sections of the Chicago papers
describing us as the toms shoes of bread
back when Tom shoots were super cool and
we would be masters of the altruistic
world five years later though by Monday
fire life I’m still not baking bread and
my wife Gretchen she’s not running she’s
not running a preparation she’s a
marriage therapist if we loved red so
much why don’t we do it full-time the
answer that turns out lies in the math
although maybe not the way you think see
growing up I always thought I I knew
because that was kind of taught
subliminally what it takes to be happy
kind of a recipe or if you’re a fancy
shmancy baker a formula that tells you
how things should work it starts when
you’re in high school and you pull down
great grades maybe add a few extra
curricular activities to round out your
resume and then you apply to the best
school you can and you go to that school
hopefully a school with a badger as a
mascot and you in create yourself to
some professors they write great
recommendations to grad school or to a
hot company where you go start your
career and you climb and you climb and
you climb them pretty soon pretty soon
you can move out of that apartment to
the starter house to the mid-size house
to the house where your taxes are more
than your parents would ever have
thought about paying
mortgage and if you’re really lucky
you’re in the c-suite you’ve hit the top
you’re a partner in a firm you’re a
tenured professor to prestigious
university you’ve arrived this is the
formula I think I was taught and
summarized it looks something like this
success plus being a decent person is
happiness in my consulting work i
actually have spent the last 25 years a
lot of time in these rooms the c-suite
and i’ve been struck i mean i actually
thought that decent people at the top
especially decent people from happy
places like Wisconsin or Minnesota would
not just be happy they’d be deliriously
happy I thought the c-suite would be
exploding with contentment and joy as it
turns out not so much I’ve been struck
over 25 years by how many of my clients
are not just unhappy they’re profoundly
unhappy and you kind of think to
yourself how can that be when you get to
that spot you know you’re smart you’re
successful you should be happy but in
reality for many of them the misery has
just begun and they look around they go
huh yeah I’m smart and my colleagues are
smart but even the smart ones maybe
especially the smart ones are not just
unhappy but they’re scared and fear
makes smart people stupid and worse yet
fear makes decent people mean so you
think well what could possibly make
somebody who ascends to a very high
altitude be at all nervous maybe that
you know what this means this means we
have to think differently about what it
is to be happy at work we have to
reexamine the math
I was lucky I grew up in the shadow of
somebody who knew older and deeper math
my dad taught me a different way of
looking at things he got the math right
my dad’s story is actually an American
Dream story he was born into abject
poverty the youngest of 10 children in
the 1930s he’s in a snappy set of
clothes here but I just need to tell you
that I know for a fact he figured out at
the age of six that his family was too
poor to buy him clothes and he probably
bought this set of clothes and every set
of clothes the rest of his life he went
on to become a doctor and could have
done many visible things with his
medical career but instead he decided to
serve the unseen and marginalized so he
started clinics for rural African
Americans in the segregated south in the
1950s he ran medical facilities for the
mentally handicapped in New York and
toward the end of his career he started
a teaching practice for young doctors
who were trying to learn to work with
the elderly and other unseen population
in our world in nursing homes none of
these populations were sexy or wealthy
or powerful which is exactly why my dad
wanted to serve him he knew there was a
different way of getting the good life
he got the math right he never exactly
said it this way but this is the
equation I think my dad lived by being
who you’re created to be plus
contentment equals success now notice to
make that math work we flipped a few
things around from the one that I
learned as a kid we’ve said that instead
of success being a necessary ingredient
for a happy good life it’s something
that’s much more organic and comes from
something that’s true to who we are who
were created to be and I don’t know
about you you may be may have been
created to be the next Lady Gaga or the
next Mark Zuckerberg of Barack Obama I
kind of doubt it I wasn’t
but whoever you’re created to be the
third part of this equation is you’re
going to have to work super hard to be
contented because our world has made
discontent a virtue most of us spend our
lives even when we have a super good
which most of us in this room really do
looking over our shoulders and thinking
could it be even better not my dad my
dad knew that the key to contentment was
living who he was who he was created to
be and I was probably taught that and
subliminally picked that up as a kid but
it’s easy for me to forget and I needed
to be reminded of things easily lost
things easily forgotten maybe you do too
which makes me I want to ask you are you
getting the math right now this brings
you back to bread if you know me well
enough you’ll find out that everything
bings ring comes back to bread if you
hang around long enough about a year ago
Gretchen and I thought maybe we should
think about scaling this thing up let’s
go big with the bread thing so we ran
the numbers the way you should run the
numbers and of course there was a usual
panic of ovens and mixers and staff and
how much money that costs but there were
some uncomfortable truths that we had to
face that went beyond just financial
numbers they went to deeper math you see
we have two sons 19 and 15 which means
that our tuition in our family unit our
tuition life is going to look something
like this over the next seven years just
say it’s going to be ugly what’s the
final number who the heck knows but it’s
going to be ugly and we realized that
yes we could quit our bread venture and
pour ourselves full-time into mean quit
our normal jobs and pull ourselves
full-time into the bread venture and
tell our kids work it out but we were
parents long before we were in the bread
and we want to help launch our kids so
we realized one of us at least was going
to have to stay doing our normal
rear to help fund tuition level income
now here’s some simple math as important
and meaningful as Gretchen’s therapy
work is it takes a lot of unhappy
couples at $125 an hour to fund tuition
level income whereas in my consulting
work I can do that with a reasonable
amount of effort in time so we started
thinking to make this happen we’re going
to have to redirect most if not all of
Gretchen’s time from therapy into
running a retail bread operation now she
likes bread but I’m not sure it’s her
life calling so we had one of those
moments of irony where we thought this
venture that originally was all about
helping us get the math right could go
horribly wrong in the attempt to make
our business successful through some
arbitrary financial measure and more the
point to feed my ego we might nudge
Gretchen away from the work that she’s
called to do that she was created dude
towards something she she couldn’t do
but she wasn’t created to be once we saw
that and we knew the math the decision
was simple we would keep our bread
operation our quirky little venture as a
weekend only business with modest
profits and plenty of joy now I say it
was simple don’t think for a second it
with easy equation one dreams drop die
hard especially when they’re built on
lies that we sometimes accept this truth
let me give you a couple one of my
favorites is do what you love and the
money will follow wish if it were true
would mean I could make a full time
living eating pizza and watching soccer
which if any of you want to offer me the
job I’m in right now second lie that I
love is that work shouldn’t just be work
or a career it should be here every
thing like some kind of soul me like
work is your lover in a romance novel
about work sometimes work is just work
well when I alluded to earlier which is
that contentment is for losers that
somehow if you’re contented you’re a
slacker you just don’t have the guts to
do something big don’t get me wrong
there are plenty of things that we
should be discontented about in our
world but whether or not I get the
corner office or I have the most
followers on Twitter shouldn’t be one of
them so maybe maybe you’re facing a
turning point right now and I just want
to ask you a question as you think about
the turning point you might be facing
are you really looking at what you’re
created to be or as you make your
decision about that turning point are
you chasing some arbitrary level of
success are you making a decision based
on where you can contribute from your
best of the world or is it really that
you’re just not very happy with your
current circumstances or maybe you’re
just cruising along in everyday life
that’s a great time to Liddy Quay shun
to an equation to person holds her life
very carefully she knows she knows that
even if her impact isn’t very visible
that like yeast in a batch of dough that
transforms it from a sticky messy goo
into a beautiful creation that crazed
benefit for everyone and everything
around it her life can be that way too
she knows in the words of a wise author
how to put her good where it will do the
most good so treating the lies that you
have to get more be more be more visible
to have a good life abandon your envy of
your so-called friend and their recent
award or their upcoming trip to the
Caribbean trade all that in for the
truth that wealth and fame and power are
nice but are not ultimately what defines
a good life do it now especially if
you’re not facing a crossroads because
when that happens how well you’ve
learned the math how deeply it’s in your
person will make up a difference and in
the end it’s all about getting the math
right thank you [Applause]