Nicolas looked me right in the eye. He was covered in flour, wearing a faded t-shirt, and his eyes were tired, but the rest of him looked completely at ease, like someone who had already finished the hardest part of his day and was enjoying the
remainder.
Let me back up.
I had come that morning to visit a friend in Saint-Denis, just north of Paris. He walked through his front door holding a loaf of country sourdough he had picked up from the co-op down the street. I tore off a piece right there at the kitchen table. It was heavy, warm, and dark. The crust shattered perfectly. The crumb was custardy, and the flavor had that complex sour tang that takes days of fermentation to achieve.
I immediately wanted to meet the person who made it.
We walked down together, and that is where I found Nicolas.
“Your bread is incredible,” I told him.
“Thank you,” he said. “It takes three days to make.”
My entrepreneur brain turned on immediately. For twenty-five years, I have built companies. I look at a product and I see supply chains. I looked at this bread and saw a gold mine. If he standardized the flour mix, he could open five locations in Paris within a year.
“You could sell ten times this amount,” I said, my voice rising with excitement. “Have you thought about renting a larger space? You could put in a commercial deck oven and hire apprentices.”
Nicolas looked at me the way you look at someone who has completely missed the point.
“Why would I do that?” he asked.
“To grow,” I said. “To make more money. To reach more people.”
He wiped his hands on his apron and smiled.
“I bake once a week. I wake up at four in the morning and I am done by four in the afternoon. I sell to this one co-op, and I make enough to pay my rent, cover my ingredients, and buy good wine. The rest of the week I read, I write, I volunteer, I walk, I close my oven for two months in the summer to go hiking.”
Which brings us back to his question.
“Why would I trade my life for your spreadsheet?”
I felt my face get hot. I had been in his world for ten minutes and had already redesigned it to look like mine.
I still ask him now and then, the way entrepreneurs do, “What is your vision? What is your exit strategy?” He smiles and shrugs. He is good where he is. What matters to him is no extra pollution, no unnecessary footprint on his community, collaboration with his neighbors, and being good to himself. He is fully aligned with his values. I was the one out of alignment, projecting my definition of success onto someone who had already found his own.
I had looked at his small operation and seen something incomplete. He looked at it and saw
enough.
I apologized for the unsolicited advice and bought a second loaf.
In Loving Conflict, I write about the principle of Assuming Nothing. We usually apply it to arguments, to the stories we invent about why our partner is angry or what our colleague meant by that comment in the meeting.
But I think the most dangerous assumptions are the ones we make about values. We walk into someone else’s life, someone else’s marriage, someone else’s way of doing things, and we start rearranging the furniture without asking whether it was arranged that way on purpose. I was trying to cast Nicolas as the promising entrepreneur in my story of business success. I failed to notice he was already living his.
Nicolas had no need for my consulting. Standing there in his flour-dusted shoes, he seemed much richer than I felt in that moment. He knew exactly what he wanted, and he had it.
I walked back to my friend’s apartment carrying warm bread and a question I am still sitting
with: how often do I try to fix things that are already whole?
This story is included in my book Loving Conflict: Creating Collaboration Where Others See Division. If you want to follow along as it comes into the world, you can subscribe for updates at If you want to follow along as it comes into the world, you can subscribe for updates at link: annalecat.com/book.
