Flour, water, yeast, and salt. I combined them in a mixing bowl with a spoon until there was no more dry flour left.
Just four ingredients, yet a nudge of difference in ratios of any of them can create a vastly different product.
I learned this the hard way when the second bread I baked out of our oven turned out looking a little… flat.
I thought back to the four core ingredients again. I remembered accidentally pouring 10 to 15 grams more water than the recipe called for. At the time I thought, eh, what’s the big difference in just 10 grams? Well apparently, it made a whole lot of difference. The dough didn’t rise as expected. So we ended up just getting a large flatbread as our result. Still tasty… just not what we expected.
So ever since, I pour the water more conservatively. I even caught myself mid-pour once and spooned out the water before mixing. Or I add more flour to balance it out.
The nice thing about baking bread is that the failure is diagnosable. And after the diagnosis, I can adjust for next time and likely get a better result. It’s a clean loop of not only trial and error, but steady improvement.
I received a layoff notice in 2023, and in 2026 I actually got laid off. Each time was at a different company. Both times they gave me the same reason. “Role elimination.” “Role is no longer needed.”
At the time it seemed like I was doing well with most stakeholders. In 2023, outside of my immediate team, it felt like the management never stabilized. In 2026, my manager (who wasn’t originally even the person I interviewed with) sent mixed signals. It was obvious to me he didn’t care about my work at all but still seemed to need me when it benefited him.
I could spend countless hours pondering why exactly this happened to me, what I did wrong, what I could’ve done differently. But the real answer is probably “something beyond my influence and pay grade.”
It’s probably politics, or people above not understanding the role. Probably budget as well. To this day, it’s still all guesswork.
I’m a perfectionist. I like learning from my mistakes. I like when there are clear data points to learn from. That’s the kind of hard work and diligence I can get on board with.
But these layoffs? “Positive” year-end reviews? Feedback on “what I can improve on”? I learned long ago these data points aren’t real, especially when optics are rewarded over results or execution.
Working in corporate felt like a perpetual unclosed loop. Without any real data points to reference, my brain kept returning to it.
A few months ago, my two pepper plants’ leaves started wilting and then dropping. I had recently changed their water, filled the reservoir a little too high, and added more nutrients than usual.
Over the course of several weeks, I gradually lowered the water level. The plants continued dropping leaves so I also diluted the nutrient solution in the reservoir. I moved the plants into more shade. After about a month of observation, adjustment, and nail-biting, one plant died but the other survived with just one small leaf remaining on its stem. Then a couple of weeks later, I saw small leaves sprouting in other areas, and now it’s growing peppers again. In total the recovery time took almost two to three months.
But those two to three months of trial and error felt more logical and coherent than my last five years of corporate work. I took action. The system (my pepper plant) responded with data. I adjusted, and over time it responded. Rinse and repeat.
It’s an oversimplification to distill this into “corporate is bad” and “homesteading is amazing!” I’ve been thinking about the difference between working inside systems where failure teaches you something versus systems where failure is noise.
In bread, hydroponics, and gardening, when something is wrong, I get tangible data even though these are complex, living systems. But in corporate, it’s like banging my head against the same wall in the same spot, expecting different results. Why would any sane person keep doing that?
I’d rather work in a system where I know why it failed.
All true. Getting laid off was probably the best thing that could have happened. Your world is so much more real now.