Dream Big. Bake Bread. Win Life.
The world is rolling forward at an infernal pace. Before you can blink, empires, trends, brands and technologies are born, they rise, they fall, and this whirlwind creates a horrible trap for young people. Our lives are one thousand times faster than ever before.
You made it overnight.
Yes, but that night came after fifteen years of hard work
Successful people look back at all the years spent perfecting their trade without anyone knowing they exist, earning bread crumbs and daydreaming about how their time would come. They talk about stubbornness, sacrifice, perseverance, not giving up, but all everyone else hears is how they woke up one morning, opened the door and got buried in success.
Overnight. That’s all people want to hear, nobody’s interested in the work put in before that night.
And then there’s Dream Big. It comes as a compensation for generations raised under the sign of “know your place in society, stop wanting things that are out of your league, that life isn’t meant for you”. Somehow Dream Big became not just the most important thing you have to do, but also the only thing you have to do.
Dream big and there you go, you’ll definitely have the life you want. You need nothing else, just be careful to dream as big as you can. What happens when these two ideas, on which teenagers are now building their entire imaginary future on, collide with the real world? When dreams don’t just happen overnight? When just dreaming big is a recipe for… well, nothing?
They lose their footing, they no longer understand what’s going on. How can they be the only losers who don’t make it? How can life be so unfair? The road from confusion to feeling that everything’s pointless is shorter than from confusion to success. It’s pretty damn close to depression, addiction and worse.
Why throw children out of the plane, making them think they’re birds? Think they’ll grow wings by the time they hit the ground?
We are very careful not to limit their dreams(which was an important part of the previous generations education) but we have no problem with life crushing their expectations as soon as they leave the nest. As long as we don’t do the crushing it’s ok, we’re perfect parents.
Becoming good enough, or executing an idea well enough to reach the top of the world isn’t something that happens at the snap of your fingers. Dream big, work, persevere. That’s how you make it. That’s how you win. That’s how you make your dreams come true. Just dreaming is worthless.
I’ll never tell my daughter how high she has to aim, or what towards, but I want her to know that the way there can be slippery, it can be hard, it can even seem impossible from time to time. But that’s how it was for every dreamer who made it.
I don’t want her to know this in an abstract way, like one of those pieces of advice she’ll understand only later in life. I want her to feel it like something that’s self-evident. Now, how could I teach her that?
Ladybug, wanna help daddy make bread?
Real bread?
Of course.
One second later, she was in the kitchen. That’s how the father-daughter bread-making adventure began. I let her make every possible mistake in the book, every single one, but I made sure to add a stop sign from the very beginning: if we do something wrong and we fail at any stage ofthe process, we don’t start again the same day.
First of all, we sift the flour.
Flour. Strainer. Kid. It isn’t a very productive combination, especially when you add novelty to it all. Half an hour later I asked her: Where’s the flour, ladybug?
She stared at me with huge eyes and white eyelashes. She was just sweaty enough to be sticky and collect flour on every inch of her skin, from her ears down to the knees coming out under her dress. She looked around and raised her hand to her chest in surprise.
Oh dear, daddy, it’s everywhere!
She managed to get flour all over the table, the floor, the three counter tops, the sink and her dad. I was covered in flour even in the crack of my a… err, ears. You can’t make bread without flour so we stopped. It was a terrible disappointment, especially since she’d already told mommy about the amazing bread she’d have for her.
It’s alright, cub, we’ll try again and maybe we’ll succeed next time.
Come on, daddy, please, let’s try again now…
I picked her up and took her to the mirror. Her tears of disappointment had dug two lines on her face, down to her chin, one on each cheek. The rest of her face was powdered in sadness and flour. She burst into laughter when she saw herself, too.
Tomorrow, Ioana, tomorrow we’ll march again.
It didn’t happen on the next day, either. We went through the sifting part just fine, but the yeast gave us real trouble.
This is yeast. It makes the dough fluffy, if we wake it up and feed it right.
Does it sleep in the fridge like that?
Yes, it rests when it’s cold and doesn’t do anything. We have to feed it warm water, sugar and a bit of flour to get it to work.
Her greatest joy is feeding things, nothing makes her happier. She feeds anything she possibly can: parents, guests, birds, animals, caterpillars, toys, flowers (milk for them, blooming needs vitamins).
The water’s too hot, we have to wait until it cools a little.
Nooo, daddy, it’s already crying because it’s so hungry!
You’ll hurt it…
She poured the boiling water over the yeast which, just like most living organisms, didn’t take it too well.
Gooood, it’s not hungry anymore. What now?
In ten minutes it should start bubbling, it’s a sign that the yeast started working and we can make the dough. You can play while we wait.
She didn’t leave the table for a second.
Daddy, has it been ten minutes yet?
Yes, more actually.
Then why isn’t it bubbling?
Bug, what happens when you don’t have the patience to wait for the soup to cool down, and taste it when it’s really hot?
She looked at the still water, at me, at the flour, at the ceiling…
Did the yeast get burned, daddy, because the water was too hot?
Yes, Ioana, we didn’t have the patience to let it cool down a little and we messed it up again. If it doesn’t bubble up, the dough won’t be good.
Another failure, another sad, sad baker. And that’s how, every two or three days, we kept trying to make bread. We made all sorts of mistakes, but never the same one twice. It made me surprisingly happy that Ioana never did the same thing wrong more than once. After we got past breaking eggs, after the tragedy of dough sticking to hands which hadn’t been oiled, after forgetting to add salt for taste, we finally had well-kneaded dough.
Victoryyyy, daddy, finally!!! In the oven!!!
Ioana, we have to cover it with a towel and let it grow a bit in a warm place, and only then do we put it in the oven. It has to proof and rise.
I could have been talking to the wall, when she heard we had to wait for two hours, she didn’t care how fluffy the bread would be. It had to be put into the oven right then.
Bug, you saw that whenever we were impatient things went badly…
Don’t worry, daddy, I will be good.
When I brought the thing out of the oven (you really couldn’t call it bread), she lost some of her optimism. When she saw me cutting it as if I were slicing a brick, she lost more of her optimism. After chewing on a piece for five minutes, she lost all of it.
Tomorrow?
Let’s rest a bit. We’ll try again Saturday, when we have guests for dinner.
It was the supreme test, a bread not just for us, but for our friends, too. She couldn’t wait to bake something as important as that and she kept asking me whether it was Saturday yet. Eventually, it was.
She greeted me with “We’re making bread today”, instead of “Good morning, daddy”.
It all went perfectly. I had to keep wiping smiles off my face so she wouldn’t think I was making fun of her work. Not only was she no longer impatient, but she berated me, too, when I seemed to not pay enough attention, or when I did things differently than I’d explained earlier on.
Did it proof enough, daddy?
When I took the towel off and she saw the dough rising up to the bowl's edges, she started jumping around. When we took the beautiful, brown bread out of the oven, she cried out so hard that martians heard it was done. When we sliced it, revealing the white and fluffy inside, she wanted to take pictures.
When we sat at the table and all of us tasted it at the same time and hummed in delight, she didn’t say another word. She felt so much pride and joy that she couldn’t speak, but her wet eyes and softly clapping hands told the whole story.
It took us twenty-six days and each one of them was worth it.
Did my daughter learn that doing things well in life requires patience, effort, care and perseverance? Heck no, she’s five, but I have many more years ahead to make her see what lies behind every fulfilled dream.
Dream big, bake bread, raise kid, kid win life.
More thoughts about raising my daughter and funny stories about how a little girl changes a lion of a man in my book ”Beginner Dad”
