Why I Started a Doughnut Shop
In 2014, I started a doughnut shop. If you had told me 20 years ago that I would leave a good corporate job to make and sell doughnuts, I would have thought you were crazy.
But it wasn’t a fever dream that compelled me to leave my job and jump into entrepreneurship. Harold's Doughnuts became a reality because I wanted to pour myself into work that I loved.
So, why doughnuts?
Why not macaroons?
Or something more in line with my skill set, like a branding or creative agency?
There were two practical reasons:
I made doughnuts at home from time to time using a family recipe. I wasn’t particularly good at it, but I liked making something that people seemed to enjoy.
Columbia, Missouri (my hometown), was a doughnut desert at the time. Since my freshman year at Mizzou in 2001, you could only find doughnuts in grocery stores until I opened my shop.
But a deeper, intrinsic reason compelled me to step away from the 9-to-5 and dive into entrepreneurship.
It was that I could compress the feeling of wanting to do work that I loved and articulate it in three words:
Love Your Craft
I don’t remember exactly where I was when that phrase popped into my head, but I do remember how I felt. Love Your Craft captured my mixed feelings about a job I didn’t like. And it expressed my wish to create something of my own.
It also bridged the chasm between my personal drive and the product itself. My doughnut shop made everything from scratch. So, we established our identity as a craft doughnut shop.
Chef’s kiss.
It may sound wild, but once I could name what burned inside me, there was no turning back; I had to start a doughnut shop.
It wasn’t that I was certain people in Columbia would love our doughnuts.
But I was certain they would want to be part of the story we told through scratch doughnuts and warm hospitality.
Bestselling author Morgan Housel joined David Perell's How I Write podcast recently. He remarked that he thought of the title of his latest book—The Art of Spending Money—while walking on a treadmill.
He had no idea what he’d actually write in that book. But he knew that The Art of Spending of Money was the perfect compression of two subjects he’s passionate about (psychology and money).
The same was true for his first book, The Psychology of Money. He thought of that title while walking in New York City. It throttled his creativity so much that he had to write the book (it’s sold over 8 million copies to date).
The author Michael Lewis shared a similar thought when talking with Derek Thompson on the Plain English podcast. While writing about the 2008 financial crisis, Lewis thought of “The Big Short.” He immediately thought “The Big Short” was too good to be a magazine article. It had to be a book (and eventually became a movie).
What Love Your Craft, The Art of Spending Money, The Big Short, and countless other examples teach us is that there’s high signal in compression.
Taking the complex and distilling it into its purest form is high signal.
Telling a story in the fewest words possible is high signal.
I didn’t start a doughnut shop because I loved doughnuts (though they are delicious). I started a doughnut shop because I wanted to tell my story.
