Student Question
Master, please help me understand my baking journey and why my business ultimately failed.
Admitting failure is hard — but after careful reflection on what success truly means, I’ve come to accept it. My definition of success was never about how big the shop was or how much money I made. It was about how much joy baking brought me.
When I first discovered baking, I was nearly obsessed. There was so much to learn, and I sought out the best teachers I could find in China for every category. I even took up drawing specifically to improve my cake decoration.
In the beginning, practicing at home, my skills improved quickly. But I never wanted to open a retail shop — I knew it would demand enormous energy for operations, and I hated the idea of making the same products day after day, like a machine. I wanted every cake to be unique. So my dream was always to open a studio and do training.
Since I couldn’t attract students right away, I started by doing custom cake orders and selling small quantities while gradually recruiting students.
Slowly, baking education became an intensely competitive space — fierce online and offline. I invested heavily, hiring a bread teacher and later a French pastry teacher. Staff costs and rent pressure hit immediately. I tried every kind of promotion, but every channel required money — less money meant worse results. I also spent time on online teaching for a while, but honestly, unless your technique is extraordinary, it’s nearly impossible to stand out.
Student enrollment was sporadic — never enough to cover expenses, so product sales had to make up the difference. Maintaining operations drained my energy, leaving no time to improve my skills. A vicious cycle began.
What kept me going was a loyal group of dedicated fans who never stopped supporting me. I used quality ingredients and made refined products at slightly higher prices — but during the pandemic, everyone was struggling, and people gravitated toward cheap options even if they weren’t healthy. My original principle of only making wholesome products took a hit.
My health steadily deteriorated. From the moment I started baking, there were no holidays, no exercise, almost no entertainment, and nearly no spending on anything outside of baking. Baking gave me many friendships, trust, and recognition — but also cost me a great deal.
Now I’ve finally decided to step back, rest, and rethink the reasons for this failure. I’d like to ask Master to analyze why things went wrong.
Master Chi’s Response
1. The problem is often the answer.
There is usually only one reason we can’t find answers when we face a difficult situation: we don’t know what problem we’re actually trying to solve.
In your earliest phase, you were simply learning to bake. That process felt good.
So why did you decide to open a shop?
You mentioned one reason: you wanted to do training and recruit students.
But what problem were you actually trying to solve by offering training?
You said it was because you didn’t want to make the same cakes every day like a machine.
Here’s the thing — those two are not a cause-and-effect relationship.
Once you opened the studio, your operating costs were high: rent, staff, and more. But given your skill level, a physical location was never a requirement. Your training, after all, largely moved online anyway.
2. You searched for answers in marketing — but couldn’t find them because you never identified the right question.
Building marketing and building a brand doesn’t happen overnight. You spent significant money and tried many methods. But the underlying impulse was a desire for a secret formula — a shortcut. And that shortcut ended up costing you more.
So stop fixating on solving problems. Because your solutions tend to generate new ones.
At the start, you didn’t want to make and sell cakes like a machine every day. Your solution was to open a studio and recruit students for training. But that created a new problem: not enough time. You couldn’t dedicate more hours to developing your craft. And that generated yet another problem: costs too high. To keep the operation running, you had to constantly recruit, constantly market, constantly invest more.
Everything you did was driven by anxiety — not strategy.
3. Success comes from seizing opportunities, not from solving problems.
When you encounter a problem, your first instinct should not be “how do I solve this?” It should be “can I leave this unsolved? Can I go around it?”
Take everyday anxiety, for example. You might feel like you have ten problems. But five of them probably don’t actually exist — you invented them yourself. Three more exist, but don’t need to be solved. One needs solving but is beyond your power to fix — like trying to shortcut your way to marketing mastery in a short time. That leaves just one problem that is genuinely solvable.
Solve that one. That’s enough.
So how do you actually solve problems well? First: correct theory. For most things we encounter, those who came before us have already done considerable research. There are established frameworks for nearly every situation. Knowing which theory applies to which situation prevents you from groping in the dark.
Second: grounded pragmatism. Know when to persist and when to compromise, when to hold firm and when to yield — and you’ll be able to navigate with ease.
But here’s where you struggled. The judgments you made were based on a foggy view of reality — often shaped by what others performed for you to see, or by what you chose to believe because you wanted it to be true.
For instance, you assumed that teaching was better than making and selling cakes every day.
The right way to arrive at sound judgments is to use historical evidence as your benchmark. Study what other people in this field actually did in the past and what genuinely produced results. Also study who tried what, got poor results, or even suffered losses. And equally important — honestly analyze your own actual track record.