Sunday, September 03, 2006

One way to make some quick cash

I was standing in the shower thinking about what makes a man.

I'm lying. I wasn't actually thinking about what makes a man. That's just a line from a Jane's Addiction song that came to mind when I started writing this because I was standing in the shower thinking just a few minutes ago. I was thinking about pizza; specifically Aimless Pizza. I was thinking about how Aimless Pizza could do more than just make me some money one night a week.

In the shower it occurred to me that shortly after I find a restaurant willing to take me up on my "Aimless Pizza" offer, the restaurant is going to want my pizza on their regular menu. They'll want my pizza because it's better than everyone else's pizza. They'll want my pizza because it sells.

When that happens, they'll have to ask themselves a question: What's it worth to them?

It's worth a lot to me because I've spent years teaching myself how to make a great pizza. I've made at least one pizza almost every day for the last several years, always trying to make each day's pizza better than the previous day's pizza. As a result, I possess pizza-making skills and pizza-making knowledge that you won't encounter anywhere else unless you devote your life to searching the globe for people with comparable knowledge and skills.

That's not arrogance; it's a simple truth that results from hard work, passion, and lots of thought. We all have strengths and weaknesses. Pizza happens to be one of my strengths. But if you hand me an oboe, I ain't gonna make no pretty noises with it.

There is a lot more to making a great pizza than just mixing the right stuff together and then putting the right stuff on top of it. Even if you have access to the best information, you still have to understand what you're doing before you can do it right. You need to understand how all the ingredients react to each other. You need to understand why one step must come before another step. You need to understand the role temperature plays in dough management and baking. You need to know a lot of shit. And the only way to understand that "shit" is by doing it over and over and over, using different methods and different formulas so you can see how things change when you try different things.

Anyway, that's worth a lot of money, and I'm not just going to give it away or sell it cheaply. If someone wants my secrets because they realize my secrets can make them a lot of money, they're gonna have to pay a reasonable price. There is a reason I've spent all these years teaching myself about pizza and baking. The reason is to make money (although it was originally just to feed myself).