Go On.

Now that we are a few weeks into the fall semester, we are visited almost daily by journalism students who are working on various assignments for their classes.  While only some need to film us baking for background footage, every single one of them needs a quick interview with Jeanne or I.   And this likely won't surprise you, but Jeanne always seems to be carving chicken or cleaning flour out of the grooves of the mixer and therefore, I appear on hundreds of hours of tape in the journalism school.

Without question, every student that has visited us has been so friendly and interested in what we do each day at PJP.  Some tell us all about their families and their experiences with baking growing up and others are more timid, worried they will be in our way.  But for the most part, they almost all have carefully written out questions for me.  Most want to know about the history of PJP (hint: there was a Version 1.0) and all want to know about the initial decision to create Version 2.0 (hint: we decided in an afternoon) and mostly, they all ask about what it is like to work with my mom (hint: it is 98% awesome and 2% stabworthy, and she would say the same about me.).

And all this is to say that as we slowly round the corner to our five year anniversary next spring, perhaps we are finally gaining enough inward eye to realize that how we've gotten here has been just a massive combination of hard work, persistence, luck, and good fortune.  Like I said to a student today on an audio recording...I so clueless in the very beginning that I didn't even know that I didn't know what I was doing.  (And really, that is the best because you can't even be stressed about what you don't know yet.  For the record, Jeanne was WAY smarter than me and knew about all the hard work coming our way.)  The student readily nodded her head, but you could tell she was thinking "whaat?".  Welcome to entrepreneurship, where nothing makes sense but everything matters.

The most alarming thing is that all the things we know now comparative to our early days in 2014 will eventually be a mere drop in the bucket to whatever amazing thing PJP is 2024.  Sometimes I think about all the stuff I don't know yet about what I'm doing and my Apple watch alarm reminds me to breath deeply.  Which is all just to say that I'm now fully aware of how much I don't know.  And that is sort of great and awful all at the same time, right?  

So look, I have no point but to say that we're finally smart enough to realize that there is so much we don't know yet about the next level of PJP.  Thankfully, PJP is patient enough to wait for us to figure it out.  And journalism students are faithful enough to return each semester and record new sound bites on the belief we always have something new to say (or Jeanne has a chicken to carve and I have something new and interesting to say, I suppose).  And that's progress, so we will take it.