When I first started working in investment management, I worked for a company with a rather interesting approach to interior decorating.
The office had an open floor plan, with artwork displayed throughout the building. My desk faced a wall adorned with an enormous picture of cakes.
Just cakes.
Rows of them, lined up side by side, stretching in seemingly every direction. As I recall, they were generally the same size, each decorated a little differently.
I remember sitting there thinking, Well, this is unfortunate. I’m going to be thinking about cake all day.
And I was right.
Years later, I’ve somehow found myself contemplating the philosophical implications of baked goods. Apparently, the artwork made a lasting impression.
Now, I should clarify that I’m not particularly qualified to discuss baking. I’ve gotten considerably better at cooking over the years, but if you handed me flour, sugar, eggs, and butter and told me to make a cake without a recipe, I’d probably ask how attached you were to your dental work.
I come by this honestly.
My mom wasn’t exactly a culinary prodigy.
Someone once gave her a Kitchen Witch, one of those little good-luck charms traditionally hung in kitchens to ward off burnt food and whatever other culinary catastrophe the imagination might summon.
My mom set hers on fire.
She burned the thing that was supposed to prevent things from burning.
I’m not entirely sure what you’re supposed to do after that. Or whether you can ever be trusted in a kitchen again.
Presumably, the witch resigned. Or maybe she was classified as fired.
Anyway.
Most cakes begin with fairly ordinary ingredients. Flour, sugar, eggs, butter, baking powder. Nothing particularly exciting on its own.
Nobody’s standing in their kitchen eating a handful of flour thinking, Jesus Christ, this is incredible.
Well, probably nobody. Who knows? People are fucking weird.
But combine those ingredients in the right proportions, introduce a little heat, and suddenly you’ve got something worth sticking candles into and setting on fire. Intentionally, this time.
Which got me thinking about people. Admittedly, that’s a considerable leap from baking powder, but welcome to my brain.
Every person you encounter brings something different to the table. Some bring intelligence. Some, experience. Some bring humor. Others bring patience. Some bring a remarkable ability to identify everything that’s wrong without offering a single useful suggestion about how to fix it.
An important skill, apparently.
You can put five exceptionally talented people in a room and still produce an absolute disaster.
Because chemistry is a bitch.
Take salt, for example. A little makes everything better. Too much, and you’ve ruined the entire dish.
Sugar? Everybody loves sugar until the whole thing becomes sickening.
Then there’s baking powder, an ingredient nobody thinks twice about until they forget it and wonder why their cake looks like a depressed pancake.
Some contributions aren’t particularly glamorous. The person who keeps everything organized. The one who notices a problem before it becomes a catastrophe. The one who knows when to speak up.
And, occasionally, the one who knows when to shut up.
Then there’s the person who insists on adding something nobody asked for.
The recipe is working. Everybody’s getting along. The cake is rising beautifully.
But somebody walks into the kitchen and decides it needs mayonnaise.
Have you considered mayonnaise?
No, Karen. We haven’t. Because it’s a chocolate cake.
Except, annoyingly enough, mayonnaise actually belongs in some chocolate cake recipes. It’s made largely from oil and eggs, both common baking ingredients, and can help make a cake moist.
So Karen, whom I was fully prepared to have escorted from the kitchen, might actually know what she’s talking about.
Which is unfortunate, because I’d already committed to disliking Karen.
When I was younger, my friends used to mix ketchup and mayonnaise together in the school cafeteria. I thought it was disgusting.
Who looks at two perfectly respectable condiments and decides they need to make a gross child?
Apparently, my friends.
For years, I refused to participate in this disturbing little experiment. Until one day, I tried it.
Holy shit. It was delicious.
I’d never considered scooping mayonnaise into a cup and dipping my French fries into it. But mix it with ketchup, and suddenly the ingredient I’d dismissed was responsible for making something unexpectedly wonderful.
And that’s the trouble with ingredients. Sometimes the thing you’re convinced doesn’t belong turns out to be exactly what was missing.
Sometimes the person making everyone uncomfortable is asking the question nobody else wants to ask. Sometimes the quietest person in the room is holding the entire operation together.
And sometimes the person with the most impressive résumé couldn’t follow a recipe if you stapled it to their forehead.
I’ve watched this happen professionally. Give several people the same problem and they’ll approach it from entirely different directions. One sees opportunity. Another sees risk. Someone else has identified twelve potential complications, and a fourth wants to know why we’re still having a meeting about this. Then they’ll probably schedule another meeting about how to have fewer meetings.
Individually, they might all be making reasonable points. Collectively, they’ve managed to turn baking a cake into a congressional hearing.
Which raises an interesting question. When the cake turns out badly, where does the fault actually land? The ingredients? The recipe? The person who mixed everything together?
Or the jackass who keeps opening the oven every thirty seconds to see whether it’s done?
I’ve lived with people who loved to cook. One former roommate handled most of the cooking in our apartment, which worked out beautifully because our kitchen was barely large enough for two people to occupy simultaneously.
Add a third, and somebody was going to end up wearing dinner instead of eating it.
It turns out that too many cooks in the kitchen isn’t always a criticism of the cooks.
Sometimes you just have a shitty kitchen.
I’ve noticed that even my own brain responds differently depending on where I put it. I can be sitting at home with three monitors and everything I need, completely stuck on a problem. Move myself to a restaurant with a laptop, a little background noise, and a different view, and suddenly I can concentrate.
Same brain. Same work. Different kitchen.
But sometimes the kitchen is perfectly fine. The ingredients just don’t belong together.
And I think we make that unnecessarily personal.
Not everyone is going to like you. You’re not going to like everyone. Sometimes there won’t even be a particularly good explanation.
You meet somebody, exchange a few words, and immediately realize you’d rather spend the afternoon reorganizing your underwear drawer full of G-strings you can’t even fold. Trust me, I’ve tried more times than I’m proud to admit. I mean, I did work at Vikki’s, after all.
Doesn’t mean they’re a terrible person. Doesn’t mean you are. You just don’t click. You don’t quite align.
The more you understand what interests you, what matters to you, and how you enjoy spending your time, the easier it becomes to recognize where you fit.
When I was training for my hundred-mile race, I talked about running constantly. Running and work. That was basically my entire personality for a while.
These days, it’s writing, podcasting, and work. Apparently, I’ve diversified my lifestyle portfolio.
Put me in a room full of people who spend every waking hour playing video games, and we’d probably run out of things to discuss before they finished explaining what all the buttons do.
Nothing wrong with gaming. It’s just not where I want to spend my time. And I’m sure someone passionate about gaming would find my enthusiastic explanation of a hundred-mile footrace equally baffling and, dare I say, boring.
Neither of us needs to change. We’re just making different cakes. Maybe in the same kitchen, but preferably not elbowing each other over the mixing bowl.
Karen might be right about mayonnaise in chocolate cake. But that doesn’t mean every chocolate cake needs mayonnaise. Sometimes it’s the secret ingredient. Sometimes it has absolutely no business being there.
You can appreciate what someone brings to the table without needing to make room for them at yours.
I’ve been plenty of things to plenty of people. Too intense. Too opinionated. Too sensitive. Too independent. Too much.
One thing I’ve never been accused of being too much of is quiet. Apparently, even my silence has a limited shelf life.
I’m sure I’ve been somebody’s mayonnaise. But I’ve also been exactly what another person needed. And I suspect that’s true of most of us.
Maybe the trick is figuring out which recipes actually suit us, rather than spending our lives trying to become ingredients in somebody else’s.
Because even the finest ingredients won’t guarantee a good cake. And if you keep following the same recipe, using the same ingredients, and getting the same miserable result, at some point you might want to stop blaming the flour.
Or, I don’t know.
Turn off the oven and order a fucking pizza.
© 2026 Kimberly Beth Thomas. All rights reserved.
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The content contained herein reflects the personal views and opinions of the author and is provided for general informational and educational purposes only. This publication is not intended to constitute, and should not be construed as: investment advice, financial planning advice, tax advice, legal advice, or a recommendation to buy, sell, or hold any security or to adopt any investment strategy. This content is not individualized to any reader’s circumstances. Nothing contained herein creates an advisory relationship, and the author is not acting in any fiduciary or advisory capacity through this publication. Nothing herein is an offer to provide advisory services or a solicitation to become a client. The views expressed are solely those of the author and do not represent the views of any current or former employer, affiliate, or associated entity.