Business is like a souffle.

 Building a big business from a small business is like baking a souffle. Its fluffy delicious everyone wants it. But agitation keeps it from rising.

This analogy cleverly compares scaling a small business into a large one to baking a soufflé, highlighting both the allure and the fragility of the process.

The Appeal: "Fluffy, delicious, everyone wants it"

A successful soufflé is light, airy, impressive, and highly desirable — much like a big, thriving business. Scaling up from a small operation can lead to greater profits, recognition, prestige, and impact. It's the dream many entrepreneurs chase: turning a modest venture into something substantial and coveted.

These images show the ideal outcome: a perfectly risen soufflé, tall and elegant, symbolizing the "big business" reward.

The Challenge: "Agitation keeps it from rising"

The key to a soufflé's rise is incorporating air into the egg whites (through careful whipping) and then baking it undisturbed. Any agitation — slamming the oven door, peeking too often, or even loud noises/vibrations — can cause the delicate air bubbles to collapse, resulting in a flat, failed dish.

In business terms, "agitation" represents disruptions, excessive interference, or instability during the growth phase:

- Constant pivots or meddling (e.g., frequent strategy changes, micromanaging).

- External turbulence (market volatility, economic shocks).

- Internal drama (team conflicts, over-hiring too quickly, or poor processes).

- Over-eagerness (rushing expansion without solid foundations).

Scaling requires patience, stability, and the right conditions to "rise" properly. Too much disturbance, and the potential collapses — the business stays small, stagnates, or fails outright.

Here are examples of "fallen" soufflés — dense and deflated, illustrating what happens when agitation wins.

Overall, the metaphor is spot-on for entrepreneurship: growth isn't just about ambition or ingredients (resources, ideas); it's about creating a calm, controlled environment for delicate expansion. Many businesses fail to scale not from lack of potential, but from too much unnecessary shaking along the way. To succeed, focus on steady progress, strong foundations, and minimizing avoidable turmoil.

The fan. And new years

A while back, my bedside fan was mounted on a piece of ½-inch stainless steel tubing that I'd welded into an L-shape and bolted to the bed frame. It worked great.

The fans I'm talking about probably aren't available in the US anymore. They're super-cheap plastic units, about 12 inches in diameter, with no starting capacitor. Instead, they have a little spring mechanism that reverses the motor if it happens to start spinning the wrong direction.

No guards, a flimsy inline switch, and they only draw 10–15 watts. Quality is a total crapshoot—some are silent, others hum like crazy. Mine hummed until I suspended it from a strip of rubber gasket material, which quieted it right down.

The setup was perfect... until the bedbug invasion forced me to throw out the entire bed frame.

These days I've just extended the cord with a cheap extension lead.

It also makes me wonder: why don't bedrooms ever come with ceiling fans and a pull-cord switch long enough to reach from the bed?

New Year's was low-key but nice. I didn't have a ton of cash to splash out, so I kept it simple: a rack of ribs, peach cobbler, some good cheeses with crackers, and grapes.

Fireworks were pretty much nonexistent this year thanks to the local government crackdown. Instead, the idiots just outside the subdivision spent hours riding scooters they'd tuned to backfire like machine guns while screaming karaoke at the top of their lungs.

I didn't drink a drop

Re wall bracket

 The wall is cast concrete where the fan needs to go.  The fan weighs maybe 12 ounces at the most. 

I used 2 part marine  epoxy with it.  That stuff is really tough.  

Best I can do with what I got.  My hammer drill is broken.

Omfg you wont believe this

 8 years ago I met this Brit who was banging the sister of my best friend here.

Brit guy.  Totally broke, visa expired, totally screwed except that the chick was keeping him.

Dude was a dickhead.  Talked shit about me. Gave h some work and he resented it.

Yesterday, a friend sends me a picture. Telling me there is some white guy begging in the slum.

Imagine my surprise that its the same guy.

8 years ago my friend gave him enough cash to pay his past due visa and leabe6.  Instead he went to oolongapo, drank it away.

We cut him off at that point.

Post Christmas

Today I'm picking up a new ceiling fan—the old one gave up months ago, and I still haven't found the damn swing arm that let it hang properly over the bed. So I'm improvising: grabbing a heavy-duty shelf bracket from the garage, gluing it to the wall, and rigging the new fan off that. It'll look janky as hell, but it'll move air, and that's what matters. Sleeping lately has been brutal. The room turns into a swamp at night; humidity creeps in and just sits there. I've been cranking the AC just to dry things out enough to breathe, which feels ridiculous in December, but without airflow it's unbearable.

A friend posted the other day about his dad's final months—the slow, brutal slide from cancer into hospice. He described the stages so plainly it stuck with me: at first he thought his dad would get better, then he hoped he would, then he just wished he would, and finally, when the mind was gone and the body was done, he wanted it to end. Not out of cruelty, just mercy. The man himself stopped fighting and seemed ready to go.

Reading that hit me sideways, because I recognized the pattern in my own life with this business I've been dragging around for years.

It's always the same loop: I'm one good sale away from turning the corner. One solid month away from breathing room. One more grind, one more fire to put out, one more invoice to chase. But the corner never quite arrives. Cash flow stays on the knife edge—one slow week, one surprise expense, one government letter with a fine attached, one dumb accident—and it's disaster. I've gotten good at juggling, at patching leaks, at talking myself into the next push. But the optimism has quietly shifted stages without me noticing.

First it was certainty: this thing is going to work. Then hope: it's going to work if I just keep at it. Then wishing: please, let it work soon. And lately... well, some days I catch myself thinking it might be easier if it just ended. Not dramatically—nothing suicidal or anything—but a quiet acceptance that maybe this chapter has run its course and forcing it longer is its own kind of suffering.

End of the year is when I usually sit down and plan the next one with fresh energy. I've got my 2025 to-do list taped to the wall right in front of my desk—big sheet of paper, black Sharpie goals, checkboxes half-filled. This time I'm not even printing a new one. I'll just grab a marker, cross out "2025" at the top, write "2026" above it, maybe add a couple new lines at the bottom. Because the unfinished stuff? It's still the stuff. The big items haven't moved much. Half-done is better than zero, I guess, but staring at the same list wearing a new date feels like its own quiet admission.

Anyway. Fan goes up today. Air moves tonight. One small win.

The rest... we'll see what 2026 feels like when it actually gets here.