From Consultant to Pizza Chef: Crafting Towards a Happier Life

What if everything you worked for, everything you thought defined success turned out to be hollow? If you feel this way, don’t settle, there’s a way out, a better way!

Today, I quit my corporate career to follow my passion for pizza and build something of my own.

Assess: Building a New Definition of Success

Five years ago, I started a career in Strategy Consulting, advising corporate executives and investors in their mergers and acquisitions activities. I started my career in Paris and continued in Amsterdam, for five years, I traded my free time for a constantly increasing salary. Initially, it felt great and it gave me the impression of being successful. I enjoyed solving challenging problems — it felt like a game. I had more money than I could spend in my free time, I could afford everything I wanted and was successful by all the metrics I had previously defined. Yet, one day in the spring of 2023, I realized something was missing. I was bored when I wasn’t working, I had no passion and didn’t really enjoy my free time except for travelling and partying.

I was not happy nor fulfilled.

Before, when feeling trapped, I would have planned a trip abroad, gone out partying, or found some other escape from my daily life. This time, I wanted to make a deep change, I forced myself to stay in the city where I lived and dig deeper into this feeling. I realized I had to act where the pain was happening. Every day, I solved complex business problems for large companies — yet I couldn't fix one in my own life? This time, I finally had a clear one to solve.

The first step to solving this problem was to redefine what success meant to me. Before I measured success largely by external factors (financial independence, status, career progression, etc.). These metrics are end goals and I had no or little control over it which made me feel trapped in a constant anxiety, in the hope of achieving the milestones I set for myself. Even when I achieved one of these goals, success fell short of expectations, and I quickly set my sights on the next one. My new definition is simpler, I want to be happy. Initially, I didn’t really know what it meant to be happy, so I broke it down. I thought I would be happy if I enjoyed every single unit of time in my life to the fullest. This meant being more present and constantly being connected to my feelings, assessing whether I was happy in the moment.

Enjoying every single unit of time became my new metric.

Experiment: Evaluating New Paths

Using this new metric, I began exploring. I started digging in my everyday life to assess where I felt fulfilled and where I was lacking. I quickly realized that most of my consulting job didn’t fulfil me outside of making PowerPoint slides. I started analyzing what truly made me happy and testing different activities to see what resonated. Here's a simplified version of that journey:

• First I had to reconnect to my feelings, questioning myself constantly about how I felt.
• In my professional life, weirdly for most people, I enjoyed making PowerPoint slides (quite helpful for a Consultant as this is one of the main occupations), I thought it was the most creative activity in my job (first observation).
• In my personal life, I also enjoyed cooking which also involves creativity (second observation).
• Hence, my hypothesis was that I could be a creative person deprived of its ability to create (hypothesis).
• I explored different creative outlets, such as staging in a fine dining restaurant, fermenting food, baking, painting, drawing, attending food workshops, writing, and even building a health-conscious soda company (exploration).
• I rapidly observed a strong attraction to baking and more specifically Neapolitan pizza, when baking, I would lose track of time, enjoy every second and sometimes do it for hours without even realizing it.
• I kept doing more and rapidly became obsessed with achieving the best results possible, it became a game.

I had never gone all out on a hobby — until pizza. I invested in ovens, tools, books, learning, and meals at the world’s best pizzerias. I was focused on my new metric, enjoying every single unit of time and forgetting my old ones such as financial independence. After reaching a good level in the craft I thought it would be interesting to bring my product to a larger audience. This is when I started making pizza pop-ups and private events in my free time. It rapidly became difficult to manage with the long consulting hours. I wanted to allocate more time, my goal was to find if there was a amount of time which felt like too much. At this point, a few months passed by before I could take a decision, the inner struggle between my old and new objectives kept bringing me back and forth and blocking my decision. I had to accept that being fulfilled by my job would mean, at least in the short term, to give up on weekends, evenings with friends, travelling, financial security, savings, status associated with the job etc. It felt like being pulled apart mentally.

Change: From Consultant to Pizza Chef and Entrepreneur

I always saw myself as an entrepreneur, and saw an opportunity to make the leap, but the restaurant industry is a tough and unforgiving one. This is when I met with the owner of Piatti Beach, a restaurant that gave me the opportunity to build further the pizza business for them. The perfect opportunity for me to learn without many of the risks involved.

“Find a job you love, and you will never have to work a day in your life.”

This is how I feel right now. I’m happy to wake up in the morning. I feel connected to what I do, to my craft. There’s a special feeling associated with the fact of working with your hands which is difficult to explain. Every single product that comes out of the oven is a challenge, and the customer's smile and feedback are the reward.

Initially, I had some concerns on the fact that making pizza is a simple and “unintellectual” thing which would not feed me enough in terms of challenges and learnings. I began to see that any craft, when pursued with excellence, offers endless challenges. What seems “too simple” is often just a matter of raising the standards. If you aim for excellence, nothing is too simple. In fact, I feel more intellectually challenged learning about the chemistry and complex processes involved in pizza making than in my previous job. Adding the challenges of entrepreneurship on top of that, you get an incredibly complex yet deeply fulfilling journey of learning and growth.

Repeat: Don’t Settle

While I enjoy making pizza as a Pizza Chef, I know this is not where the journey ends. I have started exploring more of the baking world beyond pizza including sourdough bread, croissants, and more. I’m deeply passionate about the chemistry behind our favorite dishes and more specifically fermentation. I want to learn more about it. I also hope one day, to announce the opening of a location where I will serve food I love and gather people in a pleasant atmosphere.

“Each one of us has to start out with developing his or her definition of success. And when we have these specific expectations of ourselves, we are more likely to live up to them. Ultimately it is not what you get or even what you give. It's what you become.” ―?Mary Gates

My message to anyone feeling stuck in your current job, take small steps, research, explore your passions, and dare to redefine success on your own terms.

If you’re in the Netherlands, come enjoy what passion tastes like at Piatti Beach, Zandvoort aan Zee. Otherwise, if you want to follow my adventures or simply learn about Neapolitan pizza and baking, join me on Instagram: @nonanza_pizza.

Thank you!

I want to express my gratitude to everyone who contributed in countless ways — by sharing their thoughts and ideas, creating opportunities for my first events, helping bring those events to life, trusting me, making key introductions, inspiring me through their own careers, teaching, offering support and so much more.