🤠 How Amish Bread is Both a Metaphor for Life and Financial Success

Day 25:   Bread Etiquette Is a Winning Recipe  

by Edward Smith

30 Jul 2020 

When it Comes To Dough, It's What You Know

Food is a great teacher.    About a month ago, a co-worker of my wife showed up to work and gave my wife a clear plastic bag full of a bread starter.   The starter was for a bread dough used to make Amish Friendship Bread.    

Amish Friendship Bread, like the people that the bread appears to be named after, work as a perfect metaphor for both life and how to live.   If you are an attentive student, Amish Friendship Bread will teach you how to become a better person, and it can even help train you to keep your financial habits healthy and in balance.   Let me explain.   

 

Friendship Bread Encourages Delayed Gratification

Amish Friendship Bread starter kits do not impress when you first encounter them.   A bag of bread starter can look a lot like a bag of brown spit.   Don't believe me?   Here is a picture of a sour dough bread starter that I found on the following website, which looks about the same https://breadtopia.com/make-your-own-sourdough-starter/

Bread starters can be a little awkward at the beginning.

Bread starters don't plan out things this way.   It's not even the starter's fault, but like many other things that begin life ugly, don't judge this thing too quickly.  Bread starters can be like butterflies.  Give it a chance, and the bread starter will transform into something beautiful.    Bread dough is sneaky that way.   Things are not always as they seem.      

Deep inside this bag of primordial goo lives a tiny army of hungry critters looking for a sugar snack.  If you pay the sugar price, these little lifeforms will activate and go to work for you.   They work non-stop both day and night, and their hard work really pays off.   

Give them about a week, and you will find your bag jam packed full of some of the most magical, yummy, sweet bread dough, that the world has ever graced bakers with.       

Picture of our current round of Amish Bread Dough. 
It's been building itself up for about a week.

This is next level kind of dough.   It's not your run of the mill store type bread.   This is the good stuff.    The kind your mama used to make, when she would make bread from scratch, and the house would be filled with the explosive smells of yeast, butter, and wonderful bread baking.    

There is nothing else quite like it in the world, and all it takes from you, is some waiting, patience, and an ability to look past what is in front of you, to the beyond, where good things await that haven't even occurred yet.   

We made a loaf of soda bread from part of the Amish bread dough (two weeks ago).
 Soda bread is kind of like sour dough, except you add in small fruits to it like raisins.

Friendship Bread Teaches Prudent Investing

As mentioned above, Amish Friendship Bread, like investing, teaches you the value of  delayed gratification, but it does so much more then that.   Here are some examples.   

When you invest, you need to commit to the thing long term.   You need to know what it is you're investing in.  You need to know how long to wait.   You need to understand the ingredients.  You need to understand how it works, and you need to be willing to keep paying into it if you want the thing to do it's job.   

Most importantly though, you need to leave the thing alone once you start it, and you need to refrain from taking everything out and using it all up at once.   There has to be a leftover, untouched portion.  That's the secret step that keep the magic producing more magic.  

Bread dough, like a good investment, can pay out dividends over and over again forever.  It's all up you though.  That dividend depends on you leaving some principal money behind each time.   The principle money is the starter.   It's the active ingredient that produces more dividend.    

If you want infinite bread, don't break the bread machine.   That's where the bread comes from.  

With investing, don't break the principal.   That's where the dividend comes from.   It's the same thing.   

Friendship Bread Teaches The Importance of Giving

  

This one should be easy to follow.  How do you think you got your Amish Friendship Bread starter kit in the first place?   

Someone selflessly gave it to you.   It didn't cost them very much, but this stuff is a valuable treasure.   It's alive.  It keeps growing.   

You really can't put a price on it.   It was never intended to be sold.   If you embrace the spirit of the Amish Friendship Bread program, you will come to realize that this starter kit represents something really important.   It represents connection between members of the community.  

With your kit, you use it to make dough, but if you ration it, you also end up making more dough then you really need, so the dough encourages you to give some of it away to other people (much like what happened when someone gave it to you).   That's why you end up giving some to your neighbor.  Having had it happen to them, they in turn repeat the process and do the same thing.  

Now imagine that keeps happening over and over again.    Bread is shared between person and person.   It doesn't stop.   Low and behold, the dough has grown exponentially, and so has the good will and spirit that were ingrained within it.      

Bread sharing teaches a lesson.    Small things when shared, become bigger, and bigger things can change things in big ways.   Bread dough contains potential.   Just like you.   

   

Want to have an impact?   Be like bread.   Expand and share with those around you!      

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