The Pizza Was Burning: The Power of Being Present When Plans Go Up in Smoke

The pizza was burning.

Not a wisp. Not a curl. A full-on billow of dark smoke forced its way out of the oven and into the living room like an angry guest.

It was 1975, Los Angeles. I was 20, newly settled in Santa Barbara, and down in L.A. to visit my younger brother, Tim. He was hosting a party at his rental house. Like a lot of young-adult spaces, it was held together with folding chairs, takeout menus, and optimism. It was the kind of place where the furniture came from different garage sales, and nothing matched except the enthusiasm.

Music blasted from a boombox—probably Chicago or Bachman-Turner Overdrive—and the air was thick with cologne and chatter. My brother ran with a different crowd than I did. Louder. Looser. Hungrier, maybe—in every sense.

He'd invited a big crowd, and more than once I heard him say, "My brother's a chef." That line carried weight. I was flattered, of course. But also a little nervous. Now I had to live up to something. His pride became my pressure.

So I offered to cook. Naturally. Pizza. Easy, reliable, crowd-pleasing. I preheated the oven to 500°, slid the pizza in, and then started working the room. I was feeling confident, even a little inflated. People were laughing, and I felt like a minor celebrity. I was leaning into the story of myself—so much so that I forgot about the pizza entirely.

Until the smoke.

"Hey—what's burning?" someone called.

I rushed to the kitchen and opened the oven. There it was: the charred remains of my moment of glory, a blackened disc fused to the rack like a reminder from the humility gods.

We laughed—kind of. I played it off. But inside, I felt something cold. Shame, mostly. And a deep sense that I'd stopped doing what I was supposed to do. Pay attention.

That was the first time I remember learning the real difference between knowing how to cook and actually cooking.

If I could go back and give my 20-year-old self one piece of advice about attention and presence, I'd keep it simple: Don't leave the kitchen while something is in it at 500°F.

Sometimes the most profound lessons are that straightforward.

When Planning Meets Reality

I'm not happy with failure. Ever. However, it does happen, less and less as I get older. Most of the time, on reflection, I see that it was my fault. Always. Either I didn't plan, I didn't pay attention, or I assumed something. We do something called an After Action Review: What went well, what went wrong, and what needs work—and we do it immediately after any coordinated action. I wish I'd known about that in my 20s.

That lesson has followed me for decades. I think about it every time I talk about my problem-solving method: See What You Think. It's a simple idea, but deceptively powerful:

* Don't just follow a plan—observe what's really happening.

* Don't just act—respond to what you see.

I didn't have those words back then. But I was already learning to live them.

My relationship with failure has evolved significantly over my career. These days, I'm more tolerant of failure because I've reframed it as "everything is an experiment." In improv, we have this saying: "You can't make a mistake—everything you say becomes the truth of the scene," and you just go with it.

That's a hidden superpower. It doesn't mean you avoid failure or negate it. Just the opposite. You acknowledge, learn from, and fold it into your next iteration.

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The Pressure Cooker

Years later, I helped design an open-kitchen restaurant called 1129 in downtown Santa Barbara. The concept was beautiful—a space where chefs would cook in full view of the dining room, with the bar slightly elevated so guests could watch every move. You couldn't hide, you couldn't coast, you had to be present.

But plans rarely survive contact with reality, as I'd already learned. The restaurant opening was delayed, and I ended up having to cook downtown at an all-night diner instead, managing the shift after the bars closed. So while I helped design the kitchen at 1129 to be open and interactive, I never got to work in it. Instead, I was getting shouted at by drunks at the counter and yelled at by waitresses wondering where their orders were.

It was a different kind of pressure cooker—less elegant than what I'd planned, but no less demanding of my attention. In fact, it required even more focus to stay calm and precise amid the chaos of post-bar rush orders and impatient staff.

This experience taught me something crucial: if you're not paying attention, you will be caught. And if you are paying attention, you can shift, adapt, and learn in real time.

The Three Core Steps

Over time, these experiences coalesced into a