I have personally cooked more than 10,000 mac and cheese dishes. I have grated over one metric ton of cheese, boiled thousands of pounds of pasta, and whisked such vast amounts of cream sauce that I developed a wrist injury my doctor told me she has only seen in teenage boys with masturbatory addictions.

I wrote the global best-selling cookbook and definitive work on the topic, creatively titled, The Mac and Cheese Cookbook. Amazon ranks it as the 65,739th most popular book of all time, placing it just above Tanya’s Comprehensive Guide to Feline Kidney Disease (#175,890), and just below Fifty Shades of Grey (#25,370).

I built a cult macaroni and cheese restaurant, Homeroom, which has sold millions of mac and cheeses over a decade in business. Homeroom’s mac and cheese is so popular that it has been featured everywhere from The Wall Street Journal to the Cooking Channel, and its financial performance puts it in the top 1% of restaurants nationwide. Put simply, no one has dedicated more of their life to this cheesy carb than I have.

You might be wondering, why the hell would anyone spend so much of their life focused on macaroni and cheese? (Or, if you’re really into mac, perhaps you are not wondering this.)

I went down a rabbit hole of dairy-filled obsession for the same reason most people do crazy things: for love. Not for the romantic love of another, but for another kind of love we don’t talk about nearly as much—because I wanted to love who I was at work. I would hear people talk about being excited to wake up in the morning to go to work and think they were crazy—that maybe I just wasn’t that kind of person. I wanted to love who I was in the world and how I spent my days there. I wanted the people around me to feel the same way.

At the time I decided that I wanted to open a macaroni and cheese restaurant, I was living what I had been told was a fairytale ending. I had graduated from top schools and was working as a highly paid lawyer in a cushy high rise in San Francisco. I sounded important at cocktail parties, looked damned respectable in a suit each day, and did work representing some of the largest companies in America. The problem was that I was miserable. I had won at playing a game I didn’t even like, but had labored over perfecting for most of my life.

Opening Homeroom in 2011 was my personal Hail Mary to fall in love with work. I hoped that the longing I felt for something more meaningful could be found in making delicious food and sharing it with people. And while that proved to be true, I ended up loving my work not for any of the reasons that I articulated at the outset. While I began Homeroom out of a love of macaroni and cheese, what I ultimately fell in love with was business. And specifically, how you can create a business that centers on meaning, purpose, and connection.

Over the decade I led our team at Homeroom, I began to define success differently than the fairytale I had been raised with. I became obsessed with picking apart the reasons that other jobs and workplaces sucked, and how to do better. Through an embarrassing amount of trial and error, my team and I developed language and systems that maximized meaning, purpose, and connection, and created a more suck-free workplace. In an industry where the average tenure of employees is fewer than 90 days, Homeroom’s average was 2.5 years.

After a decade of running Homeroom, I sold the restaurant in 2020 to a large, venture-backed restaurant company. The acquiring company had some of the biggest names in Silicon Valley as investors, and a seasoned CEO who had led some of America’s most prominent restaurant chains. Despite their company being successful in its own right, Homeroom’s profitability out of a single restaurant was greater than five of their restaurants put together. 

When I started Homeroom, I believed that if I wanted to lead with the values that lit me up, doing so would come at the expense of making money. I believed that financial success was for people who were ruthless, competitive, and winner-take-all. I thought that values like pursuing passion, maximizing collaboration, and sharing success were what led to such bad ideas as communism and John Lennon’s albums with Yoko Ono. 

What I discovered is that the opposite is true. I learned that by playing a completely different game, I could still win at the one that I wasn’t even trying to play.

I never set out to become a mac-and-cheese millionaire. When I first put together my Homeroom business plan, I had estimated my take-home pay to be $40,000. I was stunned when in our first year I earned more than I had as a corporate attorney. I discovered that wealth generation is a natural by-product of the pursuit of creating something meaningful for as many people as possible.  

Adapted with permission by the publisher, Wiley, from The Mac & Cheese Millionaire: Building a Better Business by Thinking Outside the Box by Erin Wade. Copyright © 2024 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. All rights reserved. This book is available wherever books and eBooks are sold.