Noodles & Company

Planning is the comfortable flavor of hard work that avoids the real work

Shaan says his early grind was fake productivity: like many people, he avoided the actual work by doing the kind of hard work that felt safe, which for him meant forecasts, financial models, and planning down to employee uniforms and promotion paths.

“I really subscribed to this kind of hard work grindset mindset mentality. But my version of hard work was what it is for many people, where you avoid the actual work and you instead do the flavor of hard work that you feel more comfortable with, that you feel safe in. And for me, that was planning. And so we were writing our plan, we were creating forecasts, financial models.”