52 Cups of Coffee: Inspiring and insightful stories for navigating life’s uncertainties (16 page)

Mike McFall

Biggby Coffee Headquarters in East Lansing, Michigan

Small house coffee

Embrace uncertainty; it keeps life interesting.

“Do you ever wonder how your life would be if you
had made one decision differently?” Mike McFall asked me this question as we sat in his office at the Headquarters of Biggby Coffee, a popular Midwestern coffee chain.

The question came after he
’d recounted the events that led him to spend a year of high school sailing around the world for a study-at-sea experience. His mom had picked up a brochure about the program thinking Mike might be interested. Mike was slightly intrigued, so he filled out the application and threw it on his coffee table—where it sat for weeks, forgotten amongst the various items coffee tables tend to accumulate.

While sitting on the couch one afte
rnoon, his mother uncovered the application and consulted Mike, “Do you still want to do this, or should I toss it?”

Mike figured since he
had filled it out; he might as well mail it. The decision changed his life. It was, unsurprisingly, an incredible experience that shaped his perspective, introduced him to new ideas, and ultimately helped him get into a very selective college despite his lackluster grades. He often asked himself afterward,
“How would my life be different if I had just let my mom toss the application?”

* * *

We were sitting in Mike’s office, a room with a round table and chairs with bare walls (he had recently moved in and hadn’t gotten around to decorating). When I had arrived, he gave me a quick tour of the office that ended at the mock Biggby store where new franchise owners learn the ropes.

He told me the story of his experience at sea after I me
ntioned that one of the most-important lessons I had learned so far during 52 Cups had been that life never goes according to plan. Mike understood what I meant immediately. Living in Lansing, Michigan and working as the President of Biggby Coffee hadn’t been in his forecast when he’d graduated from Kalamazoo College in 1994.

A research project
had brought him to Lansing. While working 20 hours a week on the project, he had an abundance of time and scarcity of money so he dropped off an application at every coffee shop in town. He ended up at Biggby, which, at the time, was a small one-store operation that sold about 300 cups a day.

He
’d been working there a couple of months when one day he went for a walk with the co-founder, Bob Fish. He didn’t explain the details—and I didn’t ask because I liked the mystique of the story—but the walk had turned into a four-hour ordeal that ended with an agreement between Mike and Bob to expand their small coffee business together.

Ten years later, they had grown to over 100 stores selling 33,000 cups a day.

Mike’s story captivated me. I loved when people jumped on a big opportunity without knowing where it would lead. That’s what I had done my whole life, and it had led to remarkable experiences.

We continued talking about the uncertainty of life,
specifically regarding career paths. Mike mentioned something I understood immediately, “People follow the path—corporate job, marriage, kids, mortgage, etc.—because it’s a safer route.”

Uncertainty is difficult; it
’s easier to follow the route many have taken before.

That
’s something I’d discovered in the previous six months. There isn’t a rulebook when you’re paving your own way; you’ve got to make your own decisions and live with the unpredictability of where those decisions lead. That’s a lot of pressure, which explains why we all too often opt for the path of least resistance.

Back when I started
52 Cups, I was planning on finding a corporate job like everyone expected I would. I was stuck in the mindset that there was just one route to success, and if I didn’t find that
one specific route
, I would be setting myself up for irreversible failure. But 52 Cups has helped me realize that is not the case at all.

Life
is what you make it—and
you
get to make it whatever you want.

* * *

I used to look for ways to make the fear of uncertainty go away, but failed every time. The reality is that life is unpredictable: the uncertainty never goes away.

Choosing to live an unconventional life
means more risk and less certainty. It is the price you pay for the opportunity to make a remarkable life.

Mike agree
s. He has spent his whole life living unconventionally; he has never been able to follow the crowd, and it is clear his strategy has paid off.

Cup 30
is a reminder that you can’t predict what opportunities life will bring—like a parent making a recommendation for a life-changing experience, or an unexpected walk turning into something more—but the unpredictable moments are the ones that keep life interesting and fun.

Kenyatta Berry

Phone call from East Lansing, Michigan to Los Angeles, California

Homemade brewed coffee

It’s all right to strike out a few times.

In college,
Kenyatta Berry found herself on academic probation. It wouldn’t be the first time, and it wasn’t because she wasn’t smart. In high school, she had gone to a Detroit magnet school for gifted kids and was always interested in learning. She just had better things to worry about than grades. Eventually, she got her grades into good enough shape to earn a degree in Business Administration from Michigan State (which is how we had a mutual friend who suggested we meet). Then she headed to law school.

It was during her time
in law school that she discovered the then-emerging technological phenomenon called the Internet. Kenyatta hadn’t understood what it was, or what it would become, but she knew she wanted to be a part of it. She geared her law classes toward Intellectual Property and Patent Law, and helped start a student group focused on Internet Law.

She
was active and driven, yet her grades weren’t cutting it—once again, she was placed on academic probation. Unfortunately, that wasn’t her biggest worry. During her senior year, her law school had a controversial racial issue that prompted Kenyatta to send an audacious email to the student body, which she had also copied to the dean of the college.

He
was not impressed by her bold action. He threatened a defamation suit, which led to a host of issues and problems that (fortunately) were worked out without a lawsuit. At the end of the year, Kenyatta walked to the Wailing Wall (the spot where grades were posted) to discover her grades were sufficient to graduate. She’d happily collected her degree and moved on to the next stage of her life without looking back.

Kenyatta
had been set on getting a job in the tech industry, specifically one in Washington, D.C. She called the company every day, and her persistence paid off. The company offered her a job, so she picked up and moved to D.C. where she worked until the dot-com crash terminated both her job and the company. Fortunately, she wasn’t unemployed long before finding an opening at a small company called Blackboard. Although she was greatly overqualified, she had taken the position and quickly rose through the ranks as Blackboard became a leader in online platforms for education.

After five years, Kenyatta realized she needed a change and decided to leave the company. When she
quit Blackboard, she didn’t have a plan, but she wasn’t worried. She knew her experience working for Blackboard would be one that opened a lot of doors in her future. Plus she was resourceful. She soon took a job with a different Internet company in Massachusetts exploring her true passion: genealogy.

Before long, s
he had become fascinated with the idea of tracing her roots and decided to make it the center of her professional life—she decided to start a company of her own.

In the process of looking for funding
for her company, an investor gave her some valuable advice. Kenyatta was most interested in genealogy focused on slavery. The investors in Massachusetts weren’t interested in touching a sensitive issue like slavery and had told her she needed to move to California where the strong entrepreneurial environment might create more opportunities for her idea. Without hesitation, she packed up and moved across the country to put her idea in motion.

It was a smart move. Kenyatta
found a job with another education company in Los Angeles to support her financially while she grew her company.

* * *

The rest of Kenyatta’s story is unwritten. Where her company and the genealogy passion will take her is uncertain, but she is excited to find out. Despite the ups and downs of college, the short stints of unemployment, company changes, and multiple moves, Kenyatta has built a life that she greatly enjoys. It is filled with meaningful employment and opportunities to pursue her passion, helping others in the process. She may have gotten a few bumps and bruises along the way, but she has overcome the mistakes and close encounters with failure that have stood in her way.

That
is an important takeaway for me, especially since growing up, I had perfect grades and rarely stepped out of line.

I explained to Kenyatta how our mindsets differed and asked how she
had handled so many strikes against her. Her response will stick with me: “Everything is a learning experience.”

Each of her academic and personal struggles taught her something
that made her stronger for the next challenge or stumbling block. Her experiences had made her resilient, and she knows she will never encounter a defeat that is too large for her to recover. It is this reservoir of resilience that makes her unstoppable and able to push boundaries.

Kenyatta’s story
illustrates how to be comfortable with failure. This doesn’t mean trying to fail, or being okay with it, but rather accepting failure as a common ingredient in life—not the end of the world.

I realized
that I had stayed in line and worked hard so external sources could validate me: good grades proved that I was smart; no major failures meant I was a success. But if I continued to build that life, I might never experience failure, never have the chance to build my own reservoir of resilience.

Kenyatta taught
me the value of looking inward to find validation, based on self-awareness and past experiences. If you can do that, you can create confidence and resilience that fosters risk taking, because you know that failure doesn’t mean you aren’t good enough, it just means you need to get up and attack the challenge again.