52 Cups of Coffee: Inspiring and insightful stories for navigating life’s uncertainties (22 page)

Mihaela Fabian

Museon Museum in Den Haag,
The Netherlands

Café Americano

Raise the potential of others.

Before Cup 42, I had never given Romania much thought.
After Cup 42, I decided I needed to visit Romania, so I immediately planned a visit later in my travels through Europe.

Here
’s a very quick history lesson: After WWI, Romania was experiencing an era of prosperity. At the start of WWII the country wanted to remain neutral; however, a Soviet ultimatum forced them to the Axis side. Then, when the war ended, the Soviet Union forced Romania into a social republic. Over the following decades, the Communist government established a reign of terror over the country.

In 1974,
Nicolae Ceausescu took over as the Romanian President and began borrowing heavily to finance economic programs for the Socialist Republic of Romania. This left the country more than $13 billion dollars in debt. To solve the problem, Ceausescu began exporting agricultural and industrial products to repay the debt to other countries. The plan worked economically but left Romanians in a dire situation: Ceausescu’s exports depleted the country of adequate resources to survive; Romanians faced food rationing and frequent electricity blackouts.

Mihaela Fabian was one of the many Romanians forced to endure the suffering and decline in the standard of
living.

* * *

We were sitting in the cafeteria at the Museon Museum of Popular Science in Den Haag (near Amsterdam) as Mihaela recounted her experience. As a young woman in school, she would often do her homework in the dark during power outages and often ran out of common food staples. Mihaela shared a vivid memory of the first time she was able to leave Romania. The train station where she arrived had bananas and beer for sale—she let out a cry of joy she was so excited. There were no bananas or beer in Romania.

It was clear
her upbringing hadn’t been easy, but she said close family ties helped her through it. Luckily, life was very different now. The Romanian Revolution of 1989 brought an end to Ceausescu’s dreadful reign and paved the way for democracy that was slowly rebuilding the country from its rocky past.

As for Mihaela, she was no longer a young woman facing food shortages in Romania. She was now the wife of the Romanian Ambassador to the Netherlands.

* * *

My aunt Kim
met Mihaela through the International Wives Club she had joined when my uncle’s job moved them from Houston, Texas to the Netherlands. The club, which had a couple dozen ladies from all different countries and cultures, helped women who were new to the country meet other women in the same situation. When my aunt told me about the group, she mentioned Mihaela would be fascinating to talk with.

As luck would have it, one night while out to dinner
, we ran into Mihaela, who was having dinner with a friend. My aunt introduced us and we set up a meeting for the following morning.

* * *

I was fortunate to grow up in a household where we never worried if there would be enough food on the table or if the lights would work when we flipped the switch. This made it difficult to grasp what Mihaela’s life had been like growing up. It was even harder to comprehend how a ruler could allow his people to suffer in such a way (especially when, a week later, I visited Bucharest, and saw the multi-billion-dollar parliament building Ceausescu had built during his reign).

I asked Mihaela if, du
ring those difficult times, she had ever imagined she would be leading the distinguished life of a diplomat’s wife. She said she hadn’t.

Then s
he told me a story of an older woman once telling her she was lucky. However, Mihaela’s perspective was, “you pay a price for luck.”

The best things in life don’t come easy.
Mihaela endured difficult times, worked hard and made sacrifices to get to where she is today. In college, Mihaela studied psychology before becoming a speech pathologist for children with hearing impairments. There was great joy in her voice as she described years spent working with kids—watching their growth and development.

She explained that the woman she had been with
when we saw her the previous night was a former student of hers. The young woman had lost her hearing when she was six months old because of an incorrect dose of antibiotics. This left her facing an uncertain future. Fortunately, Mihaela had found her, and through their work together, the girl developed the necessary skills to excel in high school and continue on to college, where she was now working on an advanced degree in medicine.

Mihaela was filled with pride as she told the story. She said she stayed in touch with many of her students
, and it was obvious she had been good at her job.

However, when her husband became an ambassador, Mihaela knew she would have to quit her work to help serve her country.

She clearly missed it
. While we were talking, two dozen preschoolers on a field trip ran past us toward the museum entrance, instantly stealing Mihaela’s attention in the process. She really loved kids.

But she also love
d her country. Despite the difficulties of its past, Mihaela spoke of Romania with great affection, and was grateful for the opportunity to show others what the country has to offer. She spends a lot of time meeting people and talking about Romania, which—between her warm personality and easy sense of humor—is a role that suits her well. It didn’t surprise me when she said she made friends wherever she went.

In fact, it was when were on the
topic of friendships when she casually said, “We have to raise the potential of others.”

That’s the statement that stuck with me after Mihaela and I ended our conversation. I understood then what drove her to become what she is today. Whether it is helping young p
atients, serving as a diplomat for Romania, or befriending a Texan recently transplanted to the Netherlands, Mihaela sees the potential in others, and that’s what gave her own life meaning.

Yasmina Boustani
&
Katharina Schmitt

A local café in Cannes, France

Café Americano

It
’s the extra step that creates the opportunity.

On Friday, June 20
th,
at 8:30 PM, I sent Yasmina Boustani a Facebook message. At 9:10 PM she responded. By 9:41 PM that night we had arranged to meet for coffee the following morning.

* * *

It was because of a Facebook message that I was in France in the first place. A few weeks before I left for Europe, I received an unexpected Facebook message from my friend Trista, a recent alumna of Michigan State, who had moved to Texas. She knew I was headed to Europe and wanted to let me know she was going to be in Rome assisting with a study abroad program. If I could get to Rome, she would love to give me a grand tour of the city.

I told her I
’d love to meet up and would contact her when I knew the dates I’d be in Italy.

When I emailed her the dates
of my arrival, I discovered she would be spending that weekend in Cannes, France at the Cannes Lion International Festival of Creativity. A few months earlier Bill Ward, Cup 9, and I were catching up over another cup of coffee, and he mentioned that if I were ever in France, it would be worthwhile to swing by Cannes to check out the festival.

I decided to reroute to Cannes and met up with Trista, hoping to find a big-hitter in the advertising industry to meet for coffee.

It was a great plan, but, like many of the plans I
’d made during my trip, it took an unexpected turn. The last festival session I attended was the Future Lions Competition award ceremony. It is the culmination of a global competition where college students, working in teams of two, are challenged to “advertise a product from a global brand in a way that couldn’t have been conceived five years ago.”

There were over 800 entries submitted from around the globe, of which four finalists were chosen to attend Cannes.

Each of the finalists showed a short video explaining their concept, and it was fascinating to see the quality of the presentations and the innovation of the ideas. The first two were impressive, but it was the third idea, created by Yasmina and Katharina Schmitt, which struck me.

Their idea for
1-800 Flowers was to take the digital act of saying “Happy Birthday” on Facebook and make it more tangible, more meaningful. Their product, Flowers for Facebook, printed a person’s Facebook birthday wishes on paper and used it to deliver a surprise bouquet of flowers to the birthday girl. It was a fun product with a very compelling video.

At the end of the presentation, the lively emcee put up the contact information and encouraged conference attendees to reach out to these talented young advertisers, stating very simply,
“Hire them before they steal your job.”

That
’s when I decided I wanted to talk to Yasmina and Katharina. Not only did I love their idea, I thought it would be more fun to talk to the future industry big hitters rather than the current ones.

* * *

So there we were, Yasmina, Katharina and me, sitting at an outdoor cafe a block from the Mediterranean Sea.

After we
had ordered our coffee, we started getting to know each other better. Yasmina was originally from Beirut, Lebanon. She had earned a degree in Advertising and Art Direction from the Lebanese Academy of Fine Arts before enrolling at the Miami Ad School in Europe. That was where she met Katharina.

Katharina
was from Mannheim, Germany. Her aspiration was to become a dancer, but she realized en route that she had a passion for advertising. She shifted her efforts toward a Bachelors degree in Economics and Marketing, before enrolling at the Ad School.

Katharina and Yasmina quickly bec
ame friends, then project partners, and then roommates in New York City, where they studied abroad for a semester. While there, they created Flowers for Facebook for a class project. Their professor encouraged them to submit the idea to Future Lions. They didn’t think the idea was ready for Cannes, but followed the professor’s advice anyway.

After a few tweaks
, they submitted the idea and waited for a response, not expecting much. With so many submissions, they figured they didn’t stand a chance.

They were happily wrong. The idea
was good enough to make it to the final round. This meant Yasmina and Katharina were headed to France for an intense week of advertising adventures and one last hurrah together before Katharina headed to Germany to begin her first job and Yasmina returned to New York for one last semester.

They
were loving their time at Cannes, reconnecting with old friends they knew from school who had since moved to different corners of the world. After going all the way to France to connect with friends from my backyard in Michigan, I could relate.

And it wasn
’t just France; along each step of my European adventure, I connected with friends: a running buddy from home now living in Poland, as well as former MSU classmates working in Scotland, Prague, and Poland.

It felt pretty surreal
that an American, a Lebanese, and a German would all enjoy a great cup of coffee and conversation together in a cafe in France.

But at the same time,
it felt perfectly natural. Technology is changing the way we connect and do business—global collaboration is becoming as easy as collaborating with the cubicle (or, in my case, the table in a coffee shop) next door. It is an incredible opportunity, but only for those willing to leverage technology—those willing to take action, take risks and think globally.

It
doesn’t happen while sitting at home behind a computer. It happens when you get outside your comfort zone, find ways to travel and try new things. I made two new friends because Yasmina and Katharina were willing to enter a competition they had a slim chance of winning, and were willing to say yes to a Friday-night Facebook message from a stranger asking to meet for coffee.

It
is easy to take two seconds and write “Happy Birthday” on a friend’s Facebook wall. It’s a little harder to take an extra step and do something memorable. But if Cup 43 taught me anything, it is this: it’s the extra step that creates the opportunities.

And in today
’s world, those opportunities can literally take you around the world.