»A ship in port is safe, but that’s not what ships are built for.« For me as a sailor, that’s more than just a great quote. It’s almost a truism. But as the son of a civil servant, raised on stability and security, in a family where permanent jobs and predictable career paths were seen as the sensible way to do things, it’s also something I didn’t live by for a long time.
Sometimes, life scares me. The decisions I can make, or have to make. Not the ones where the risk is reasonably easy to calculate. What will this cost me? How much time will it take? What happens if it goes wrong, and can I deal with the fallout? Those aren’t the decisions I mean. I mean the ones where getting it wrong could have serious consequences. The ones that could put relationships at risk, or destroy them. That could affect my health for years to come. The ones I might look back on years later and realise that this decision got in the way of living a fulfilled life. Those are the decisions that scare me.
Until recently, companies at least had to make the same mistakes independently. One organization might overvalue prestigious universities. Another might mistake confidence for competence. A third might quietly screen out unconventional careers. Their judgments were often flawed. But they were flawed in different ways.
»Dump the first espresso of the day.« That was the advice, I saw in a reel the other day. A guy standing in a spotless kitchen, speaking with quiet authority. No drama, no irony. Just a clean instruction. Even if you single dose. Even if you weigh your beans to the tenth of a gram. The coffee sitting in the dead space of the grinder overnight will have oxidized. It will dull the shot. It is not worth drinking.
The first time I read about Before the Coffee Gets Cold, I was sitting in a café not unlike the one in the book — quiet, a little narrow, the kind of place where time seems to gather rather than pass. Outside, the city was still in its morning hurry, but inside there was only the soft hum of the espresso machine and the faint clatter of cups.