52 Cups of Coffee: Inspiring and insightful stories for navigating life’s uncertainties

by Megan Gebhart

  I could relate—in a big way. My transition to college had been relatively easy. I joined the cross-country team, which meant I had a ready-made group of friends the day I started school. I also had two coaches keeping an eye on me (a comforting feeling when 1,000 miles from home). I still had to find my place within that group, but instantly surrounding myself with good people had been a nice way to get college started on the right foot.

  I took that support for granted. It wasn’t until I left the team and found myself without the support system that I realized how important it had been in my life. I still had great friends on the team, but I no longer had a three-hour block of time I spent with them every day. Suddenly, I felt lonely and entirely unmotivated. The loss of a social network made for a rough sophomore year.

  Then, during my junior year of college, I stumbled into a group of students who had a transformative effect on me. It was a much less formal setting than Vince’s fraternity; we were just a group of student entrepreneurs getting together once a week to have a beer and talk business. However, before we knew it, the group started to grow. There is something magical about getting a bunch of passionate, like-minded people in one place. And 30 years from now, when I reminisce on my time at Michigan State, it will be this group of people that I talk about.

  Stefan Olander

  Cafeteria at the Nike Headquarters in Beaverton, Oregon

  Medium Americano

  Don’t work so hard that you stop loving what you do.

  I got my first pair of Nike running shoes in eighth grade—back when it was a feat to finish a five-mile run. By my senior year of high school, I had a dozen pairs piled in the corner of my closet, worn from countless miles traveled along the familiar streets of my hometown.

  My interest in running continued to grow; in 2008, I took a road trip out to Eugene, Oregon to watch my roommate compete in the Olympic Trials. While there, I bought a book called Out of Nowhere: The Inside Story of How Nike Marketed the Culture of Running—a book that chronicled how the company had begun with Bill Bowerman making shoes with a waffle iron in his garage, then grew into a sportswear giant that significantly changed the world of running.

  As a runner and marketing major, I had a lot of respect for Nike, which I had mentioned to Bill Ward, Cup 9, while carpooling to a conference in Detroit. He asked me the dreaded question I’d been hearing a lot, “So, what are your plans for after college?”

  It was a well-intentioned question I felt I should have had a good answer for, but I didn’t, so the question always created stress. I settled on telling Bill that I liked Nike, and he mentioned that his friend Stefan Olander worked on the team that developed the Nike+ running system, and he’d be happy to introduce me. I was heading to the West Coast for Thanksgiving, so the timing was perfect. After a few emails among the three of us, I had a meeting setup with Stefan at the Nike World Headquarters in Oregon.

  * * *

  The meeting was on the Wednesday before Thanksgiving. It was a frosty morning, and, despite the Nike campus feeling deserted due to many employees being gone for the holiday, the place was as impressive as I had expected. I met Stefan in the Jerry Rice building, and we walked across the street to the cafeteria. Bill had told me Stefan had been born in Sweden, so as we stood in line to order, I asked how long he had been in the United States. “Six years,” he said as he began to explain the series of events that had led to his current position. By the time we had our drinks and found a place to sit, I’d learned that the Nike Headquarters hadn’t even been Stefan’s anticipated destination.

  He had originally wanted to be a ski guide in the Alps; after earning a degree in engineering, he hit the slopes, leading tours while working at a ski store on the side. His boss at the shop had taken a job working with a then-young company called Nike and convinced Stefan to follow suit.

  After a few years working the Nordic division, and a few courses in marketing, Nike moved Stefan and his family to Holland, to work with brand management for a five-country region. This happened when the Internet was just starting to gain traction, and Nike had one website it used for all of its regions. The strategy hadn’t made any sense to Stefan. He understood how Europeans had different tastes than Americans, so he and his team had taken on the task of rolling out customized websites for each region.

  Stefan’s success with the new technology helped him build a reputation as a leader in digital marketing and landed him his current job in Portland: Vice President of Digital Sports. That included work with Nike+, Ballers Network, and Nike’s latest installment of digital awesomeness: Nike Grid in London. It wasn’t where he had expected he’d be when he left college, but he had followed his passion and ended up with a job he loved.

  Stefan had a laid-back disposition, a healthy perspective on life, interesting background, and clearly a creative mind. I knew his rise through the ranks inevitably taught him a lot, so I asked him what advice he would give the 22-year-old version of himself.

  It took him a minute to answer the question. I got the impression he appreciated both the good and bad in life as necessary steps of his journey, and that he didn’t have many regrets. But he finally decided on an answer, and I will never forget what he said, “I am certain I could have achieved the same level of success without working so hard.”

  He explained he had never minded working hard—that’s a prerequisite; he was talking about pushing himself and the people working with him too hard—like a radio dial turned a few notches past the prime spot. If he could have adjusted the dial to find the right balance of effort, he would have been more focused, more efficient, had more fun, and ended up just as successful.

  * * *

  The thought echoed in my mind. It’s the opposite advice you typically hear, but I knew exactly what he meant.

  Preparing for the Nike meeting had me reminiscing on my cross-country days, and as I sat there with Stefan, something clicked: I had had the most success running during times when I was relaxed and having fun. I wasn’t having fun because I was succeeding; I was succeeding because I was having fun. The summer before my high school senior year, my passion for the sport had engulfed me. I had looked forward to daily runs—once willingly leaving an energetic wedding reception to run eight miles in the dark. I loved the pressure of challenging workouts; I counted down the days until big meets. That passion and work led to success.

  But as that success escalated, so had the pressure to continue succeeding. Somewhere along the line, the stress had turned my passion into an obligation. Continuing on to a Division I cross-country team in college definitely hadn’t reduced the stress. I told myself I had to work harder, had to hit a certain time at practice, had to run more miles.

  My ambition had worked against me. Instead of getting better, I got worse.

  I quit the team after one year. I said it was because there were other opportunities at Michigan State I wanted to explore—which was true—but the other factor, the one I couldn’t admit for a long time, was that I was burned out.

  I had done just what Stefan had said he would tell his younger self not to do: I had turned the dial way past the optimal setting. I became so serious about running, I started looking at fun as a distraction I didn’t have time for—something that just got in the way of the hard work I had to do.

  Stefan showed me that success isn’t about working as hard as possible; it’s about finding the right balance and having fun along the way.

  I should have known from my running experience that I would be more successful if I kept life fun, but it wasn’t until I heard it from someone with a career I admired that I believed it.

  Sam Rosen

  Lovely Bake Shop in Chicago, Illinois

  Regular coffee

  There is more than one way to approach life.

  Cup 20 came with a riddle:

  If I handed you a pen and asked, “what is this?” you would say, “a pen.” If I asked what you did with the pen, you would say, “write.” And you would be correc
t because that’s what it is, and that’s what it does.

  But what if I handed the same pen to a dog? She wouldn’t use it to write; she would use it as a chew toy. Is she wrong? No, from a dog’s perspective, a pen is more useful as a toy than a writing tool.

  Hand the pen to an absent-minded college student, and it could become a bookmark. An engineer might see it as a combination of parts: a plastic casing that holds a tube of ink with a dispensing mechanism. You get the picture.

  The pen doesn’t have to be a pen—it can be whatever you make it.

  * * *

  The above story was a concept Sam Rosen presented to me after we’d been volleying stories back and forth for 45 minutes inside an adorable café. I was in Chicago visiting a friend who introduced me to Sam. The snow outside was blowing fiercely, but Sam’s relaxed demeanor and creative perspective made for easy and enjoyable conversation. I told him a little about myself, and he chronicled the Bohemian steps he had taken that had led to his current role as a founding partner at One Design Company.

  At some point in the conversation, he stopped and said there were two ideas by which he lived. The first was a quote by former Major League Baseball player and general manager Branch Rickey: Luck is the residue of design.

  The second, the pen-parable, was a Buddhist principle about perspective and value; a reminder that there was more than one right way to approach any situation.

  Sam had an interesting approach to life, especially school. One of the first things he said to me was that he knew early on he was good at computers—not necessarily the best, but certainly good enough to turn it into a career. The value a traditional education didn’t mean much to Sam, he had self-taught skills and knew what he wanted to do with his life. Arbitrary learning didn’t seem worth the effort.

  That perspective explained the 2.1 GPA on his high-school diploma. In fact, during his last week of high school, he had had to beg one of his teachers to give him a passing grade so he could graduate.

  However, it’s not that he wasn’t capable of getting good grades. Sam had decided he wanted to go to the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena—a leader in art and design education. Unsurprisingly, he didn’t get accepted, but he did receive a handwritten rejection letter saying they liked him, but with a 2.1 GPA, they weren’t sure he could handle the rigorous academics of the school.

  The value of school had now changed for Sam; it became his passport to Pasadena. He spent a semester at Colombia College in Chicago, finished with a strong GPA, and transferred to the Art Center.

  He left after a year.

  His year at the rigorous school reminded him that, from his perspective, college was just a place where you spent a lot of money so someone could force you to do work and then criticize it when you finished. Sam had been starting projects his whole life; he didn’t need to pay someone for that, so he dropped out.

  At that point in time, he found work with a web-design firm. The owner, who charged $150 an hour for each project, would contract work to Sam, who worked for $50 an hour. Sam looked at the situation and realized something: if this guy could make $150 an hour and Sam was doing most of the work, there was no way Sam couldn’t do the same, or better. So he decided to start a web-design firm.

  He figured if his idea failed; he could always go back to working for someone else.

  * * *

  After six years, it looked like Sam wouldn’t need to apply for jobs anytime soon. One Design had seen double-digit growth for the past five years, grown to a dozen employees and established a client list that includes Groupon, Xerox, and New York Magazine.

  Sam’s approach doesn’t work for everyone—in fact; it doesn’t work for a lot of people. But Sam is successful because he is both passionate about what he is doing and willing to spend hours developing his skills. Whether knowingly or not, Sam took an honest assessment of himself—his likes and dislikes, strengths and weaknesses—and discovered the path that works best for him. With a supportive family and the courage to take calculated risks, he made his approach work.

  * * *

  Of course, I’m not advocating a lax approach to school or dropping out of college; I’m pointing out the value of finding what works best for you. Just like there is more than one way to look at a pen, there is more than one way to approach life, school, careers, etc. You have to pick one, and then exert the effort needed to make it work.

  That’s been a recurring lesson over first 20 Cups. But what is different about Cup 20 is this: Instead of helping me find my approach, Sam reminded me to respect the choices others make. Everybody’s approach is different, and just because they don’t do things your way doesn’t mean they are doing them the wrong way.

  I don’t want people judging my life’s ambitions, so I shouldn’t judge theirs. It’s easy to discount the kid who barely survived high school and left college early. But one day, that kid could be your boss.

  Torya Blanchard

  Good Girls Go To Paris Crepes in Detroit, Michigan

  Small house coffee

  You only get one life—make the most of it.

  Torya Blanchard was caught shoplifting a few weeks before a trip to Paris for her 16th birthday. When she got home, her mother’s furious words were simple, “Only good girls go to Paris!”

  Her mother, who had a change of heart and let Torya go on the trip, doesn’t remember the scolding, but it was something Torya would never forget. Fifteen years after that trip to Paris, when Torya decided to open a crepe shop in Downtown Detroit, she knew exactly what to name it—Good Girls Go to Paris Crepes.

  * * *

  A few months prior to Cup 21, I was at a conference in Detroit, when I overheard a few snippets of a conversation happening next to me, something about a can’t-miss crepe shop. When I got back to East Lansing, I did some research and discovered Good Girls and its owner, Torya Blanchard, the “Francophile, fashionista and fearless crepe-maker.” With a description like that, I knew I needed to talk to her.

  So there I was, sitting in the small shop, with its boldly painted red walls lined with French film posters and a large menu of crepe options that made my mouth water. The woman at the counter told me Torya was on her way, and offered me a cup of coffee. I found a table where I could watch the employees making the crepes, which brought back great memories of my two trips to Paris.

  When Torya walked in, her big smile and loud “hello” shook me out of my trip down memory lane. I stood up to introduce myself, reaching to shake her hand. She ignored my gesture, instead giving me a big hug—talking continuously as she grabbed herself a cup of coffee and pulled up a chair at my table.

  I didn’t know what to expect from the meeting, but I was sure of one thing: it was going to be fun. Torya had a personality that filled the room. It wasn’t just her big smile and booming voice, it was also her Ray Ban glasses and hair with a mind of its own. She had a quirky demeanor that mixed a cool composure with contagious enthusiasm that made swapping stories even more entertaining.

  * * *

  Torya had been working on an engineering degree at Michigan Tech when she decided it was too boring for her tastes. She’d run into a woman at a Study Abroad Fair who told her about an opportunity to work in Paris as an au pair. Torya had loved the idea—a two-year adventure in Paris would give her time to figure out a new direction for life. So she booked her ticket, packed her bags, and took off across the ocean. By the time her trip had ended, she knew what she wanted to do. She transferred to Wayne State University, earned a degree in French and started teaching at a Detroit high school.

  Torya enjoyed teaching French. She lined her classroom walls with French film posters and told stories about French culture. She loved getting to know the students, and although the administrative tasks might have been draining at times, she had no plans to leave her job.

  Until a seemingly insignificant thing happened.

  Torya had left work on a Thursday afternoon to catch a spinning class, but when she got to the
gym, the class was empty. She had come on the wrong day. The mix-up bothered her, and she thought, “Really, Torya? Your life is so busy and complex; you can’t get to a spinning class on the right day? This is what your life has come to?”

  The moment made her notice something she hadn’t noticed before. She wasn’t as happy with life as she knew she could be. She decided to get on a bike anyways and do some thinking—take an inventory of her life. She asked herself a basic question: What do I love to do?

  She knew she loved people, and loved French culture, but how could she combine the two? A restaurant? The only thing she knew how to cook was crepes…but her crepes were good, and she loved making them.

  That’s when it clicked—right there on a bike in an empty exercise room, Torya realized what she needed to do. She would leave her teaching job of five years and open a crepe shop.

  A few days later, she walked past an empty storefront where a hotdog stand had recently shut down. It was just a small 48-square-foot shop, but to Torya, it was perfect. Her friends and family thought she was crazy, but she didn’t care. It was what she now calls her “Fight Club moment”—the instant she decided to go all-in, to risk everything to make the dream a reality. She called the number on the for-sale sign, cashed in her 401k, and got to work.

  It took months of planning, long hours, and a lot of elbow grease before the day she had been anxiously awaiting arrived: the day she opened the doors for her first customers.

  Between the delicious crepes, Torya’s welcoming personality and the support of a tight-knit group of Detroit entrepreneurs, word about Good Girls spread, and her business took off. Within a few months, Good Girls had outgrown the small store-space and upgraded to a larger location.