My last few posts have covered a lot of ground on the early years and more recent events, but there's a messy middle.
I could start this story with COVID, a bad investor, cold brew in offices growing fast, but I don't think that's actually where my burnout started.
I know now it started when I bought somebody else's café.
I'm not going to tell the story of that café or the people behind it. Their internal struggles aren't really my story to tell. I can tell my part.
I did something then that I did a lot when I was younger, in that I overcommitted. I saw somebody struggling and I tried to help. I got involved in something I think a lot of entrepreneurs probably would have looked at and walked away from. I took on a struggling company and tried to give it a soft landing.
Don't get me wrong. I hoped there was an outside chance I could make it work. I thought maybe we could stabilize the café, change some things and keep that location going.
I understand why that was never going to happen now.
Some cafés are built around a community, and sometimes at the center of that community is a person. A person absorbs an incredible amount of the stress, the struggles, the conflicts and even the emotional well-being of the people around them. A person who deeply cares about the café, its meaning, its customers and their staff, to the point of sacrificing their mental and physical health to be there for everyone. They smooth over the stress and anxiety of staff and take on the heart of the café for their customers.
Take that person out of the mix and the whole thing can fall apart.
You can rename the café. You can change the coffee. You can change the processes and put your own systems into it. You can't necessarily recreate the thing that made people love the place in the first place.
Take out the longtime staff and the longtime center of the café and sometimes you just have a room where a café used to be.
I don't actually feel bad now about having tried. I absorbed somebody else's loss and got tagged with it, but it was going to fail. That's something I could probably approach very differently today, but I don't regret doing it.
The lesson I did take from it is something I've repeated ever since: a good landlord is worth their weight in gold; a bad one will sink you.
A building owner who actually wants you there changes everything. Steve and Sylvia wanted me to open in Cambridge. Tom and Sue want me to continue operating in Arlington. When the people who own the building want a small business to succeed there, there is a relationship and a flexibility that makes an enormous difference.
Corporate landlords are probably great for corporate clients.
I'm not a corporate client.
That experience took so much out of me. I don't think I recognized that at the time because I did what I usually did.
I kept going.
There were other projects. Cold brew got bigger. Office coffee got bigger, and the market got really competitive and cutthroat quickly. Maybe that's its own story someday.
The cafés were busy. There were always new things happening. For a while it felt like having a bunch of plates spinning on sticks and running around trying to make sure none of them fell.
Then COVID happened.
Like everyone else operating a café in 2020, we had no idea what was going to happen. I think I could have handled the business part of it. Give me a process problem and eventually I can usually figure out a process. Give me a broken system and I'll start pulling at it until I understand what is broken.
COVID left me dealing with many upset customers while trying to figure out how to protect my family and staff.
But almost right as things began leveling out, I had a lot of disruption at home. The place where I could shut everything down and recover from work became another place of conflict and disruption for my family that put me under a high mental load pursuing a resolution.
That took the better part of three years to resolve and is a story I can't tell.
It is resolved now. And I think one of the reasons I can finally see all of this clearly is that I can go home now.
I can stop.
I can rest.
I didn't really understand how important that was until I couldn't do it for a very long time.
Somewhere along the way during all of that, I started losing access to things.
Not just energy.
Skills. Memory. Perspective.
I could still run the business. I could mostly deal with whatever problem was directly in front of me. I could make decisions because decisions had to be made, but I was drifting. There were days I would be in one of my own cafés and avoid the bar and customers because I could barely engage.
That's a strange thing when you've spent most of your adult life doing this and feeling connected by it.
At a certain point, I had actually forgotten how to roast coffee, how to think abstractly about the processes, and I forgot all the purpose of the business that I had set out. I leaned on the longtime staff around me to cover.
I kid you not, I've written endlessly about roast development. I've built profiles, cupped thousands of coffees and spent an absurd amount of my life thinking about the processes in coffee.
So when I got back onto the roaster and couldn't access it, the relationships between things that had once been almost automatic weren't automatic anymore.
I had to pull up old profiles. I went back through my own notes, blogs and journals. I started reading things I had written years earlier to remind myself. Then I started getting involved in roasting again.
It was the first step in dragging myself an inch at a time back into this.
The strange thing was that I still knew it. It was all still in there.
I just hadn't been able to get at it for a long time.
I think that's one of the things people don't always understand when they talk about burnout. At least it wasn't what I understood about it. I thought burnout meant being exhausted. Maybe hating your job. Maybe needing to take a vacation or step away for a while.
For me it was more like slowly losing access to myself.
When you've been doing something for a long time and it was a hyperfocus that regenerated you, that's scary to lose. You remember being good at it. You just can't quite remember how you did it.
The way back has been equally strange because it hasn't happened through some grand plan.
It has mostly happened by doing.
I started hiring some new people recently, and I've been lucky to find a few really talented people who don't need me to pour all of my energy into them just to get them moving. They're interested. They ask questions. They have ideas. They want to be here.
Seeing that spark in somebody else started reminding me of a spark I used to have.
Earlier this year, I did an event at WBUR and decided, somewhat impractically, to pull out the siphons again. I hadn't really thought about it this way at the time. I just wanted to do something interesting.
Interesting to me.
Someone there remembered a little flow restrictor I had designed for Hario kettles almost twenty years ago. That sent me back through old memories.
Then I rolled out some single-origin espresso. People were excited and talking fast and, for a minute, I had to catch up to the fact that people still care.
Then I realized I did too.
I started writing about some of these things. Siphons. Kettles. Old espresso events. Luminaire. Pour'd. Toast. Projects I had worked on and people I had worked with that I hadn't thought seriously about in years.
I started working on the Cambridge sign and touching up paint and tuning grinders. I started looking around Arlington and thinking again about what I wanted the room to look and feel like instead of just seeing another maintenance problem.
One thing started connecting to another.
Then Simon's closed.
Going back through that history forced me to spend some time with the person I was more than twenty years ago. It reminded me how curious I was and how that curiosity was my way of connecting to people.
I had forgotten how important that was.
Writing about Simon's also reminded me what a gift it is when people actually show up for a place. Good employees. Regular customers. People who ask questions. People who hang around. People who let you try new ideas with them. People who make the room something more than the business that happens to occupy it.
I've spent a lot of my career thinking about coffee shops as systems. Coffee. Equipment. Workflow. Training. Products. Design.
All of those things matter.
But they aren't the whole thing.
I'm starting to understand that again.
A few months ago I was still sometimes hiding from the bar. This week I found myself talking with some of our newer staff about hosting a barista throwdown.
Except I don't really want to do a throwdown the way we used to. I don't particularly care who can pour the best rosetta or design, partly because it's rare to meet people who are deep into latte art who are nice.
What I talked about was maybe doing a barista social. Get a bunch of baristas into a room. Let them meet each other. Network. Hang out. Talk about coffee if they want to.
Have fun.
I couldn't have imagined volunteering to host a room full of baristas two months ago.
Now I'm excited about it.
I'm not completely back.
I'm nearly back.
But I can feel the difference. I'm comfortable on the bar again. I'm leading again. I'm making decisions and trusting them. I'm interested in things. I'm around some talented people who are interested in things too, and instead of their needs feeling like something else I have to carry, their energy is helping pull me along.
Twenty years ago, when I was working at Simon's, I wrote something about coffee being the medium and the point being having fun and making friends.
I don't think I understood then how important that sentence would eventually become to me.
For a long time I kept waiting to feel like the person I had been before burnout.
I don't think that's how it works.
I'm not that person anymore. I've got twenty more years of experience. I've made mistakes. I've built things. I've watched things fail. I've had some success. I've overcommitted. I've learned that I don't have to absorb every problem just because I think I might be able to solve it.
But the curiosity is coming back.
The skills are coming back.
The memories are coming back.
And I'm realizing they were never really gone. I just couldn't access them for a while.
It's weird to wake up one day and feel like yourself at work, and it makes work fun again. The difference now is I have a team hustling with me, excited to clear out the clutter and reestablish a sense of place and purpose. I still have a lot of things to do to feel caught up, but that's another post.
