A great palate? Dedication? A high tolerance for pain?
I've been thinking about this a lot and trying to take a lot of positives and eliminate the ones that are too vague or have negative sides and trying to distill it all down to a simple statement.
In the end I think that there are four primary attributes that can be used as predictors of success in coffee.
- Passion.
- Curiousity.
- Humility.
- Flavour-obsessed.
Passion. Without the passion you cannot maintain the level of focus, you cannot maintain the required sacrifices... you cannot continue to care to the degree you need to to be successful. With passion you get resiliance. Passion feeds all other attributes and allows you to soldier on - in spite of all the odds.
Curiousity. I think that this is a key and often under-rated attribute for coffee professionals. In many cases, it is this which seperates the average from the great. You need to wonder - about everything. You need to constantly be looking for new knowledge, to put together new ideas and new concepts. You need to have that itch in the back of the head... that drive to understand.
Humility. This is too hard of a business, too rough of a business, and too fast-changing of a business for an ego-maniac to survive in it. You need to ego to keep on going (see Passion) but you cannot mind being wrong, you cannot mind failing. You have to be okay with not being a star - because at the end of the day the coffee is always the star.
Flavour-obsessed. I don't know how else to say this but it seems like everyone who is successful in this industry is passionate not just about coffee, but about food and about wine and about beer and about anything that is all about taste. It makes sense because, while the toys are all fun and all, it's what's in the cup that matters.
Perhaps we can use these as a starting point to help us make better hiring decisions. Perhaps we can just use them as a curiosity. Perhaps I'm wrong on one, some or all of these.
But it's cool to think about.
What's "success" in your book?
ReplyDeleteAnd for that matter, success for who? I mean anywhere in the coffee industry? A specific or general role with it?
My husband graduated from Northwestern this weekend and the graduation speaker gave a 5 minute speech that I'd like to attempt to quote from here.
ReplyDeleteI mention the context because as we all know most graduation speakers say all the same things and so I was particularly impressed with Marilyn Kennedy's insightfullness.
What she said that was different was a phrase I'd never before heard- "Energy is the byproduct of your skills, passion is the fuel." Rather than encouraging the graduates to simply "do what you love" like so many speakers before her, she chose to focus on the conduit between skills and happiness in the opposite direction. That the relationship between skills and happiness is not an accident- you are naturally (through being born that way or through acquisition) good at things and THAT's what you love, and that passion is what gives you energy to continue, not that you love something first and then you'll probably be good at it if you devote earning your livelihood to it. It makes sense to me and I think it's particularly relevant here with chris' post.
I love this article.
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