A watered down Americano

One of my favorite drinks is a café Americano. This is basically one or two shots of espresso combined with boiling water.

When I went to the coffee shop down the street from my office, I ordered the drink. The guy behind the counter was new (this was his second day) and obviously nervous. And, he was left alone with no additional support!

He prepared the drink, handed it over, and mentioned that he tried to make the drink the best that he could, but wasn’t sure if he got it right. He assured me that if the drink wasn’t to my satisfaction, he would give it another try.

I sipped the hot beverage, and immediately knew that it was no good. There was clearly too much water and not enough espresso. However, instead of taking the opportunity of a teachable moment, of giving him the opportunity to learn, I politely and kindly stated that it was just fine and wished him the best.

Now, I may have thought that I was simply being a nice guy. I didn’t want to stress him out or leave him feeling like he messed up.

In reality, I hurt him, the product, and the brand. From this point forward, he is going to believe that this is how an Americano is made. Instead of being a little bit uncomfortable and providing honest and open feedback with understanding, feedback that could make the product better for everyone and could have helped him to grow and learn, I backed off.

When you are given the opportunity to voice your opinion on a product or service, it is your responsibility to speak up. If you don’t, you may come to find that the product that you have come to enjoy the most has lost its flavor, that it is boring, and simply watered down.

Messy life and messy notes

A friend and I were talking some time ago about how valuable handwritten notes truly are. There is something special about creating a handwritten note, and there is something even more special in receiving one.

If you think about it, a handwritten note is a lot like life.

Handwritten notes are sometimes messy. That's absolutely okay, because life gets messy sometimes too.

Handwritten notes are full of character, just as our lives should be.

There is no delete key in life, there is not a spell check option, and you certainly cannot change the entire story by simply highlighting some text on a screen and changing what was there.

Sometimes depending on the person writing the note, the handwriting can be hard to read and the message difficult to understand. That's a lot like life too.

When creating a handwritten note, a lot of thought can go into finding the perfect combination of words to express exactly what you are trying to say. When the writing is done, we look back and see scratched out words, places where we have tried to squeeze in another word, or even arrows that fly off onto some other tangent. Life also contains places we have tried to scratch out and start again, tweaking and noodling and iterating, as we work to find our way.

Sometimes, in a handwritten note, you can see when the ink begins to run dry, or when tears have been shed by the writer. You can sense the emotion of the writer as she or he commits his or her heart to paper. Passion is transformed from heart to hand, and energy flows to the medium that the writer is working in.

Sometimes, notes are happy, sometimes they are sad, but they are always unique. You are unique too. There is not another soul or life that has been created that is just like you.

You have to live life passionately without fear of being too messy, be true to the story that you are writing, and hope that the ending is one that you, the writer, can be proud of, no matter how misunderstood it might be.

Dancing hamsters are important...

Back when the internet was just getting off the ground, Deidre LaCarte created a page that contained a screen full of animated hamsters that danced to a really annoying song when the page was opened. The dancing would continue endlessly until you either left the page, or in a moment of insanity, threw your computer out of a window.

While dancing hamsters seem trivial, dated, and of little value, creating dancing hamsters is extremely important for any artist. In order to become great at anything, you have to be willing to create stuff that is sometimes trivial and fun for the sake of learning.

Creating all of those animated gifs was something relatively cutting edge at the time. Figuring out how to loop something endlessly probably required some learning too. Registering domain names, playing a song on a browser, dealing with server load due to unexpected growth; All of these things were lessons that had to be learned, but could only be learned in creating something, even if it was just a bunch of hamsters on a single web page.

Sculptors grab huge handfuls of clay and form beautiful works of art, but I am sure at some point they just created something that seemed silly in order to learn. Programmers write "Hello World" programs when learning a new language and create goofy little applications that may seem trivial, but actually teach a great deal about the technology that they are using. Each of these lessons that are learned are seeds to greatness.

If you are going to be an artist, you have to understand the tools, and the feel of the materials in your hands. You have to be willing to create stuff that others may looks at as being trivial. You become okay by reading and working through small controlled examples, but you become great by building stuff and playing.

That being said, learn to play, play to learn, and make some hamsters dance!

What I learned from the founder of Jenni's Ice Cream

I love to hear stories about how someone has taken a risk to pursue what they are most passionate about, and how their perseverance and focus on creating remarkable art leads to success.

This past week, Jenni Bauer of Jenni's Splendid Ice Cream fame came into our office and shared her story about how Jenni's became what it is today and also gave us an idea why the business has experienced such remarkable growth over the past 4 years, despite what some might call the worst economy since the Great Depression.

The following are some lessons that I learned that seem to be consistent in the stories of many successful entrepreneurs.

Consistency matters.

To promote a customer base or a following around what you are doing, you have to give people a "craveable" reason to return.

What Jenni found was that while many people were fascinated by the unique flavors that she created, many repeat customers came back for their own personal favorite. But, she couldn't always guarantee that she would have that flavor, since her flavors were created based on what was available in the market and on her inspiration of the day.

She soon realized that she could increase her customer base without releasing control of her creative freedom by creating some of the more common flavors consistently. This grew her customer base, which also provided her the cash flow so she would have the freedom to be daring and creative with her art at the same time.

Think like a person with pink hair.

Passion is fundamental in creating something that is just a little bit different from the rest. While consistency is important, placing your entire focus on creating a product that only appeals to the masses waters down your brand, stifles innovation, and leaves you feeling like there is nothing left of yourself in the business you built.

Jenni remains true to her artistry in frozen confections by having two dipping stations in her stores. One station is all about consistency, selling the signature flavors that her customers have come to recognize and love, such as Salty Carmel. Another station is all about art, creating masterpieces with unique and seasonal ingredients, to include flavors like Olive Oil with Sea-Salted Pepitas.

Alone is not sustainable or scalable.

Accounting, training, hiring, legalities, real estate, sales, marketing, purchasing, logistics, and the list goes on and on. At the end of the day, you still just need to make ice cream. Otherwise, none of that other stuff matters.

There are a ton of activities that need to happen in the course of running a business, and while your business is still in the startup phase you may be able to work on some of these things yourself and still deliver a great product. Keep in mind, when you're just getting started, many of these things are not important. However, as your business expands, you have to find people that you trust that are passionate about your mission and vision, and are passionate about doing the business stuff.

For instance, while Jenni still spends time in the business, she has a team of people that want to see the company grow and are able to handle the details so she can focus on the product. This allows her to continue to innovate and create, which ultimate leads to a product that people return for.

Cultivate "symbiotic relationships" with your partners and vendors.

Jenni has found a lot of success in making sure that her vendors and partners are successful. By creating win-win relationships, you know exactly what you are putting into your products, and you can better ensure the quality of your products is consistently where it should be.

Jenni buys all of the cream that she uses in her ice from a single Ohio dairy, Snowville Creamery. Jenni's uses the cream from this single dairy, and by helping Snowville to be successful, has helped to ensure that the cream that she depends on to make her product stand out from others will continue to be around for years to come.

It was encouraging to hear Jenni speak about her experiences in getting started, as well where the business is going. When you love what you do, and play with your art (and sometimes your food), you will make a difference and have more fun doing so!

Income from your art!

I read an article in Fast Company this morning where Rico Frances makes the observation that "gold has lost its prestige," and "When gold was the only store of value, it was sacred. In medieval art, gold was everywhere. Viewed by candlelight, it created a dazzling, spiritual effect. Today's world doesn't want to be dazzled by gold. We just want to know how much money it can be converted into."

Unfortunately, this is how many of us tend to view what we do with our art and our time. How can we sell a great idea to make a ton of money? How can we make our art appeal to the masses so we can make a living doing what we love? In other words, we water down our passion and put a price tag on it in the hopes that someone will be willing to pay for it.

Maybe, through our pursuit of profit and appealing to the masses we have lost the joy, beauty, and magic in creating? Perhaps, if we simply returned to drinking in the beauty of the world around us, and started again to create for the joy of creating, we would find that our art appeals to more people than we could have possibly imagined?