8
Blue
I couldn’t stop thinking about what had just been revealed to me. It was exciting to have a new understanding of compassion, to understand that it wasn’t just a word for pain, but also, for tremendous joy; for elation. It made me realize just how out of touch I’d been with my employees. How could I truly have cared about them if I could never identify, emotionally, with what they were feeling during critical times in their lives?
I thought back about the times with my wife and how she tolerated my lack of true compassion. I must have been difficult to live with, being so totally consumed by my business and my problems – and the white noise inside my head. It’d been a rare exception, indeed, when I felt exactly what my wife was experiencing.
I was still affected by the remarkable insights and feelings I’d experienced when I ate the green Bean. The birds’ flight overhead in the morning in search for food – was something I’d thought about many times as I also scrounged around for my next meal.
To see my boys as two-year-olds again – living in a state of total bliss moved me – while the world around them verges on becoming lost or self-destructing in these scary and confused times. I thought deeply about all this as I walked down the hall.
I went to the blue room and gave the door two knocks. It opened slowly and a bright, blue light streaked out of it as if a leak had sprung. Once I saw who was behind the door I knew I’d be in good hands.
“Jerry!”
“Hey, Boss!”
We gave each other a “man hug” like we were old friends.
Jerry was a much larger man up close. He looked more jovial and less businesslike than he did in the limo. I got the feeling that Jerry got his smarts from the streets rather than from a university.
The blue room evoked an otherworldly feeling in me – as if I’d been there before, maybe in one of my dreams. The walls were blue, of course, and so was the ceiling, suggesting the open air. There may even have been clouds painted on it.
This room seemed to be the kitchen of the house – at least the kind one sees in extended stay hotels – there was a stove, oven and a small refrigerator. A large table in the center of the room had what appeared to be – implausibly – cookware and baking ingredients? There were also blue boxes on a table in a corner of the room – and again, I assumed those were the Beans.
“You baking, Jerry?”
“I come from a large family who love to eat. I grew up poor, but my mama would somehow always find a way to make the greatest meals for us,” Jerry reminisced. “What I loved the most was when she baked cupcakes. There’s something special about cupcakes to a little boy, don’t you think, Boss?”
I had to agree with Jerry, and we shared a laugh. Suddenly – for just a moment – my mind flipped back to the good times at home and I could see my two little boys excitedly grabbing cupcakes off the kitchen table. I remembered how I looked at my wife and smiled as Coffee and Cocoa licked the frosting off their cupcakes, always getting a dab or two on their noses.
“To answer your question – no, you’re baking. I have everything here that you need – cake mix, baking pan, frosting – you a chocolate or vanilla type of guy? I have both. Me – I’m chocolate all the way – something about vanilla that just doesn’t seem right.”
“Chocolate, Jerry. I’m chocolate all the way – cake and frosting.”
“You’ve made cupcakes before, right Boss? It’s easy – just follow the recipe.”
“You gonna help me or are you just gonna stand there and make stupid comments?”
“I’m helping – I’m helping. At least this time there’s no ladder involved, right?”
Even though I’d obviously baked cupcakes before, I followed the directions on the back of the box exactly since I knew each mix had its own requirements for ingredients, baking temperature, etc.
The thought of me, a homeless man – baking cupcakes on Christmas Eve – made me chuckle because it was so ridiculous. But the more I got into it, the less ridiculous it felt. It brought me back to the times I lent a hand in one of my restaurants because of understaffing.
I always felt that working in the kitchen with the bottom line, hourly wage employees was special since it gave me a rare opportunity to get to know them – to discover what was going on in their lives. But after I opened my second restaurant, I seldom did it unless I was putting out fires.
“Tell me, Boss – you’re a restaurant man – what exactly is a recipe?”
I gave Jerry a crazy look because I thought he was joking.
“Are you nuts, Jerry? What do you mean, ‘what is a recipe’?”
“Yeah – what’s a recipe – when it’s broken down to its true core?”
“What are you – a gourmet chef now? Maybe you’ve been watching too many of those cooking shows.”
“You’re not answering the question,” he scowled with irritation.
“I guess you could call it a set of instructions on how to cook or bake something.” “It’s funny, Boss – people will follow a box recipe for cupcakes or some chicken dish a TV chef makes, but they won’t follow a recipe for success from a mentor – makes you wonder how bad they really want it.”
“I don’t get what you’re saying.”
“I used to drive a limo for a successful businessman when I was just a kid,” Jerry continued. “I saw how he lived and how treated people – his family, employees and customers – and I knew then that I wanted to be like him someday. He was always helping people when they were down or when they wanted advice or help with their business.”
“I’ll never forget the day I asked him how to go about starting my own limo business – I couldn’t have been more than 22 or 23. I thought he was going to tell me I was nuts.”
Jerry’s voice trailed off as if he were back on the streets once again driving the limo. I could swear that I saw him wipe away a tear or two.
“What happened?” I asked.
“He told me that success leaves traces, and to watch what he did and then copy what he did well, and eliminate his mistakes. He said success is like a recipe – the traces or footprints of others who are successful just have to be replicated. I’ve never forgotten that, and it’s served me very well in business and in life.”
Jerry was one of those people who liked to talk while he worked, unlike me – I was more of a loner in the kitchen – although I never used to be that way.
“Why the restaurant business, Boss? It’s tough, no? Not like driving a limo.”
“Why? I can’t remember, Jerry. Maybe I used to make a mean soufflé.”
I wasn’t direct because I had to think about it. I often wondered why, myself. It’s a difficult, volatile business with lots of stress and high employee turnover – even in good times and with great leadership.
“I mean, to get to five restaurants, you had to be doing something right,” Jerry added. “What happened?”
I pondered his comment and thought back to my early days in the business – when it seemed fun and exciting – when I was filled with passion, not greed. I suddenly saw that what I’d loved about the restaurant business – the food and the people – had deteriorated into a battle to grab as much money as I could in as little time as possible.
I started cutting corners – on both the food and the employees – to squeeze every ounce of profit from it that I could. Talk about recipes – turned out that one was a recipe for disaster.
I put the cupcakes into the oven and slammed the door.
“I guess I kept hoping things would change.”
Jerry looked taken aback by my slamming of the door and we stood staring at each other for a few moments.
“You lost me. What do you mean by hoping things would change?”
“What don’t you get? You know – I kept hoping things would change; that I’d somehow be able to turn the business around.”
“And your family?”
“Yeah, my family too. I’d hoped that once the business was turned around, the home life would too.”
“Boss, hoping is wishful thinking – it’s what one does when one has no control over events. Like when my family and I are planning a picnic – I hope it doesn’t rain. Or, when I’m watching the game with the guys – I hope my team wins.”
“What else was I supposed to do – give up?”
“Of course not. But, believing you can do something eliminates the mindset of believing you can’t.”
Jerry reached over to the small table and handed me a blue box.
“For your courage, Joe”
Even though I’d gotten a little agitated, I calmly took the box from Jerry and gingerly placed the blue Bean into my mouth. I noticed that I was becoming less and less apprehensive the more Beans I encountered, and this time was no different.
“What do you feel?” Jerry asked.
It was difficult to answer him because I was overcome with a wave of anxiety – though I had no rational reason why. I recognized it as the same daily feeling I lived with when my business began to fall apart – when I just wanted to stay in bed and ignore it all – when it became too much to bear and my confidence in myself and my ability to turn things around was just draining out of me.
I opened my eyes and looked into the mirror as I had done five previous times. This time, the image staring back at me looked so different from how I was feeling – more assured, more confident. I sort of felt like it was daring me to take action.
“I just want to believe.”
“The sixth Bean of Wisdom is the Blue Bean of Faith. Life without faith – is no life at all. Faith is the building block for our futures – we realize our purpose through faith. Faith is having the courage to do something without knowing how it will happen or having any guarantees that it even will.”
“Faith is not hope. Hope is dreaming or wishing something to happen without effort or taking action. Faith is all about action – hope is passive.”
“Great leaders don’t sit around hoping that customers come into their stores to buy. They hire and train great employees, invest in marketing and inspire their team to exceed even their highest expectations. Then they tackle each day as if it’s their last. That’s because faith is present in every day of the struggle.”
“Boss, I know you’re an educated man and I’m just a poor kid from the streets – but, I have to knock that idea of hope out of your head. Hope has no business in your business. The moment I took hope out of my business and put my faith into it by following the recipe for success that my mentor taught me is the day my business took off.”
There wasn’t much I could say to Jerry at this point because, intuitively, I knew he was right. Hope had led me down a paralyzing path where, instead of taking courageous action, I passively waited – until my business – and my marriage – fell apart. I often felt there was a reason for the paralysis.
“Jerry, it’s easy to say ‘take action,’ but what about when you don’t know what do? Sometimes it’s just easier to lie in bed and do nothing.”
“I’m sure you’ve heard the saying ‘whatever your mind can conceive, you can achieve.’ Well, you don’t attain the desired result by daydreaming or hoping,” Jerry preached. “You don’t watch the Olympics on television and state that you hope to be a future Olympian and honestly expect that result. Becoming an Olympian is a daily test of faith and living with anticipation – where despite everything, despite all the negative messages, you move ahead, a little more each day.”
“What a future Olympian does have is a plan – a recipe, if you will – to get to where they need to go. The biggest impediment to having faith is fear – and the biggest creator of fear is ambiguity. Create a plan – any plan – and follow it faithfully.”
“Having a plan creates anticipation, Boss” Jerry continued. “It creates a pattern of attraction – almost as if the universe knows what you need and magnetizes those things into your life to help you achieve your goals and dreams.”
“Boss, as a great leader, you must become a mentor to your employees and give them your recipe for success. Instill in them the faith to move forward with their own transformation – their own dreams and goals.”
“Think of it like this – you used to feed people at your restaurant with food – now you’ll be feeding them with the food of life.”
I took the cupcakes out of the oven and absentmindedly put vanilla frosting on the first batch, to Jerry’s consternation. I applied some colorful Christmas sprinkles to top them off, and while doing that, I wondered what we were going to do with them now that they looked so inviting.
It dawned on me that – as the caterpillar possesses the faith to transform itself into a butterfly – I also had to base my transformation, my fulfilling of my purpose – on faith.
“The sixth Bean of Wisdom is the Bean of Faith. Faith is the building block for our futures – we realize our purpose through faith. Faith is having the courage to do something without knowing how it will happen or having any guarantees that it even will.”