How Starbucks saved My Life

Experienced as a Partner at Starbucks, this story gave me more complicated feeling.

At first, when I saw the name of the book, I was thinking it might be a gimmick more than a story. After read the introduction, I bought it at once. It really drew my attraction to know how Starbucks saved a guy's life.

Michael Gill, the author, was hired out of college to work at J. Walter Thompson, the world's biggest ad agency. He worked in this company for 26 years and thought his career was all of his life. One morning, he was fired by a young executive.

He tried to start his own business; however, it did not work. Besides, he screw up his life.

One day, he had Latte at Starbucks, which changed his life and the story started here.

He found a job at Starbucks as barista. He was glad to have a job but also felt sad to review his previous life. He lost confidence in everything and he couldn't believe in himself. Also, he's afraid to be fired again and so he tried very hard to impress his boss, a young lady, Crystal.

That feeling of lacking confidence was real and made myself to remember the time I was working at Starbucks. When the economy was bad, it's hard to find a job. In order to make myself out of my home and really love coffee, I joined Starbucks.

The most difficult thing was you could just tell people you were serving coffee when they asked what position you were. They couldn't expect this answer due to your educational background.

However, as Mike said, Starbucks provided "the Best experience to Partners and Guests". The atmosphere and culture were completely different from other companies. The most important was "respect". I wasn't know much about USA and just found the race problem from TV show. The Starbucks culture seemed to make difference in this aspect. There were no employees but Partners only. It was a team work and everyone had to cooperate to make the whole business smooth running.

The story showed how Mike changed. You could understand more and more with him when reading the book. From "not getting it" to "got it", I could realize what saved Mike's life and how to do it.

It was not an exiting story but just a real, warming and touching one which you could find in your daily life. That's why it could make us to think more about life.