A surprising principle for changing your life

What the barista teacher showed me

I hope you’ve had a good few days since I last posted something. Unfortunately, I caught the lurgy and have been recovering. They say you shouldn’t make big decisions while you’re not well however I may have indeed made one. I’m going to sit on it for a few days at least before saying more. I find that a good strategy - putting “dwell-time” in between idea and declaration! Talking of good strategies, today’s post is about a lesson from the art of making good coffee. If you’re a tea drinker, substitute accordingly.

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In an effort to improve our lives, many of us find some kind of new input to our life - a new community, a new gym membership, a new diet, whatever - and begin the process of trying to make it work. The trouble is, it seldom does. Why is that? You’d think that along with a real desire to become better, having something new in our lives would be a great way to bring about the changes we think we want. But after a while, our stress or anxiety (or loneliness) returns, the gym outfit stays in the cupboard, and the diet book goes back on the shelf.

It seems that, in today’s world, our houses are littered with the artefacts of unfulfilled selves.

So, what’s going on, and what’s the answer? Is there one?

Yes. Coffee.

For Christmas, my darling wife Tess bought me a voucher to go and do a one-hour course with a coffee barista at the local roastery/excellent coffee house called Excelso here in Tauranga.

(If you happen to go in there, tell them you know Rob. Of course, they won’t have a clue who you’re talking about, but hey.)

A brilliant idea, they asked me to come in with our home machine and they would assess my current skills, then we’d go from there. No point learning on some fancy commercial Italiano machine.

This is the Kees Van Der Westen Speedster. It sells for about $9,336 NZD!

So I dutifully arrived with our embarrassingly small domestic coffee machine, was met by my teacher, the marvellous Maxi, and we got set up.

Fast forward to the end, and within a short while, I was making coffees that looked and tasted just like the ones in the cafe.

Here’s the lesson

To make better coffee, I did not have to go back to square one. I didn’t have to get a new and different machine. No visualisations were necessary. There was no coffee-making handbook to buy.

I only had to make a few minor tweaks to my existing situation.

For those of you interested, they were:

1. Weigh your grind and make sure it’s 19 grams

2. Set the grind fine-ness so that after 25 seconds, you get a 30-gram extract

3. For a flat-white: if your jug’s spout is at 12 o’clock, pointing away from you, then make sure the wand enters the milk between 10 and 11 o’clock, sits high in the milk, and aims slightly to the centre.

And that’s it.

Here’s the insight

To go from good to great or from not-so-good to good, you don’t need a whole new system, a new guru, or a new wardrobe/diet/[insert new thing here].

You just need to make the right tweaks.

It may be that you’re already doing 60 to 70% of things right and just need a few adjustments.

• Get up 15 minutes earlier and do some stretching.

• Save $20 more a week.

• Make sure you kiss your husband each day, not each week.

• Unsubscribe from 5 emails you just don’t need.

Whatever.

Not massive changes, because while they hold promise, they’re bloody hard to keep up.

Tweaks.

Questions to think about

1. What do you think about this approach to improving things in your life?

2. What might be on your tweak-list?

3. How good is your coffee?