Statisticians Should Thank Baristas
It’s amazing that I get to sit in a coffee shop and sip a double espresso with a cup of sparkling water. It’s a feat of human triumph that so many gathered and decided to specialize in every small part to make this entire experience a possibility. All for me.
Let’s think about this step by step. Someone decided to make a living picking coffee beans. Then, someone decided to transport them halfway across the world to Canada. Then they bought a machine that roasts the beans, using a machine someone else decided to make.
Then, they decided to sell the beans to other people. Some bought the beans and decided to run a coffee shop for others. They found people who could help them set that up.
Some wanted to make a living making coffee shops look nice as designers. They bought furniture from people who decided to make something nice for people to sit on and converse around.
Those people found people who wanted to draw out beautiful designs they had in their minds. They also had to find people who decided to harvest raw materials so others could bring ideas to life.
The coffee shop owners then bought everything they needed to keep it running. They bought cups made by someone who learned to make beautiful ceramic. They bought pastries made by someone who decided to wake up at 6 am to bake all the wonderful treats.
Some people want to provide the city with electricity and they keep everything in the coffee shop running. Then some other people decided working on water was important so they made sure the tap works when someone turns it on—let’s not forget the people who wanted to make faucets and improve upon them!
Some decided they wanted to learn how to make good coffee and they served me and everyone else scattered around the shop with a book, laptop, or friend. Then, someone decided I was someone worthy of speaking with so joined me at the coffee shop to have a 3-hour conversation. If this isn’t wonderful, I don’t know what is!
My girlfriend once asked me why people ran restaurants and coffee shops when they were such difficult businesses to run. My initial answer was that I didn’t know either.
I think the people who do are optimists who have the wonderful quality of hope. The cynical pragmatist might say they are fools. Those people don’t deserve to eat out nor drink coffee if they’re going to be so fucking ungrateful for the chance and risk these wonderful people took for us.
The $5 I spent on a coffee or muffin does not, in any way, justify the effort such people took to unify and create such wonderful experiences. They went against the odds and set up a restaurant or coffee shop for shmucks like us.
Thank God the world isn’t filled with statisticians. Then, no one would start companies and take risks that serve the greater community becasue all their numbers will say the 3% chance of success for all that effort is irrational. Everyone would be holed up somewhere in some stable government job or work as an accountant whose job is to tell the risk-taker how well they’ve done for a fee. What an awful and boring society that would be!
I’m not saying the statisticians don’t have their place in the world. They do. Everyone serves a purpose and it’s amazing people all decide to do these things and serve one another. It’s amazing we have people who decide to do all kinds of things.
But the world needs more than people who like to cite XYZ reasons why something is a bad idea or why something is fucked or why there is no hope or why something just won’t work. A project with a 70% failure rate has a 30% chance of success, that’s a better chance than being born in a country where one would be able to read this essay!
A simple daily activity like drinking coffee required so many wonderful people to come together to build something. Some took great risks and some took less. But the coexistence of everyone made this all possible.
It’s something that couldn’t have been predicted or mapped out. By all standards, if someone had to map out the probability I would be able to drink a double shot espresso in a neighbourhood in Vancouver at this current time and date, I think they would’ve said it’s not an endeavour looking forward to.
Thank God others didn’t listen, got together, and made all this happen. They say it’s the artists who define culture and an artist is a definition I would apply to any risk-taker whether it be an entrepreneur or anyone who creates something that didn’t exist before. It’s so wonderful we have so many people who choose to look at the other side of a failure rate.
If this isn’t wonderful, I don’t know what is.