Michael Gates Gill
01/01/2008
When I was a young advertising copywriter at J. Walter Thompson (JWT), my boss gave a warning along with my first raise. "Both of my grandparents were millionaires," he said. "I now have more than they did. Let me tell you a terrible secret: The more money you have, the more you worry about losing it."
I have come to believe my boss was right, now that I have lived my own riches-to-rags tale.
I grew up in a 25-room mansion with its own basketball court. I was handed a Yale education (in those days you could easily get in if your ancestors had gone there). A friend with plenty of Yale connections recommended me for the job at JWT. I became a vice president and creative director. I bought a big house and had a big expense account. Then, when I was 53, my boss invited me out to breakfast and fired me. I realized too late I had made the unforgivable mistake of growing old in advertising—I had been naïve enough to think it would never happen to me.
By losing the need to pretend I was a master of the universe, I became happier than I had ever been. |
A Starbucks at 93rd and Broadway in New York had become my "office," where I would sit in my Brooks Brothers suit with my T. Anthony briefcase, pretending to make calls. By accident one day I sat down next to a young lady named Crystal, who was a Starbucks manager—the kind of person I would never have normally talked to. Decades younger than me, she was also clearly from a totally different background. Despite my ignoring her, she asked me, "Would you like a job?"
She pointed out that Starbucks offers health benefits even to its part-time employees. I realized at that moment that I really needed the job. Crystal helped me fill out the job application (something I had never had to do before) and told me I could start at her store in two weeks.
Barista Beginnings
The very first day, I watched the crew of twentysomethings calling out one complicated drink order after another while ringing up at cash registers. I had been thinking that the job was beneath me, but now I saw it might actually be beyond my capabilities. Crystal came over to rescue me. She led me to a table and brought me some delicious Sumatra coffee and espresso brownies. Crystal—my new boss—was serving me! In my 26 years at JWT, I would never have thought of bringing coffee to an underling.
Despite the busy environment, Crystal would always ask, "Mike, would you do me a favor?" rather than order me to some task, as I had done to those who worked for me. She knew more about managing and motivating people than I ever learned in expensive executive-training classes.
I now learned to appreciate the times of laughter on every shift. And, it turned out to be a lot more gratifying to serve people something tasty than to sit through five meetings to prepare for a client meeting, then five more meetings to rehash the client meeting. Somehow, by losing the need to pretend I was a master of the universe, I became happier than I had ever been.
I wrote a book about the experience, and, just a few days after I signed a publishing contract, Tom Hanks called my agent, saying that the story really struck a chord and that he would like to play me in a movie. Despite the money I have made from the book and movie rights, I continue to live in a little apartment in the attic of a friend’s house, with nothing but a white picnic table that cost me $15 and a few white picnic chairs. And I continue to enjoy my day job at Starbucks. In my past life, the more I had, the more I struggled to live up to external measures of status and suc-cess. You have to leap beyond that to find real happiness.
Michael Gates Gill, the son of the late New Yorker writer Brendan Gill, is the author of the book How Starbucks Saved My Life: A Son of Privilege Learns to Live Like Everyone Else.